Sweet Baby Octopolish!

Next up on my journey through the oldest untried Femme Fatale polishes in my collection, I took a step back even further to her 2012 Gemstones collection. indoor, bright CF lighting The Gemstones collection was a group of shimmery iridescent effects topcoats, too sheer to be worn solo (see the air bubble in the above bottle shot for an idea).  Dragonscale is a peridot green to gold shifter, and I'm showing it over an assortment of base colors to see how that impacted the shifty properties.  indoor, CF lighting My index finger is OPI Christmas Gone Plaid, with the idea that it would compliment the head-on peridot and perhaps shade it toward emerald.  Middle & ring fingers are Vapid Brown Chicken Brown Cow, in hopes to amp the warmer brown edge of the shift, assuming it was a duochrome in the vein of Cover Girl Emerald Blaze .  After wearing this, I don't think that's the case after all.  On my pinky, basic black, usually the go-to for making any sheer duochro...

For the past couple years, I've decided on a theme for my nail looks - first it was colorful alternating with neutral, then light alternating with dark last year.  By some small miracle, a long-searched for DISO fell into my lap this week, which caused me to pore through all the far too long unloved polishes in my stash.  BAM!  This is the theme for 2023:  I'll pick a new brand each month, and select from the oldest yet-untrieds I have of that brand.  In shopping my stash, I'll either feel the need to purge or I'll dig up buried treasure! indoor, bright CF lighting for all photos Hooooboy I have been collecting and wearing polish for more than a decade, with some things lying untried for longer than the brand was in business, eek!  Pahlish is thankfully still going strong, and still with really personal and unique inspo for her collections.  Today I'm showing Sleep To Dream, from her 2013 Winter collection.  The name is taken from a Fiona Apple so...

It's the height of summer dragonfly season, and I've been seeing so many beautiful jewels flying around that I was absolutely inspired to bring some with me everywhere I go. On my "jelly donut mani" base of 1 coat Fancy Gloss Got Milk + 1 coat Ethereal White Smoke, I've stamped several different dragonfly images from KADS Flower 015 and any other plate I found with a realistic looking design.  I then filled in the dragonfly bodies were with various holos, some as leadlighting and some as reverse-stamping... but then promptly could not get a bright sunlight photo to show off the sparkle.   I totally loved this look, wearing it for a whole week.  Hope you get out to enjoy some summer sunshine while it lasts! ~Michelle 

 Some of the super hot nail trends that pop up on everyone's feed really crack me up.  Most aren't so much a "trend" as "that one time someone did something over-the-top for a nail art competition, and someone felt the need to make a post about it."   outdoor, bright daylight This time around, though, the "trend" is certainly trending, with the "jelly donut look" gracing the fingers of celebs and city dwellers in the know all over instagram.  In my eyes, though, it's just a sheer, soft, white, and it just so happens I wanted exactly that for my next nail art look, so I wore it solo for a day too. indoor, bright CF lighting My version is a super shiny iridescent, but still translucent enough to look like the glaze on a donut (sidebar: why are these called jelly donuts and not glazed donut nails??).  I've used 1 coat Fancy Gloss Got Milk, then 1 coat Ethereal White Smoke, plus my usual base & top coats, and wow was this quick bu...

 Our latest book club pick did not sit well with me.  I had a huge hate for that book, and tossed it in the "life is too short" pile and moved on.  I'm not going to mention the particular book for a whole lot of reasons that have to do with avoiding search engine shenaniganery, and so instead let's focus on the fiery duochromes that went into my "F this book" look. indoor, bright CF lighting I started this look with a base of straight piano-black crème, then pulled out a bottle  of very long untried Dragon Heartstring from Nvr Enuff. outdoor, bright daylight Dragon Heartstring is a topper that's got a whole lot going on - that means it's actually dense enough to wear solo if you don't mind 3-4 coats, but the flashy elements play much better over darker colors, and I'm using classic black to make it really sing. outdoor, bright daylight There's a generous helping of linear holo in this mix, as well as duochromatic pigment that flips from w...

