Sweet Baby Octopolish!

While I'm not at all a monarchist, I am a bit of an anglophile, and in honor of the queen's passing I pulled out Girly Bits' lovely November 2018 PPU offering, My Name is Elizabeth. indoor, bright CF lighting Elizabeth is a lush royal berry wine shade, filled with holographic microglitters, holo flake, and iridescent flakies. window-filtered bright daylight This went on in two smooth coats, and the formula and brush were exactly as nice as you'd expect from Girly Bits. outdoor, shady late afternoon daylight The flakies & tiny glitters were very well behaved, and though this dries a little satin, one regular layer of topcoat was all that's needed to bring it up to a smooth shine. indoor, bright CF lighting This wore a little more quickly than ideal, showing some edgewear by day 3, but I enjoyed the color enough to wear it most of the week anyway. outdoor, late afternoon daylight indoor, CF lighting Rating:  4 out of 5 stars, this is a classy and classically femin...

New month, new nail art prompts from one of my FB groups, and what was going to be a quick cute something for a couple of days ended up being my look for most of a week.  The prompt was "baby" and while I just don't particularly care for people babies, I have been spending a whole lot of quality time with my sweet baby dog, who happens to be fawn & white, so voila! indoor, bright CF lighting I've started here with 4 very thin, super smooth coats of Girly Bits Eggnogoholic - I said the first time that I wore it that I wasn't sure it would come to opacity even by 4, and whaddyaknow, it does indeed!  Over this off-white creamy speckly base, I've added paw prints & an "I heart/paw my dog" image from Marianne Pro No 20, and the A++ sighthound image from MoYou London Animal 01 in Super Chic Rum Billie. Hope you're finding zen with your pupper kiddos as well, ~Michelle

Trust Fund Beauty doesn't send stuff out to many bloggers, so there's usually an utter dearth of swatches available when you're deciding.  The site is full of plain bottle shots +/- "dots" of the paint itself, but the gorgeous duochrome that came in my first order   along with the frequent super coupons was enough to have me rolling the dice on a few others with the swirly look that suggested they were duochromes. indoor, bright CF lighting Sigh.  Yeah, I'm showing my fails here, too. Boozy Brunch is not, in fact, a duochrome, and it's not even a contrast or pearlescent shimmer.  It's a peachy nude frosty shimmer that flat out did not look well with my skin tone.  Did I mention frosty?  Because, yeah, there's some 80s type frostiness going on here, which I mitigated by slathering on a thick coating of Girly Bits Shift Happens. indoor, window-filtered daylight  Not even the magic of real and true old-school 230-type shifty topcoat fixe...

It's December, but I'm somehow not even a little in a holiday mood.  A flakie mood, though, THAT I can get behind. indoor, bright CF lighting Girly Bits released Friends Don't Give Friends Fruitcake as part of their super fun Ermahgerd Flerkers collection last year - this was the one entry that was an opaque stand-alone polish instead of a flakie topper.  It's a very rich bittersweet chocolate brown, packed with red extra tiny microglitter, a scattered holo effect (or is that more with the microglitters?), and iridescent lime green flakies. indoor, bright CF lighting Though there's a lot in here, the formula was nice and smooth and went on without being sticky or clumpy.  2 coats was good for opacity, but both the color and flakie concentration deepened to match the look of the bottle with a 3rd coat. window-filtered daylight I've stamped here using El Corazon First Kiss (depending on the lighting, it's either a very dark pink or a very lig...

There's always time for a good duochrome, especially one forgotten in your stash for a while, so Trust Fund Beauty's Spring Detox stepped up when I went delving for a green - spoiler alert, huge winner. indoor, CF lighting When I first pulled Spring Detox out of the box and saw this emerald to pink shift, I was a little disappointed, thinking I'd yet again fallen for my e leventy-bajillionth iteration of the green to purple duochromes I apparently can't say no to . indoor, bright CF lighting But wait!  Both of these bottle shots are utterly accurate, and while Hey Jude-type duochromes sometimes get an almost mossy look, they never get this dirty swampy green.  Huzzah, totally different!! indoor, window-filtered daylight Spring Detox's base is a sheer swampy brownish-green that's packed with bright, nearly chrome emerald shimmer just a little finer than what I'd call a glass fleck.  I paint under pretty bright lights, and when my hand was di...

