Birthday Mani 2017

Whoosh! And just like that, we're almost at the end of the year. A lot has happened since then, including a big cross country move to the Pacific Northwest. That put an end to my buying nail polish for a while but did manage to keep my nails painted some of the time. I haven't been taking any pictures though until just recently.

Today, I want to show you what I wore for my birthday yesterday. Except for this polish, it was nothing special. I do like to make sure I have something awesome on my nails for my birthday though and this one fit the bill! This is Tonic Polish Mermaid Scales. This was a limited edition Color 4 Nails exclusive that came as part of a duo with Greenglow earlier this year. As with any Tonic Polish, it is spectacular! Two wonderfully easy coats, full coverage and so so sparkly and shifty!! For some professional looking photos, check out Cosmetic Sanctuary. Mine have been taken inside and outside my house with an iPhone. But still, looks so good!

The next few photos were taken outside on a cloudy day.

Had to come out of hiatus for this beautiful polish. I do have several pictures in the vault of other beautiful polishes I managed to take pictures of over the last few months and maybe I'll manage to post about them too! Later, everyone!

Happy late Fourth of July!!

Here it is, more than a day late! Oops! Hope everyone had a good Fourth of July! I used Fun Lacquer Blue Tears and Goddess of the Dawn and used a generic white striping polish for the white in the middle.

NailaDay: Barry M Coral and China Glaze Blonde Bombshell Skittlette

Another mani that's great for summertime. I know. It's almost Fourth of July and I'll have an appropriate manicure for you guys soon but this is one that I pulled out from the vault that I wore last year. It's with Barry M Coral again, what a great polish! I just love all the polishes I have from Barry M. 

The accent nail is China Glaze Blonde Bombshell and the stamped image is from a Pueen Encore plate. I use that set a lot, don't I? It's the only one handy enough for my lazy self to dig out because all of my other plates are currently stuck in boxes and I could use this set 50 more times and still not duplicate myself. It was a pretty good purchase. 

Here we are with Barry M Coral and CG Blonde Bombshell without the stamping. I tell you, I fell in love with Blonde Bombshell in this mani. I love the mix of small and medium gold glitters. It's a simple formulation but the density and sparkle is really nice! This here is about 2 1/2 to 3 coats.

Thanks again for looking!!

Broadway Dark Night with red-green-gold shifting pigment (aka Unicorn Pee)

There is a lot of hype right now with this red/green/gold color shifting pigment. It started off with Clarins 230, something I'll never get my hands on, THE Unicorn Pee. Then, (and I consider myself lucky to have gotten into nail polish long enough ago that I could do this,) I saw that Cathy from More Nail Polish got her hands on some of that color shifting pigment and was offering it to her readers...even internationally! I am so thankful to her to this day. She is an amazing lady who parted with this and a gold-green and a green-blue color shifting pigment for dirt cheap. This pigment really is gorgeous and looks amazing over blues and purples! That didn't prevent me from getting a bottle of ILNP's The Magician but I'm sure I could have not bothered.

I had a hard time getting the green shift on camera for some reason so you will just have to see the awesomeness of the red shift. This is one coat of my franken with the red-green pigment over Broadway Dark Night.

I will have to wear it again and show better pictures of it another time. Until next time!

Born Pretty Holo #4

A long time ago, a time when you weren't tripping over a holographic polish every time you turned around, when indie holographic polish was just starting to become a thing, I found out that the Born Pretty Store carried holographic polishes and they were a reasonable price for a small 6 ml bottle. Well, I surely did get myself a bunch of colors and this is one of them. They don't have any fancy names. This one is just called #4. These days, this would be a fairly ho hum holo polish. Nothing fancy, no shimmer, no glitter, no flakies. Definitely no multichrome pigment added. Just a lovely pinky/red/coral (what the hell is this color? Watermelon?) straight holo. And I wore it that way. This is three coats. No stamping, no gradient, no art. It was very pretty. 

Thanks for looking!

