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...

Pink isn't my usual jam, though it often looks flattering on most skin tones including mine.  I'm drawn more to vampy or bright or unusual colors, not traditional ones... but a whole row of pink polishes inhabits my storage rack, most of them because they had a little something extra. indoor, bright CF lighting for all photos Femme Fatale created Midnight Masquerade as a store exclusive for Singapore stockist Mei Mei's Signatures back in 2014.  It's a rich, warm-leaning pink with a gorgeous flash of gold metallic shimmer, and a very light sprinkling of scattered holo dust. Just one medium coat provides full coverage, though I'm showing 2 thin coats here.  Midnight Masquerade has an utterly flawless formula with minimal cleanup needed.  Rating:  yet another really good 4 out of 5 stars for my old skool Femmes.  A seriously lovely polish, even if it's more delicate and feminine than what I usually reach for.  I had full intention of stamping this with a ...

With so many untried Femme Fatale polishes to choose from, it's easy to select a thoroughly different look and mood with each example of my journey through the oldest parts of my collection indoor, CF lighting for all photos Falling Glacier was part of Femme Fatale's 2014 Autumn release, and is the only thing I have from that group.  I've filed it under "grey" since the base is a sheer pale grey, but it's really all about the super bright aqua shimmer.  This arc of metallic, electric aqua was visible in all lighting, and is more saturated and vibrant than the pics show. This one additionally has a lightly sparkling, fine milled holo just barely over the line to having a linear arc, most visible in bright light and utterly vanishing in lower light.  I'm wearing 3 coats here to achieve visual opacity, and each of them were very smooth and even.  Rating:  a lovely 4 out of 5 stars.  Formula and color like this is what made me fall thoroughly in love with...

This week was all forecast to be rainy, so time to move on from holos to something that would show well in the lower light... and oh how is this still untried?? indoor, CF lighting Well, I'll tell you - it got skipped for a while because I think I expected something else. Texas Flake was released as a "Bespoke Batch" in August 2016, and I have it filed as being a "charcoal pewter" color, while I remember that the few swatch pics were more purple (limited swatch pics being pretty typical for these prototypes).  I can only assume my disonnect between expectation & reality caused me to set this aside for too long.   outdoor, overcast daylight I was wrong.  Texas flake is neither charcoal nor purple, but a warm raisiny taupe - if you believe that neutral shades can be vampy, this is it.  There's an assortment of microflakes in gold and metallic ultrachrome, and a very delicate scattered holo sparkle. indoor, bright CF lighting The bottle has a wicked case of...

Winter is just absolutely the worst time of year to try and show off a nice nail polish.  When the work day is a lot longer than the day light, you're pretty well stuck with indoor and bottle shots... until a coworker informs you of some amazingly cool celestial phenomenon happening right outside , prompting you to get a nice sunlight photo of your coincidentally celestially-named polish.   outdoor, bright direct sunlight Chasing Northern Lights was Pahlish's contribution to the December 2015 Holo Hookup box (blast from the past, yo!).  It's a cool greenish-leaning bronze linear holographic with a subtly duochromatic contrast shimmer that goes from coppery (center of my pinky) to gold to chartreuse (index finger) at angles.  I'm wearing 2 coats of this smooth perfect formula for complete opacity. Rating:  4 out of 5 stars, this is a lovely edgy neutral color that was very flattering on my skin tone.  The only flaw was that it wore a little quickly, but...

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...

Apparently, I'm still in a blue polish mood, but a little lighter and more springtime than my last look... indoor, bright CF lighting for all photos Lilac Fairy, from Pahlish's 2019 Russian Ballet Collection, is a soft sky blue with a delicate ruby-pink contrasting shimmer. It's a fairly sheer but buildable crelly formula that came up to opacity in 3 smooth and even coats.  This wore nicely and gave me no troubles with application.  Rating:  4 out of 5 stars.  Equally lovely as a midwinter frosty look or as a springtime change-of-seasons, Lilac Fairy isn't lilac per se but is pretty fairy-esque.  I love contrast shimmers, and this one isn't POW in your face but it is very wearable. Where to buy:  Pahlish usually rotates her collections out within a year or so, and I don't believe you can still buy this direct from her .  Keep an eye out for destashes & blog sales. ~Michelle 

Oh yes, I still have plenty of Enchanteds now calling my name, and it's been way too long since I wore a deep, luscious purple.  indoor, bright CF lighting Awwww yeaaaaah that's my kind of color. outdoor, direct daylight Enchanted Polish released Telenovela with their 2016 Midwinter Night's Dream collection, and indeed it's a juicy berry perfect for the time of the year where jewel tones are de rigueur.   indoor, bright CF lighting I have this shade filed with purple, but you could make a reasonable argument for it being wine instead due to the pinky contrast shimmer that forms a metallic gleam of brighter, warmer color down the center in bright light.   outdoor, direct daylight There's a real theme going on here in quality & finish for my untried mountain of Enchanted Polishes:  we have a finely milled linear holo sparkle very nicely complimented by a super smooth borderline metallic contrasty shimmer. outdoor, direct daylight The formula was perhaps a touc...

Continuing both my light & dark alternating manis and my deep dive into Enchanted untrieds in my stash, I pulled out one that I neglected for years.  It's funny how much your "mood" can play into whether a polish works for you or not. When I originally bought Enchanted's February 2017 mystery, I was pretty ho-hum about it, just another pastel holo.  I was wrong. indoor, bright CF lighting The 2017 mysteries were all "remixes" of early, hard-to-find colors, with this one being an updated version of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.  The rarity and gotta-have-it-ness of the original (other nail blogs showed direct comparisons between this and the original as being extremely close) was frankly the only reason I kept this one, since I didn't think at the time it was something I'd necessarily love.   indoor, bright CF lighting Again, seriously y'all, I was wrong.  Feb 2017 is a desaturated, nearly white linear holo.  It's a little sheer on the fi...

I'd originally intended to stamp my last mani with some fall leaves, but that color was just too distracting to cover up.  Then last week, I received from older Enchanted Polishes from an estate sale, which reminded me of how much I loved their stuff, so take 2 for fall leaves: indoor, bright CF lighting Hooboy, pulling this one out of the vault!  Enchanted Polish released Hot Chocolate for Unicorns way back in 2014.  As you can see here, my bottle has a pretty fantastic case of "ugly bottle syndrome" where the chalky white pigment that makes the polish opaque (and not a sheer jelly) has started to precipitate out onto the bottom of the bottle.  It looks orange here, but nah, it's actually white. window-filtered bright daylight Hot Chocolate is an utterly perfect shade of melted Hershey bar.  It's super smooth and creamy, and is a one-coater if you have a heavy hand.  I found that a 2nd coat deepened the color, though it had no real effect on opacity. ...

I've been feeling the fall vibes lately, with crunchy leaves all around and the drop in temperature, and an ad for a England's latest collection reminded me I had a perfect fall polish waiting in the wings. indoor, bright CF lighting Flaming June is named for the iconic Leighton painting of a sleeping woman decked in a gauzy orange dress.  The color is a perfect match for the fabric in that image, a warm coppery metallic orange.  Even though orange is firmly not my jam, I absolutely had to have this the moment I saw it.  outdoor, bright direct sunlight That sale ad for the new collection somehow led me down a rabbit hole of looking at the rest of the polishes in this collection, Leighton's Nymphs, and other than the polish named for Leighton himself, the rest have this soft green contrasting shimmer.  I'm convinced that it's here in Flaming June also, making the metallic flash in the center a cooler tone than the warm orange of the base. indoor, bright CF lighting I...