Sweet Baby Octopolish!

For my last polish for Femme Fatale February, I'd been growing out my nails a bit to show off a thermal polish to best effect... and then a major cleaning project at home resulted in several chips & breaks on my swatching hand, so for this post Cindy takes the spotlight. indoor, bright CF lighting Thermals are notorious for having a finite shelf life, typically guaranteed to be working well for 6 months.  Malachite, released as a color of the month in November 2021 is my oldest untried thermal from Femme Fatale, and it's still working perfectly fine 15 months later. indoor, bright CF lighting Between the awkwardness of shooting the camera with my left hand, and the notorious trickiness of accurate color capture of teals, I find the bottle look to not be completely accurate, though the color on my nails certainly is.  Malachite is a very well-named polish, a bright earthy green when warm (above) and a deep emerald forest when cold (below), packed with "ocean flakies...

 One good "oops batch" deserves another, and I just so happen to have one vastly different than the previous example. indoor, bright CF lighting Crystal Skull was an "oops batch" released in May 2015, and is another one I'm not at all sure what it originally started as.  This is a sea-glass steel blue base filled to the brim with a greenish-gold shimmer and holographic glitters in one or two sizes. outdoor, bright daylight The shimmer overlay tilts the overall look toward aqua rather than blue, and it's prominent in both bright and lower lighting. indoor, shady/indirect daylight The holo glitters add a bit of texture to this polish, and I needed 2 layers of topcoat to smooth things out. indoor, bright CF lighting But wow do those glitters catch any possible glint of light and throw it back in beautiful sparkly rainbows!  This style of glitter is an absolute calling card for Femme Fatale, though she doesn't do as many of them anymore.  indoor, bright dire...

After a few days of cheerfully bright sunshine and increasing temperatures, I was most certainly feeling the need for a bright linear holo. indoor, CF lighting Emily de Molly Flatline is hands-down one of the most blindingly linear holos I own.  Even in fluorescent office lighting, there's still a hint of a flame arc on the nail surface, so while the color is a soft, muted lavender/lilac that would otherwise be quite office appropriate, it's still pretty flashy as hell, especially in the sunlight. indoor, bright CF lighting The color is one of those I could never quite nail down as far as which precise shade of pale purple it really is.  I have it filed as a more pink-tinged lilac, but on the nail in some lighting it appeared more blue-leaning lavender.  Since I liked the play between the two colors, I stamped with saturated pastels in each shade, Esmaltes da Kelly Maria and Wendy, using alternating zig-zag stripes from BM-423. bright afternoon sunlight ...

The Smithsonian Museum is currently running a 90s film festival, and while my work & life schedules didn't allow me to go check out all of the ones I was interested in seeing on the big screen again, me and a few friends were able to hit up one of my all time super faves, The Fifth Element. indoor, CF lighting I needed the perfect Diva Plavalaguna shade of blue, which I found in my stash as Baroness X Mermaid Silk.  This lovely blue somewhere between cornflower and royal has a dusting of holo and a pretty aqua contrasting shimmer.  Nicely opaque in 2 coats, it was just what I needed to start this look. indoor, bright CF lighting I picked up NerdNails plate 20, all of which is images and phrases from The Fifth Element, quite a while ago and like so many things it's sat around unused for far too long.  Well, if there was ever a time to try it out, this was obviously it. indoor, bright CF lighting I stamped the 4 element symbols engraved on th...

After a big themed shenanigan in mismatching colors on each hand, I decided my next look needed to be a little more clean and simple. indoor, CF lighting Great Lakes Lacquer released Brooklyn Shenanigans as a 2017 PolishCon exclusive, and the swatch photos were right up my alley, but once it arrived I filed it with the other wine colors and kind of forgot about it.  This was very foolish on my part. outdoor, direct sunlight Brooklyn Shenanigans is a subtle duochrome that really knocked my socks off.  There's a deep plummy purple base with a holo somewhere between tightly scattered and loosely linear, and then a contrasting shifty shimmer that goes from pink to gold. outdoor, direct sunlight When that shimmer tilts gold, as above, the whole look is a warm red with molten bronze overlying.  When instead things tilt pink, as below, you get a more cool magenta shade. bright afternoon daylight  It's not at all a dramatic duochrome with a rainbow of...

indoor, CF lighting I can't remember what reminded me that it was past time for me to pull out a multichrome, but here's the lovely Tonic The Places You'll Go, part of her "May babies" duo from 2017. outdoor, direct sunlight The Places You'll Go appears to be an ILNP Sirene type shifter, tilting from green to blue to turquoise to purple.  In a rather unique twist, this is in an emerald green base rather than a neutral charcoal one.  In direct light, this polish was a gorgeous emerald green that was nearly impossible to catch on camera, since the slightest angle of the light caused the look to quickly shift to turquoise then over to purple. outdoor, direct sunlight outdoor, direct sunlight I'm wearing 3 coats here for total opacity.  Though the 3rd layer made no difference for some nails, it was needed for at least a few to have full color saturation to match the bottle.  indoor, CF lighting I was feeling like a very clean geometri...

Completely breaking my tendency to switch between deep colors to lighter or more neutral ones, this go round I decided one vampy dark shade deserves another. indoor, bright CF lighing In preparation for a big Harry Potter themed collection, Pahlish released several of the polishes as test batch mysteries in 2016, and I was quite pleased with both I ended up receiving.  The Boy Who Lived is a rich royal purple packed with several different types of shimmer, and an electric blue microflake. indoor, CF lighting As you can see with the above bottle macro, the polish is fairly sheer though it's a quite saturated color.  I needed 3 coats for opacity and to build the color to the bottle shade, but test run or no, this went on smooth and easy, 100% ready for prime time. window-filtered bright sunlight It'd been a while since I wore a stamped mani, and felt like something geometric.  The man had picked "pink and green" as contrasty colors, and I nudged that a...

I'm super in love with magnetic nail polish.  As long as you have the time to really hold that magnet while the top layer of polish and the topcoat set, dramatic nail art is a straightforward thing to achieve.  This particular day I painted, I had both the time and inclination to hold a magnet steady for a while, so I pulled out one of my more recent interesting acquisitions. indoor, CF lighting Bees Knees S. S. Georgie is one of a growing trend of shimmery polishes that look perfectly nice enough when worn unmagnetized, but reveal hidden elements once the shimmer particles are bunched up.  In this case, the magnetic shimmer is a pink to green multichrome that when drawn together reveals a deep slate blue base with a "UP sibling" pigment that shifts from gold to green. window-filtered bright sunlight I'm wearing 2 coats here, which was all I needed to get both even coverage of the deep base color as well as plenty of sparkle.  As usual with magnetics, I...