Sweet Baby Octopolish!

One good Femme Fatale deserves another, only with the color scheme flipped over to the cooler side, so... indoor, bright CF lighting Femme Fatale's older holos of the type she released in these square bottles are all just fantastic.  Like the rest of these, Gentlemen's Scuffle is a richly pigmented, creamy teal holo with an almost metallic look.  It's fully opaque in one coat (my second thin one didn't deepen the color at all), and stamps beautifully (if your plate cooperates). indoor, bright CF lighting Ray of Golden Sunshine is also holographic, but where Gentlemen's Scuffle does one thing exceptionally well, there's a bunch of other flourishes in this soft, cool gold.  Ray has a lovely seafoam-aqua shimmer overlay as well as some suuuuuper tiny gold holo microglitters added to the mix.  Because of the other sparkling elements, this one is a bit more sheer and defintely needs that second coat to come to opacity. window-filtered daylight I lov

Sometimes, you just gotta go all matchy-matchy, and these new El Corazon stamping crèmes staring right at me had me digging through mount untried looking for a neutral to coordinate.  Voilà! overcast morning daylight I started with two smooth coats of Femme Fatale Empire of Dirt, an "oops" polish from May 2017.  I'm not at all sure what polish it was originally intended to be, but the way I understand things is that if a batch goes awry, Sophie keeps adding things here and there until the batch has become sale-ably lovely, so they can be pretty far off the original mark. indoor, CF lighting Oops batches typically have few swatch pics, and Empire of Dirt was no exception.  I was expecting a warm, chestnut brown with a prominent gold flash, but instead we have here a softer and less saturated warm, pink-taupe with a rose gold flash.  It's utterly unique in my stash, and a neutral that was pretty perfect for my skintone.  indoor, office fluorescent lighti

This year has brought us a smorgasbord of polishes using the aurora pigments that are similar but much more available versions of the impossible to find Clarins 230-type red-to-green shifty shimmer.  I may have  ended up with a double handful of what I swear was the hottest color combo around, fiery red aurora in cool, deep navy, and I was trying to slow my roll.  Then I saw someone's swatches of this and YOINK!! indoor, CF lighting So.  Yeah.  What you see in that bottle shot above is basically everything you needed to know about this little number.  We have a deep slate-teal jelly base, liberally dusted with red-to-green aurora shift, then topped up with flakies that shift in nearly the same color spectrum. overcast morning daylight I love polishes that look different, but just as lovely, in different lighting conditions.  In shade or low light, of course, the flakies really take center stage, and I'm sure this would be really interesting matte as well. ou

One good superhero themed polish deserves another... come to think of it, why do I not have any Batman-themed nail stuff?  Anyway! indoor, bright CF lighting Bees Knees released Friend From Work as part of their Thor Ragnarok collection, and it takes what's arguably the best line from the movie and makes it into one of the best polish names ever.  I gotta say, I really love it when the inspiration/name is dead-on to what's in the bottle.  Friend is the Hulk's classic purple pants, liberally sprinkled with a green-to-teal-to blue microflake shimmer. indoor, bright CF lighting Indeed, it's the same shimmer as the amazing House on Haunted Chill , though while that polish sparkled non-stop, this one looks magenta/plum most of the time, but picks up the amazing shimmer at angles. indoor, CF lighting, blurry d/t funky contortions needed to capture that electric blue 2 smooth coats brought me to visible opacity and what looks like the same depth of color as t

After something fiery I had to reach for something cooler and dark, and Ever After's 2016 mystery fit the bill. indoor, bright CF lighting Full of Wonder is a Wonder Woman-themed polish that fits the aesthetic of the 2017 movie really well - it's a dark, smoky blue somewhere between cadet and navy, with glimmers of red flakies and a scattered holo finish that adds sparkle but doesn't sit on top as a linear flame. bright afternoon sunlight I've only tried a few Ever After polishes, but the formula has been consistently great, and Full of Wonder is no exception - smooth, easy applying, decent opacity in 2 coats, and a brush that didn't give me any grief. bright afternoon sunlight Some of the larger flakies did stick out a bit from the base, but were adequately tamed with a single layer of topcoat.  This wasn't the sort of thing where I had to start trimming pointy shard edges with my cuticle nippers. indoor, bright CF lighting I was only ha

Sometimes there's that one polish, even in a collection full of jewels, that just draws everyone's attention like bees to honey.  KBShimmer released a slew of utterly beautiful multichrome magnetics earlier this year, and a whole lot of the buzz went straight to Solar Flair, both because it was the LE out of the group and for its uniquely fiery look.  I originally passed on this one, thinking it was too yellow & orange, but the consistently stunning swatch pics I came across convinced me otherwise. Y'all, the hype is real . indoor, CF lighting You see how there's 2/3 of a rainbow in that bottle?  Deep carmine red straight on, that tilts to burnt orange, then a hint of coppery gold, and finally peridot green that's reaching toward blue around the curve of the bottle?  And how all of those colors come right on out on the nail, left to right, from pinky over to index on that bottle shot above?  Yup.  Shifty AF IRL, no special tricks required.   wind