While 230/Fantasy Fire ("unicorn pee") shifting shimmer gets the lion's share of the attention, I've tried out a few polishes lately that had a gold-green shifty shimmer that appears to be the same brightness and particle size (e.g.,  Baroness X Quixotica) .  A bottle of this other flavor of magic showed up at my house recently, and it inspired me to do a sort of tonal negative-space mani. indoor, CF lighting Girly Bits Street Magic is this lovely gold-to-green sparkling shimmer in a barely milky base (it might be in a clear base, and that's just the haze of the shimmer itself, not 100% sure).  It's a perfectly nice thickness for an effects topcoat, and I'm showing 2 layers here. window-filtered bright sunlight Street Magic is of course supposed to be used as a topcoat, and I'm sure it'd work fabulously for that as well.  The overall effect solo is that of barely-there translucent milky jade with loads of glowy embers. late afternoo...

This past week had me off to another  work trip, this time for CE and hanging out with my colleagues from the other side of the country, so I went with professionally subtle, but with a definite nailista flair. indoor for all pics I was inspired by the lovely Emily de Molly - she had a gorgeous mani that involved flakies under a white stamp, and my new HeHe plates were just begging to be used. This is one coat of Girly Bits Enabler, a gorgeously bright and seriously shifty iridescent flakie - it's more shocking pink than Essie Shine of the Times and her dupes, and I think might actually hit a few more colors overall, too.  I've then topped it with the freeflow watermarble pattern from HeHe 037, from their "Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio" collection. Like most round plates, this one is pretty petite and I honestly would have liked it more if the marble design occupied an even half (or more) of the plate, instead of having the adorable goldfish an...

One of the lovely ladies in my fb nail polish group posted a devastating swatch of BPAL's The House That Bleeds.  Since it had already been challenge enough to talk myself out of these inspired by Crimson Peak things, I had to dive into my stash and find the closest dupe I could to avoid even more impulse purchases.  Oh, wait, my first sampling of Trust Fund Beauty included a dead-on vampy red... indoor, bright CF lighting Just Call My Lawyer is a super saturated, extra vampy, red-with-a-hint-of-brown (let's not quite say dried blood) shimmer packed into a deep charcoal base color. you can sorta see the charcoal crelly base at the cuticle edge here It's the perfect vampy shade in that it never looks quite black, but it does sometimes look like black velvet that just happens to shine red: outdoor, late afternoon sunlight It's a pretty perfect dead of winter color, especially if you're doing something daring or sophisticated for the holidays. ind...

Sometimes you really need a nail-palate cleanser after tons of dark and rich colors, and it's still time to holo while the sun's out, so I pulled Girly Bits Push It off the untried pile. indoor, bright CF lighting Push It is a silver with a whole lot going on.  It's got a sparkly scattered holo finish, plus a bunch of silvery shimmer, plus a bunch of holo hex glitter in mostly copper but with a few silver ones thrown in. direct sunlight The holo is more of a sparkle than a flame, but the scattered holo particles plus the chunkier rainbows off the glitter meant this was pretty sparkle-tastic. In the shade, the glitters were more apparent than in bright sunlight, which was both more visual interest/complexity than your usual holo, and also a little bit muddy.  The formula was thick enough that glitters didn't lay totally flat on the nail, and i did need to clip a couple of them off to prevent any OCD craziness. shady, overcast daylight Push It wore ...

My brother got married yesterday (congrats, bro!), so I needed something festive enough to match my dress and the lovely springtime weather, but not too blingtastic.  Shiny copper to the rescue! indoor CF lighing I'm Your Venus is part of last year's 80s Girl Bands collection from Girly Bits, most of which were holos with matching shimmer (she calls them "shimmolos").  Venus is a light, bright copper just the color of a brand new penny. outdoor, direct sunlight The holo here is a sparkly linear - while there's definitely a flame arc, this is a lot softer than plenty of my other linear ones.  The central bright flash of copper comes up in bright sunlight, but is quite subdued indoors, making this sort of like a stealthy almost-neutral. indirect, overcast light The shimmer in this meant that somehow the holo was never greyed out, and didn't get that muted, silvery-dusty look that some really strong linears show in low light. outdoor, late a...