Sweet Baby Octopolish!

New month, new brand!  Today we have the polish that inspired this year's blog theme for me, which I've put out ISOs on the resell fb groups, pinterest, and destashes for several years (I found an old ISO post from 6 years ago!)… and then from out of the blue, it became available just last month, and it's HERE! indoor, bright CF lighting Let me tell you a little tale of "if I knew then what I know now":  once upon a time in 2013 when I was starting to have to worry about storing all the polish I was acquiring from all these wonderful indie stores and stockists, I tried to put the brakes on going overboard.  I'm not someone who worries about being a completist, and if the 2nd book in a series really sucks, there's no reason to keep reading.  I originally bought only about half of Femme Fatale's 2013 collection comprised of linear holos with amazing contrast shimmer.  I loved every single one I wore - these are all 4 or 5 star polishes, easy.  But I fail...

Clarins 230-type shifty shimmer polishes are of course some of my all-time faves, and OPI La Boheme has been one of my lemmings for quite some time now.  An ebay alert a couple of weeks ago informed me that a new listing had gone up for $20 cheaper than I've seen it in years, and hey, you only live once soooo... indoor, CF lighting Wait, what just happened here?!  Yep, those nails are SHORT.  While stepping into my bathroom to get some remover so I could start this here very mani, I cracked a fingernail off into the edge of the door frame.  It had the good graces to snap off very neatly and squarely at the base of my free edge, but there was no way I could do anything other than cut the rest down to match.  Sigh.  So, here we are, starting back over at squared nubs for 2019.  Huzzah! indoor, CF lighting La Boheme is part of one of the most truly amazing holiday collections of all time, OPI's 2003 Holiday on Broadway.  It's a deep red t...

Much like around this time last year, it's my birthday, and so much like last year , I pulled out something seriously special to celebrate:  Cirque Coronation. indoor, bright CF lighting Coronation was absolutely, hands-down, no questions asked, my hugest all-time lemming.  I've bid a pretty penny on this purple potion at auction, and I've bought a literal dozen other things trying get close enough.  When Cirque re-released it for the recently past holiday season, I went crazy and bought 2 bottles.  I have hundreds of bottles of polish that I would still never use up even if I changed my nails daily, I don't need backups of anything but base & top coats, but common sense be damned, this is dragon-level hoarding and the only reason I stopped at 2 was there was a limit on purchase. window-filtered daylight Coronation is a rich blue-leaning purple jelly base that's pulled over toward a warmer red purple by a wagonload of Clarins 230-type red-to-green ...

After a week of bright, fun, tropical color followed by a return to the dreary impending winter, a neutral palate cleanser was in order. indoor, bright CF lighting I can't remember what swatch pics made me fall swoonily in love with Illamasqua's Raindrops, but this was on my lemming list for a while - it's tricky now to get this brand since they no longer sell in any US stores - and snapped it up when it was listed on a facebook destash recently. window-filtered rainy daylight Raindrops looks exactly like what it's called (apparently the inspiration pic that crafted it was indeed rain on a glass window).  It's a barely blue-leaning grey jelly sprinkled with silvery-white translucent flakes.  It's quite neutral on me (not a tan- or obviously blue-tinted grey), and I think it'd look nice on a broad range of skintones. indoor, bright CF lighting window-filtered daylight This was perfectly self-leveling on first coat, but slightly less so o...

"Red" was the color the man picked this week, and when I rolled my eyes at his choices being typically only red, blue, or green, he asked, "are there other colors?"  Silly boys. Anyway, sorting through untried reds caused this gem to bob to the top: indoor, CF lighting Femme Fatale made Highgarden for the April 2015 Game of Thrones-themed What's In-Die Box.  Since this collab box was all-Aussie around the time that shipping polish out of Australia got to be more than a little tricky, not a whole ton of it made it stateside as far as I can tell.  The luscious emerald green shimmer overlay made this a die-hard lemming as soon as I saw a swatch pic, and I was lucky enough to snag a bottle in a sample sale last Fall. outdoor, bright afternoon sunlight Instead of the brick red with green shimmer I was expecting, Highgarden is a real chameleon with plenty of personalities in different lighting.  The base is indeed a brick or rusted red jelly with a gorge...

You have those times where you see someone else's swatches of a polish and HAVE to get it and then on you it's not so perfect?  Yeah, well... indoor, CF lighting Rescue Beauty Lounge closed their doors not too long ago, making some of their older discontinued shades even more HTF than before.  Liberty is a cool celery/verdigris green, with a subtle silvery blue shimmer, all of which is so right up my alley that this had been a lemming for a while now. window-filtered overcast daylight The shimmer was more prominent in the bottle than on the nail, with the most obvious shimmery spot being the cuticle edges after i'd cleaned up, but present enough to sparkle in the right light. outdoor, bright daylight The shade of green is a very natural and earthy-looking mint, with its muted qualities most obvious when compared to true (actual) grass green.  Cool, pretty, springtime chic in a bottle. window-filtered overcast daylight But let's talk about this he...

I have a love-hate relationship with subscription/collaboration boxes.  On one hand, lots of makers use them to try out ingredients they only have a limited quantity of, or try making something splashy far outside their typical comfort zone, and the results can be stunning.  On the other hand, I've never yet come across one of these boxes that I just had to have more than one or two of the polishes, so I end up scrounging for the special one in the secondary market later. indoor, bright CF lighting When the man suggested "blue with orange stars" (i <3 my colorblind color maven) for polish, I was reminded of this epic lemming hanging out with the untrieds.  CrowsToes Finnnally, IT’S HOODIE TIME!! was from the September 2014 a box, indied, and quickly became a fan fave, ending up on several best-of-the-year lists, then going for crazy money on the secondary market.  It's a gorgeously dusty navy blue jelly packed with orange metallic glitters in several si...

For the last 2 years running, Enchanted has released Vampires Suck as part of a single-pour Halloween collection.  I'd been interested, but had a full-on lemming moment once a friend posted swatches that were undeniably fantastic. indoor CF lighting Vampires Suck is a blackened brown linear holo with a duochrome that shifts from red to bronze.  With all these warm colors going on, most often it had the reddened rusty brown shade of dried blood - love it!  Of all the pics I took of this shifty holo, the bottle shot above was the only one that captured the subtle green flash that was occasionally there IRL. outdoor, shady overcast daylight The holo didn't grey out the base color at all in low light.  This is a depth of winter sort of dark color pretty much all the time. outdoor, bright sunlight In bright sunlight at direct angle, a gorgeous warm redwood flash streaked across the rainbow arc. This is definitely a blackened brown, and it does appea...

Try as I might with a cheaper version , I could never quite shake the lemming of what appears to be the most perfectest of all green crèmes, OPI Damone Roberts 1968. indoor CF lighting DR1968 is a ever so slightly dusty, ever so slightly greyed green crème.  It's described as having "a hint of brown that makes it wearable for all skin tones," and while I wouldn't ever call this BROWN per se, the color was absolutely as flattering as a pastel green can be.  I'm kinda pinky in some of these pics, but this polish never lobster-handed me IRL. indirect, shady sunlight Let's just get this out of the way:  the formula is a beast.  It's a little too runny, and simultaneously a little too thick.  3 coats are utterly required to get the streakiness to even out, and when the light glazed across the tops of my nails, I could still see an irregular texture to things even post-top coat.  Cleanup, thankfully, was super easy and very forgiving. indirect, s...