Sweet Baby Octopolish!

Completely out of the blue, someone asked the nail polish comparisons group if anyone had ever found a dupe for Cirque Coronation.  While I now have and love that one, I pulled out all my royal purple Clarins 230-type shimmer polishes, and remembered all of these are stunning.  indoor, CF lighting Dance Legend's Sparky collection was released a year before Cirque brought back Coronation, and though I can't really find any of the comparisons online now, the royal purple + holo sparkle + "unicorn pee" shimmer that is Post Scriptum was hailed as pretty darn close.  outdoor, shady daylight My swatch sticks at 2 coats showed the two of them to be aaaaalmost dupes... but this isn't a comparison post, because at this point I'm not actually sure if one is harder to find than the other, so I'm going to focus just on the merits of Post Scriptum by itself.  outdoor, bright sunlight And what a royal purple this is!  As with many polishes in this vein, PS is sheer enou...

 At the man's suggestion of "blue... no, violet!" I starting perusing my stash for a deeply saturated shade of something along those lines, and as per usual, found a gem hiding out far too long untried. indoor, bright CF lighting Bow Polish, the smaller-ml square bottled sister to Dance Legend, how do I love thee?  Dating an Alien was part of their 2016 Out of Space collection, and surely this one wins for most hilarious name. outdoor, bright direct sunlight Starting with a blue deeper than a Vulcan's blood, this jelly base is loaded with a "UP sister" pigment that's an utterly fantastic shimmer.  In direct light, it's a glowing cobalt, just barely lighter than the base color, amping up the overall look but staying fairly tonal. outdoor, bright sunlight With a slight tilt, that shimmer goes from an absolutely electric aquamarine on over to a deep royal purple.  All the colors this pigment shifts to perfectly compliment the base color. outdoor, bright...

My first Halloween look this year ended up being my fave, because I loooooove glow in the dark polish, so for my last look I felt like coming back to that. indoor, CF lighting I've started here with a base of Dance Legend Price of Beauty , a pretty color that sits on the cusp of blue and silver, packed with iridescent microflakie shimmer and a really nice blue glow in the dark effect.  Unfortunately, it'd thickened up a lot in the years since I've used it last, and with a good squirt of thinner was back to good as new... but I must have overdone it because 100% of the flakes & GITD powder settled to the bottom of the bottle 2 days later, whoops! I've rolled the dice plenty of times on cheapo chinese-made stamping plates off ebay, and sometimes you get what you pay for but sometimes things work out great.  KADS plates are absolutely stellar about 80% of the time, so for about $2 it's well worth that roll.  Nature 032 was a big win for me, and I've used the p...

A swatch photo in the Vapid fan group reminded me that Witching Hour is awfully pretty in a deep, dark, vampy way... and a cool effects topcoat from Dance Legend was just languishing untried, so... indoor, bright CF lighting Yes!  Slytherin nails!   First layers first: indoor, bright CF lighting Witching Hour is a deep inky off-black base with very fine-milled purple shimmer.  The bottle catches more shimmer for me than my nails do, and this is indeed one of those polishes that looks black in moderate light on down, but that was wholly expected from the get go.  It's completely opaque in 2 coats, but cleanup can be dicey if this ink gets at your cuticle egde. indoor, bright CF lighting The morning after I'd painted this, I wanted my vampy look to have more flash than just a creature of the night, and since the base layer was totally dry, it seemed a great time to try out one of Dance Legend's magnetic top coats. outdoor, bright d...

Oh look!  A free weekend after a KRAYZEE work week and the hectic nail art-ing of last weekend's Oscars schindig?  Why yes we DO have time to play with magnets! indoor, bright CF lighting But wait, what's this?  Yes indeed, my right hand will be making a rare showing as the star of this post, so please forgive any wonky camera angles.  Side note: of any object I routinely use, the camera is the most clearly right-handed operation only.  I'd be super peeved to be a leftie, since I'm not aware of any lefty cameras (like there are scissors, for example).  Anyway, for whatever reason, the magnetic lines softened a whole lot on my usual swatching left hand, like so: outdoor, bright sunlight While that looks very much like the softly glowy swatch photos Masura usually publishes for their magnetics, it's not what I was going for and not at all the best showing for the lovely The Red Square Nebula. outdoor, bright sunlight The Red Square Nebula ...

I was really feeling like a green this week, and after I'd picked this gorgeous emerald shade for my toes when I recently headed out for a pedi, being matchy-matchy for a couple of days was definitely in order. indoor, bright CF lighting Famously flawless Russian Blogger Anna Gorelova has partnered with Russian staple Dance Legend  for several years now, releasing new collections a couple of times yearly.  This one was number 02 from her 2014 HallOWLeen collection.  Depending on the translation from Russian, this one is either called Kikimora ( a Russian house-spirit/female bogeyman legend ) or Fright. outdoor, overcast daylight Kikimora looks very blue-leaning in the bottle, but on the nail is a lovely emerald green packed with "ocean" type flakies that shift from blue to aqua to green.  There's also a liberal sprinkling of shimmer that flashes in certain lighting conditions but is often swamped by the flakies, especially in lower light.  This shimm...

The man picked "dark blue" when prompted for a color suggestion, but instead of reaching for one of my newest sparkles, I went for something a little deeper into Mount Untried. indoor, bright CF lighting Triumph is a lovely dusty denim/slate blue filled with silver holo flake.  I feel the grey undertone in this blue would make it really wearable for most skin tones, and the moody stormcloud color is just about perfect for the non-stop rainy weather that's flooded the east coast for the past few months. indoor, bright CF lighting I have several other polishes in similar finishes - opaque color with holo flake - and found Triumph to be surprisingly sheer and borderline watery.  The base is very much a jelly, and while it's thick enough that the flakes lie flat and smooth in it, 3 coats were absolutely necessary to get it to the bottle color.  For a color this saturated at the final look, I found 3 coats to be highly unusual. outdoor, overcast daylight ...

The next major item in my life gone hectic list was the annual big conference this week - since I'm known for my nails (ha!), but this is a grownup sort of gig, slightly flashy but tasteful was the plan. indoor, CF lighting After my major love affair with Kaleidoscope/El Corazon (I think that El Corazon is the brand name, and Kaleidoscope is their line of stamping polishes, but I don't read Russian so it's all a guess) Mysterious Mars, I recently jumped at the chance to order all of their multichrome stamping polishes at a discount with a group buy.  A few of them are somewhat sheer and will look very different over different base colors, but the rest are just as opaque and shifty and universally usefully awesome as Mysterious Mars.  outdoor, bright sunlight Egyptian Scarabaeus is predominantly a slightly greenish-tinted gold head on - it's in the realm of OPI Just Spotted the Lizard/Chanel Peridot.  Like those duochromes, it shifts to minty green, then n...

After all the flaming red loveliness that I was last wearing, I decided that a neutral palate cleanser was in order.  I wore Dance Legend's Robots vs Humans once when it first came out, but never blogged it, so this seemed like a good time to revisit this one. indoor, bright CF lighting Dance Legend made a huge splash in nail polish world with their 2013 New Prism collection - these were some of the first more widely available holos, and they were really the first to go on creamy smooth without the need to paint on bare nail or a special aqua basecoat. Robots vs Humans is a warm copper-brown that goes on nearly opaquely in just one coat, and is completely solid in one and a half to two.  It's pigmented enough to use for stamping, and I swooned over that amazing holo flare in the bottle there. indoor, bright CF lighting Sadly, though, wearing it again reminded me of all the issues I had with this color the first time around - though my painting technique and base/to...