Sweet Baby Octopolish!

I've been blogging here for 9 years now (what?!) and it's fascinating to look back at my first pics and see what a difference practice and skill has made over time.  I found myself having the same conversation twice with friends in the past week about nail care for specifically "our" type of nails, so I figured since I have research, opinions, and things that work I might as well write it down for anyone else who'd find it useful! bare nails here, prepped with nothing but oil First off, your nail type: Fingernails are just like hair - sheets of keratin produced by growth centers -  and just like hair, we have different types & textures.  In the same way there's a million brands and types of shampoo specifically intended to improve your hair type, you need to select products that match your nail type.  Some folks have hard, thick nails.  Some have flexible or even oily-textured nails.  I happen to have very thin, weak nails that will peel apart in layers...

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 ...

My short little nails demanded flashy sparkles, but I'm thinking while growing them out I might pass on swatching/trying new polishes lest my annoyance with shorties taint my opinions.  I pulled an old fave out of the vault, and used it with a new magnet. indoor, CF lighting Sinful Colors released Polar Opposites back in 2012, the first time magnetic polish was cool, and I'm super glad to be back on that train.  It's an almost gunmetal silver with a subtle scattering of electric blue sparks unmagnetized, and it's easily opaque in 1-2 coats (no base undies needed, as typical for the older magnetics but less common of late).  It was sold with a starburst-design magnet that works really well with this polish, but is a bit too big for tiny nails, so I tried out my flower magnet pen. indoor, CF lighting indoor, bright CF lighting This handy little magnetic pen is available at a bunch of nail supply stores for typically about $2.  One end has a straight row...

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 require...

Last weekend, a coworker posted a magnetic polish video on facebook, asking in amazement, "what witchery is this?!"  That of course led me to playing around with magnetic polish myself, since it was more than time to test drive one of a handful of Masura polishes I'd scored last year. indoor, CF lighting Russian company Masura made a big splash in the polish aficionado community last year once magnetic polishes became cool again (yay!!) and we caught sight of the striking effects possible with the right polish and the right magnet. outdoor, shady/overcast daylight Mint and Bazil is the name on the underside of my bottle, but most stores carrying this brand have it instead listed with the more conventionally spelled Basil.  In either case, it's a luminous jade green "cat's eye" shimmer in a nearly black-green base.  If you wanted to wear this color alone, it's plenty beautiful enough to skip the magnet, and opaque at one coat.  The opacit...

I'm sure that every polish geek has a half a handful (or plenty more) topcoats - I myself have my go-to quick dry, a thicker one for chunky or unsmooth finishes, some back-up "lesser" quick drys, and a matte.  Having that many, though, honestly means we're all still looking for MORE! For a couple of years now, my holy grail TC has been HK Girl.  I'd been pretty happy with INM Out the Door for a year or so, but HKG dries much faster to a harder (aka more chip-resistant) finish, so I made that switch around the time we started blogging here.  I've never had the love affair with Seche that plenty do - it seems more stinky to me and I get shrinkage often enough to have never bought more after my first 99 cent mini of it.  I've seen a few blog posts mentioned some behemoth from WalMart, and remembered to pick up a bottle when driven to the commercial den of iniquity by a wild goose chase for multichrome notebooks, which brings us to... Topcoat Battle!!!! ...

After my peel-off fiasco left me with 2 split nails, I immediately reached for Orly's Nail Rescue kit, which I've used on many occasions to solve these issues. Nail Rescue comes in a box that contains this small bottle of cyanoacrylate glue with an extremely convenient polish brush in the cap and a little jar of acrylic powder - yes, kids, you're going to make yourself a little patch of fake acrylic nail.  Spoiler alert:  this system is utterly genius, and WAY longer lasting than any tea bag patch. As a refresher, this was my problem.  Shown here is the split on my thumb, but in the rest of the pics, I'll be fixing my middle finger on my cinderella hand, which had a split just as bad, but much trickier to photograph without whackadoo contortions.  Fortunately, both of these splits hadn't caught on anything yet, and therefore weren't bent out of place.  In other words, this fix kit works best as soon as you notice a break problem, not after it's got...

Glitter is of course a love-hate thing, what with the fabulous sparkles and the hellish removal.  So far, I find that my one brand of peel-off basecoat (Nail Pattern Boldness' Glitter-a-Peel) works well if you use 2 coats, but it's going to start popping off after a max of 48 hours.  Lots of bloggers favorably reviewed Dance Legend's Glitter Base (most reviews I saw were for the black version, with no glitter on top, just trying it solo) - this line of products is tinted opaque so you don't need undies for your glitters, letting you skip a step.  I snagged a bottle of the nude version on the cheap when Llarowe sold off everything, so let's give this a whirl. Ok, to start with the formula: working over no base coat (apparently, if you use your regular base coat with this type of peel-off, it will PEEL OFF THE TOP LAYER OF YOUR NAIL when you  remove it so don't do that, kids), this went on a bit streaky and needed 2 coats.  It's not 100% smooth and even...