Zoya Stevie

When the Zoya Pixie Dusts first came out, I was completely enamored! The sugary, confectionery look of them was incredible. And then the sparkle when you topcoat them! Just gorgeous! I wanted to own every single one. I haven't been able to quite keep up with that desire since I'm missing some of the ones from the latest release but one day....

For now, we will have to rely on this beauty, Zoya Stevie.

I absolutely love the color but I wasn't a hundred percent sure I loved the color on my nails. But, that's the way I feel about 90% of pastel type shades and I'll continue to wear them anyway so....
As most of their pixie dusts, this one went on beautifully. It had great coverage in two coats. The first coat dried almost instantly and the second coat took several minutes but that's not unusual either for this formula. The texture is finely rough and it looks like sugar crystals on the nails in the sun.

In these pictures below, I paired it with China Glaze Plur-ple, added stamping from a PUEEN plate and topcoated some of the nails. I liked the look overall but here in pictures it does look a little mish-mash-y.

And, that's it! Hope you guys liked that and I'll see you next time!

Barry M Cosmic Glow

Hello everyone!
A little magnetic fun for you guys today. This is one of the nail polish trends that I will never get tired of. I gave up on them for a while since I thought my nails were too curved for this to look pretty with. Then I realized, it was only certain designs that I didn't like, not the magnetic effect itself. This polish, Barry M Cosmic Glow, came with a magnet that seemed to actually work with my nails. I also absolutely love the holographic particles in this polish!

This polish was released in 2012 along with a few other magnetic colors. This was the only one with holographic glitter in it so the only one I felt like picking up!

As with magnetic polishes in general, this took about two coats. I did not use the magnet with the first coat and only used it with the second coat. I've had a lot of trial and error with magnetic polishes in the past which let me get the best out of this one. Even so, I still got a little smudge on my ring finger where I got too close to the magnet.

I was super worried that my topcoat would smear my lines as it has done so in the past, so I let it dry for a long long time before putting the topcoat on. I used Seche Vite here. Even then, there was some blurring. This is the crispest they were. They kind of spread out slightly over time. Something I wish I had known about magnetic polishes ahead of time so I wouldn't have been so disappointed when I first started using them. Now that we have those very strong neodymium magnets, I have been itching to try it with these polishes.

And that's it! See you guys next time!

Barry M Bright Purple

Hello everyone!

A quick post today, as these Barry M posts tend to be for me. I still have a few more that I have swatched, waiting to be posted. I chose to show this one today, Barry M Bright Purple. This is a beautiful and bright jelly like creme. This took me three coats to get great opacity. I've used this polish before in one of my all time favorite manis.

I love polishes that have this somewhat squishy quality to it. There may be a sense of patchiness when you look at these pictures but in real life, it was not at all noticeable.
That's all for today. Have a good night, everyone!

ILNP Sirène (H)

Hey polish lovers!  I have an old one from the archives today. This is ILNP Sirene (H). It took me a while to get to wearing it and it took my a while to post this. The bottle is the old round style so that goes to show you how old this polish is. This was one of my first indies and one of my first multichromes. The only others I had were the Hits collection of multichromes, one of which I've shown you before. 

On the website, this polish is described as follows: 

"Sirène (H) magically shifts through spectacularly vivid hues of green, blue, violet, red, and even offers subtle hints of gold depending on the angle of your fingertips and the type of lighting you’re under!"

I certainly got a lot of shifts from this polish in real life but the most prominent were green, teal and violet. It was hard for me to see the red and gold. I used three coats here. The first coat was a little sheer and patchy but that quickly corrected itself with further coats.

Outside shade:

Outside sunlight:

That last picture was taken after a few days. You can see the growth at the cuticles. Look how perfect it still looks otherwise! This polish had really good formula and great lasting power on my nails! I have not really been disappointed with any of my ILNPs that I've tried so far and this is no exception.

I seem to keep accumulating more pictures of polishes at a faster rate than I can post them here. So, I will keep interspersing older pictures with newer pictures until I get all caught up....which will be approximately in 12 years.
Ok, until next time! 

Different Dimension Tulips Are Better Than One

Hi all!!

