Sweet Baby Octopolish!

 One of the man's besties has taken to acrylic paint pour art (everyone has a quarantine hobby), and was therefore fascinated when he was told that I could do that same look on my very fingertips .  I was also reminded of a great bundle sale on fluid art polishes  that had recently arrived and so needed to be tried out. indoor, bright CF lighting Baroness X keeps doing all sorts of really fascinating stuff with fluid art polishes, adding a whole lot more ingredients and unique flair than just the bubbles.  Stargate is a deeply saturated midnight blue with just a touch of holo dust thrown into the mix. window-filtered daylight To this midnight starfield, I've added Llarowe Katarina (aqua with purple shimmer), Cult My Kind of Kool Aid (mauve shimmer), and at the advice of a polisher in the BX fan group who recommended thicker stamping polishes as being great for fluid nails, Pretty Serious Presence (a white crème that's now thickened up to nearly stamping opacity)....

I think we all know that I'm a complete sucker for polishes that contain shifting Clarins 230-type pigment, or any of the so-called "UP sisters," and when a fortunate happenstance was sitting on my desk along with this beauty, well, it jumped right to the front of the line. indoor, CF lighting Bee's Knees recently released a whole collection of UP and sister UP polishes themed around the Seven Wonders that the witches perform in season 3 of American Horror Story, each named for a different act of magic from the show.  Concilium is a plummy eggplant purple jelly, loaded with a green to blue shifting shimmer. outdoor, bright sunlight For some of her other sheer polishes of this type, Bee's Knees has also offered matching undies in a more opaque crème or crelly formula, though I generally prefer the squishy translucency of jellies on their own.  This polish does build up in about 4 coats, though, so was sold solo.  By luck, another polish that arrived on ...

"Unicorn Pee" (GAH how I hate that moniker.  but one must swim with the tide - note that my "230/FF" tag has been updated to include UP in there.  sigh.) is back in craze in a huge way with indie nail polish creators over the past few months.  I'm not alone in this being my fave sparkle pretty much ever, and even in a hoard that's kinda out of control, I just can't say no to this magic. indoor, bright CF lighting Don Deeva has been releasing a few Clarins 230/Fantasy Fire/Unicorn Pee polishes over the last year or so, then announced this pair in her fan group this month - a duo of jelly polishes with DOUBLE the typical amount of shifty shimmer in them.   Obviously , these got snapped up by yours truly ASAP. indoor, bright CF lighting The two have utterly identical formulas - both go on perfectly smooth, but need extra dry time in between coats due to their jelly nature - with Sid Vicious the more wine purple and Nancy the violet purple. i...

I caught a blog post a couple of days ago that reminded me magnetic polishes are so a thing again now (yay!!) and that there was a fistful of them sitting untried (what, surely you jest?!), and that was exactly the inspiration I needed to reach for one of them. outdoor, bright afternoon sunlight Dance Legend's Dirty Love is the only polish from their GoldenEye collection to not have a James Bond-inspired name (unless I'm missing it completely - do enlighten me, please!).  It's a warm, plummy wine packed with magnetic coppery shimmer, and dusted with electric blue glass flecks.  At one coat, all the magical ingredients are evenly dispersed and nicely visible: indoor, CF lighting, one coat with no topcoat After painting one thin coat on both hands, I gave it time to dry a bit more by going ahead and cleaning up around the edges.  Next, I painted one nail at a time and used DL's straight line neodymium magnet to pull the copper sparks into a diagonal across the...

After my last 2 Dance Legends have been wholly underwhelming, I checked through the list of untried goodies from them to see if there was a shot at redemption.  A-ha!  After absolutely loving the other 2 of the LE Mortal Kombat polishes ( Reptile  and  Sub Zero ) earlier this year, I snagged the 3rd one in the collection, Rain, to make this my only 100% complete polish collection ever. indoor, bright CF lighting Check out my new oval nails!  Malta #91's insane chippiness meant that I ended up with a pretty bad break along an edge of 2 different nails, so I could either go to nubbins or round them out.  They still seem strange (I've had square/squovals for so long now these don't look like me), but they're cute and a little girly, so I'll give it a whirl for a while. indoor, bright CF lighting Like the others in the collection, Rain is a very dark not-quite-black polish when cold that then shifts tonally to a plum wine when warm.  This jelly...

For some reason, I feel the need to be all professional at work this week, and put down the greens and blues for just a sec.  Still, I'm not ready to give up all things interesting (pink crème girl, not so much), so I pulled out Barry M's Dusky Mauve.  I'm a huge fan of things that are two colors at once (duochromes FTW!), and contrasting shimmer polishes certainly fit the bill. indoor CF lighting Dusky Mauve is really more taupe than mauve - it's a cool, dark mushroom crème with a lovely purple shimmer that gives it a plum cast in most lighting. outdoor direct sunlight It's a known dupe for the far pricier Chanel Paradoxical, and Chanel's standard MO is subtle, borderline hidden shimmer.  If the shimmer here were a little more prominent, I'd love it a whole lot more. sunlight Still, when the shimmer is there, ooof.  This one is an edgy modern neutral with a little sneaky something extra, and it feels very chic.  The shine that one la...

Brazillian brand Hits has been releasing a bunch of collections in the last year or so that we're only getting recently stateside.  Sadok is all named for letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and this one is Lamed. indoor CF lighting Lamed is an earthy brown-tinged plum shade that I can't help but think of as "bruise colored."  Unflattering as that sounds, I really do love bruise polishes - I think it's a very trendy shade of neutral that looks pretty awesome on most people's skin tones.  Lamed adds a ton of  mostly teal blue glass fleck shimmer that cools this bruise color down a lot. For as richly dark as it is, this doesn't look black until all but the lowest lighting - the redness of the plum shade somehow keeps it from slipping even darker. The long tapered cap is comfortable to hold, and the brush is MUCH neater than some of the older things I've gotten from Hits.  The brush is still very wide and flat, so how you feel about wide brush...

KB shimmer's big collections are typically pretty varied - at least one each of a crème, a glitter bomb, and lately a holo - so there's often at least one that strikes my fancy.  Plum Tuckered Out was a collaboration shade with Pointless Cafe. PTO is a vampy take on the "radiant orchid color of the year" business.  It's definitely plum, far more red than a royal purple, and though it was richly dark, it never pulled a surprise-black on me.  The first coat of this crelly was sheer-to-streaky, but the second evened things right out.  I eventually did about 2 and a half, but a 3rd coat probably would have been a better idea. outdoor, full sunlight Tucked within the plum base is a generous scattering of cobalt blue chunky shimmer that's more obvious in bright light.  I do wish the blue fire was able to peek out of the base more, but it is a really pretty contrast. same direct sunlight Wear time was surprisingly good, considering how nearly jelly-l...