Sweet Baby Octopolish!

One of the ladies in my FB nailpolish group was recently waffling on purchasing an original formula OPI My Private Jet from a blog sale, which got me tumbling down my own rabbit hole of vintage OPI, and the next thing I knew, 4 older duochromes were on their way to me. window-filtered sunlight Sugarplum Yum was from OPI's 2002 Victorian Holiday collection, of which the internet informs me there were 4 colors that each had matching glitter topcoats - if you search for swatches of this one, you'll find pics of either this pearly duochrome or some sparkly glitter labeled as "Sugarplum Yum," so know what you're shopping for if you go a-hunting. outdoor, direct sunlight for both Sugarplum Yum is a pearly cloud color that appeared either dusky blue or grey depending on the light.  It's somewhat sheer, leaving a hint of VNL in a sexy way that I'm fond of with 2 coats.  The shimmer in here shifts from a bright pink that my camera refused to catch ac...

I picked up Zoya's Gemma during a promotion last spring, and loved the sparkly violet fire that's visibly peeking through.  Wearing it, though... indoor, bright CF lighting Gemma is a greyed-out olive green crelly that occasionally looked actually grey in overcast, rainy morning daylight (we haven't seen the sun for a while around here).  As you can see in the corner of the bottle above, there's a glimmer of violet sparkle visible when the light hits.  Unfortunately, without a bright light source and a macro lens, the shimmer was almost completely invisible IRL. overcast daylight The crelly formula gave this a wonderful shine and good self-leveling even before topcoat, but the green tint stubbornly clung to my cuticle edges, making cleanup more obnoxious than you'd expect for a color this light.  3 coats was absolutely needed for opacity; it was still a little streaky at 2. yup.  overcast. Well, this wasn't working for me.  I mean, it's a ...

The boy said, "something purple or rich or something," so I pulled this sparkly grackle-wing out of the stash:  Julep Reece. indoor, bright CF lighting Reece is most often exactly what you see above: a soft, nearly metallic grey with a lovely lavender-purple overtone, and a healthy smattering of holographic microglitter.  In brighter lighting, both the holo sparkle and that purple become much more vibrant. direct sunlight In lower lighting, though, a lovely earthy green duochrome comes out around the edges. indirect, shady sunlight And with some wacky hand positioning, the green takes over the purple almost entirely. This purple-to-green oil-slick iridescence is so lovely that it's of course not at all unique in my stash.  Wet N Wild Gray's Anatomy (itself  a known dupe for Deborah Lippmann Wicked Game ) and Zoya Ki have an identical shift to Reece. indirect, window-filtered sunlight The WnW is significantly more sheer than t...

Early this year, Pretty Serious Cosmetics started a collection called "The Museum of Naileontology," with the idea that each polish is an "homage" (she doesn't ever call them dupes) to an old, hard to find classic.  In this past week's green nail polish haul from these guys, I picked up 2 of the 3 inaugural shades, and first up is The Dragon's Curse. indirect, window-filtered sunlight Dragon's Curse is a granny-smith-apple green full of a gorgeous ultrafine golden shimmer.  It's theoretically a nod to OPI's Creme de Menthe, or else Misa's Silk Robe - in either case, they're impossible to even find on ebay, let alone attempt to purchase one.   Kaz has both of them , so whichever one it secretly is, you know it's as close as we're all going to get. indirect, overcast light The formula on this was a little thicker than I'd like (no chance at all for thin coats), but it self-leveled perfectly, and was quite toleran...

Since we decided to go check out the new Mad Max movie this weekend, and literally everything in that movie is on fire, I felt the need to badass it up a little to hit the theater. What we have here is my first ever attempt with nail vinyls (as opposed to just winging stuff with scotch tape), and I think it worked great.  It says "take one" in the title, because I'm quite sure that these flames will reappear sometime in the near future. I went with Julep Karmen for the flames, since the red and gold combo microglitter blended so nicely with the bronze and red sparkles from P51 (in fact, sometimes too nicely, the contrast wasn't always obvious enough for me).  This is one heavy coat of Karmen layered on top. At angles, the emerald sparkle looked awesome with the scarlet flames, though it was of course tricky to photograph. Where to buy:  I got these from  Snail Vinyls , which I thought were pretty affordably priced, and had ...

Llarowe's P51 came home to me after a frenzied restock, oh, A YEAR AGO, and then promptly sat untried due to disappointment.  Wait, what?  Well, you see, the even to this day only pics of this beauty are the ones from  a 2013 batch on Pointless Cafe , which were used on the sale page of the website.  When I opened the battled-for box of treasure, I was kinda bummed to see that  P47  and P51 looked to be about the same polish, with P51 just being slightly more purpley.  When swatched, neither looked like those solitary older PC photos, which seemed to have multi-colored blue and red and green shimmer instead of this Fantasy Fire-type red-to-green shifting pigment that I otherwise love to pieces.  Waaaaa. indoor, bright CF light Hot DAMN I'm dumb. P51 is a deep, vampy purple jelly, packed with the aforementioned FF/Clarins 230-type color shifting sparkle.  It's quite a bit darker than this spring-leading-into-summer weather would usual...

Apparently I just can't get enough of Dance Legend's New Prism holos lately, and the boy said my fingers should match my toes today, so here we go with Android. indoor, CF lighting Android is a bright leafy green that leans more than a little blue, especially when the holo comes out to play. outdoor, direct sunlight I'd worn this one before but not yet blogged it, and the second go-round was just as nice as the first.  This collection was all graced with a great formula that wears fairly decently (3 days or so before edgewear shows up). indirect, shady sunlight The color has an almost pearly suggestion  of iridescence in lower lighting, which is probably the incredibly strong linear holo glinting along even without full sunlight. full sunlight Rating:  4 out of 5 stars.  Great formula and no fuss.  These don't require aqua base, and topcoating doesn't dull the rainbow. Where to buy:  DL's  list of international stockists . ~...