Today's polish is something I purchased a long time ago. I *think* it's still available on the bigcartel site. It's really lovely and I loved wearing it!! It was pretty sheer so I needed to wear three coats. I had to rush the application due to the limited time I had and the formula was a bit thicker as well and so the combination did lead to some bubbling. I didn't mind but I suppose it doesn't really lend itself to being the sexiest of swatches. Thank goodness the polish is so gorgeous that it doesn't matter!

The first three pictures are taken in the lightbox. Really shows the duochrome-y nature of the polish.

These next two pictures are taken outside in cloudy weather. 

After a couple of days, I added a little stamping. I...don't remember what I used. I'm getting lazy, I know.

Well, that's it. It's after midnight so off I go to bed. I love shades like this. I love the glowy nature of this. I could never get tired of it. Next time, I need to keep it from bubbling.

Third day transformation with Glam Polish You're Our Only Hope, Frank!

Hello everyone!!

For today's post, you guys are going to have to forgive my day three tip wear. I was too excited about this polish to really worry about all that. I will have to wear it by itself another time. So, I had been walking around feeling blah about my Femme Fatale The Secret of Secrets when this beauty arrived in the mail. I thought the color was spot on to layer over so I tried it....and loved it!

This polish is so complex I'm not sure what all is actually in there but I do detect small color shifting flakies, some color shifting iridescent glitter, the same one that is throughout this Magical Creatures collection, and holographic microglitter. It was so sparkly, I loved it!

Someday, I will wear this all by itself but I have a feeling this one looks spectacular over a variety of colors.
This is a limited edition shade but it's still available on the Glam Polish website.
Until next time!!

Femme Fatale The Secret of Secrets...but not really

Hi folks!

I debated for some time whether or not I should show you guys this next mani. I have a minor obsession with Femme Fatale Polishes and I've worn few of them in the past and loved them. I have not shown them to you on this blog and that needs to be corrected...but moving on. This might be the first one that I'm not totally in love with. It could be user error so I'm suspending final judgement but I really couldn't wait to cover this one up. You'll see with what in my next post :-)

This is one coat of Femme Fatale The Secret of Secrets over a shimmery nude. I don't have the name of that one because it's really old but that's really not important. What's important is that it was a nude, pretty much the same color as my skin. My mannequin hands polish, if you will. Not a look I'm a fan of. So perhaps, if I'd worn The Secret of Secrets alone or over any other color of polish, I would not find it so disappointing. Ah well, back to the drawing board.

Okay polish fans, until next time!!

Tonic Polish Lula with ILNP The Magician

Hi everybody!
My post today is just an extension of the last post. A day or so before I took off my last mani, I layered it with the latest resurgence of the much loved sparkly red/green/gold pigment, aka Unicorn Pee! I had obtained the actual powder for this color shifting powder as a well as a couple of others (red/gold and blue/green) from another blogger years ago. I had made my own topper by mixing it with some clear polish and suspension base and I have used it a couple of times in the past. I am stunned that I haven't posted those manis here yet. Although, actually I'm not. I have an long array of manis that I've photographed, watermarked and filed and yet still have to blog about. *sigh*
Anyway, the point is, I had the pigment already and I tried really really hard to resist buying The Magician from ILNP. I finally caved when I realized that I could use the bottle from ILNP as my official Unicorn Pee bottle and just refill it with my own pigment as the fill line got lower. Any excuse, right!?

I got the bottle in the mail while I was wearing Tonic Polish Lula and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try it out! I could compare it to my own franken as well. So, I wore a layer of each on different fingers and here is the result!

Can you tell which one is which? My franken is on the pointer and ring fingers. The Magician is on the middle and pinky fingers. Not sure if you guys can tell but I think my franken has more of the pigment in it. There was a time when I thought it wasn't dense enough so I added a little more pigment to it. Otherwise, they're the same!

It was truly magical over Lula. Those holographic glitters peeking through the color shifting pigment is amazing! I am concocting a scenario where I put tiny holographic glitter, iridescent flakies and Unicorn Pee all in one glorious topper!!