 For several years running, I've gone all-out for the Oscars, and this remains my fave event of the year.  This year, though, the show was sandwiched in between a lovely long vacation and a bunch of work shenanigans, and I just wasn't feeling up to putting in the hours of effort that look needs.   window-filtered daylight Voila!  A fun and colorful look that let me get my art on but went together more cohesively than the usual Oscars look. I wanted to celebrate the diversity in this year's slate, since the acting choices and the international films were my absolute faves this year.  I've started with a flat white crème base, then layered a few random swipes of 2 jelly colors on each nail to create a watercolor rainbow effect.  I've topped it all with a filmstrip image from my trusty XXL-4 plate. In 2015, both Essie and OPI released a collection of sheer jellies for layering, and an assortment of these easily make up a rainbow with the addition of an or...

Halloween is over, but I'm apparently not done with being vampy & mysterious...  indoor, CF lighting This mani started with 2 layers of Jessica Street Swagger, a deep, every so slightly brick-leaning, truly dried-blood red crelly.  The last time I wore this , I got away with a single coat, but this time around I painted much thinner layers and needed more like one-and-a-half.  It's still got a dead perfect formula that dries to a very nice shine on its own - it's polishes like this that teach me why there are folks that choose to wear unadorned crèmes and crellies on the regular.   outdoor, afternoon daylight Punching up my plain red, I've added a single heavy layer of Ethereal The Dark Mark, a very dense aurora shimmer topper in a barely grey base.  The end result is a sexy blackened scarlet with subtle shine and shimmer indoors, that explodes into color-shifting fire when I stepped out into the sun.   outdoor, bright afternoon daylight Becau...

 When ya got time to paint and are ready to deal with the precision needed to make magnetics work... indoor, bright CF lighting I'm just gonna say:  HOT DAMN. outdoor, bright sunlight Bee's Knees released the magic that is Losing My Mind (srsly, mind is lost, just wwooowwww) as part of the album covers theme with March 2019 PPU.  This will obviously be a pic-heavy post, both because this polish has a lot going on, and because it's just too pretty for me to cut back the photos.  indoor, bright CF lighting To start with, this polish is quite sheer to let all these gorgeously shimmery elements shine forth, so I've layered 2 coats of it over a single coat of a piano black crème.  In the bottle, LMM is a dusty plummy purple full of iridescent flakies, with flashes of red and gold.  But when you magnetize it... indoor, CF lighting And THERE'S where the magic is revealed.  Losing My Mind is a black base filled to the brim with everyone's favorite Clarins 230 ...

 I live in the middle of the east coast, which means that I'm in the area that's inundated with the Brood X cicada emergence.  Cicadas are totally harmless, so I'm not at all freaked out by the insect horde, quite the contrary!  The genus for these guys is literally Magicicada, and they are truly magical.  After living a very long life underground, they head to the surface not because of some ideal condition of weather or food supply or anything else practical, but simply when their utterly amazing internal clock tells them all it's been 17 whole years.  They also have a lot of personal significance for me - I left my home state, family, and friends behind for the job opportunity of a lifetime, and the first summer after my arrival here, the cicadas made their arrival too.  In China, cicadas represent resurrection, a new start, and lofty goals .  I've been looking forward to their return all spring, and they're here and just as amazing as the first tim...

 It's March, and that's my birthday month and St Patrick's Day month, and my fave color is green... all of which means I've now become convinced it's all-green month (because hey, I need a creative way to pick which treasure left too-long-buried in my stash needs to be tried out). indoor, bright CF lighting Ethereal lives up to the name yet again with Rainforest - instead of a dark, mysterious jungle, we have a light, airy, cool wisp of green tint, filled to the brim with finely milled aurora shimmer.  While it's possible to wear this extremely sheer polish on its own, this color combo tends to emphasize rather than blur my nails' free edge, so I searched through the stash for a base choice that would get me closest to the look in the bottle. indoor, CF lighting Pretty Serious had a series of polishes called "The Museum of Naileontology" that were her versions of very hard to find mainstream gems.  This one is Disc of the Heavens, her nod to Chanel...