Nails of the day

 In the interest of getting you all caught up on my doings... well, if you've seen my Instagram you've probably seen some of these pictures, but I know some of you don't go there for one reason or another. So I'm repeating some stuff that's probably already over there.

 This is Hakuna Matata, which I mentioned last time was a BCA polish:

For me, medium pinks have to walk a fine line or become too pale for my taste and/or my skin tone, but this one does a good job.

Incidentally, I think Zombie Claw has a great box:

I think this picture was taken after I've had this one on a while!

This is the only polish I bought from OPI's holiday collection for '21, Ready Fete Go.

This one I think I'd had on for two whole weeks:

I did Do You Sea What I Sea? alone for the first week, and then I patched it up somewhere in there and wore it for another week with Starrily Enchanted on top of it. (So the base color is the OPI and all that flakie stuff going on is Enchanted.)

NOTD: Sorry Not Sorry (over Through The Grapevine)

Here's what I'm wearing right now:

This is two coats of Mega Strength Sorry Not Sorry (made by Sally Hansen) over one coat of Megalast Through The Grapevine (made by Wet n Wild). I'm not entirely sure if I needed to put an undercoat under this but I decided brighter is better. I really really like this polish.

This is Through The Grapevine on its own:

I posted these pictures on Instagram, and I said there that I feel like I would want a second coat of this if I was going to wear it on its own. For layering, I thought one was plenty. On my monitor, at least, it looks brighter here that it did in real life.

NOTD: Arielle

Here's one other thing I've worn recently and didn't get around to posting about, Zoya Arielle:

I thought it was kind of boring - although it looks pretty in this picture, really - so after a while I put another polish on top of this, Ciaté Up In The Clouds. I don't seem to have a picture of that, though. Up In The Clouds is a sheer pink that seems to have some blue-ish flip to it.

(I don't know why I keep buying this kind of mauve-ish pink. I hardly ever end up liking them. I have like five different pink cremes from KL Polish and I'm not really crazy about any of them. The only pinks I end up thinking look really good on me are the bright ones.)

NOTD: You're Such A BudaPest (& add-ons)

I think I bought OPI You're Such A BudaPest back during the Black Friday sale from Ulta last year. The color is several years old, right? I think I remember an Eastern European collection or something like that (added: it was Euro Centrale, in 2013) - but pastels aren't generally my thing and it took me a long time to get around to deciding I wanted it. And then another while to get around to wearing it:

I slapped one coat on late at night, and then another one (or maybe two, because I remember griping about how sheer it was) before I left the house. I had my new NailsInc base-coat on - which hopefully I will get around to talking about soon - but I didn't have time to put any top-coat on. And then I forgot by the end of the day that I hadn't put top-coat on, and then a day or two later when it started chipping, I remembered. So, as is my wont, I started putting stuff on top of it to hide the chips.

First I picked up Ciaté Fly Away, thinking that it was a shimmer, but no, it's just a cream. I had it on a couple of nails by the time I figured this out (it was late) but hey, it matches - it's just a slightly darker purple than BudaPest is. Then I found the Ciaté that was actually the shimmery purple one - Purple Rain - and put it on top of everything. It was still kind of a mess but it was a better-looking mess, at least. I tried taking a picture of it, but it was really awful so you'll just have to use your imagination. (Bear in mind that I've posted some pretty bad pictures over the years. If I say a picture is so bad I won't use it, it's bad.)

Let's see, here's my swatches from the Mini Mani Month set:
Purple Rain
Fly Away
Purple Rain did look very nice over both of these. I'll have to try it again at some time in the future.

(If you now have Prince earworms like I do, well, I'm not apologizing for that!)

NOTD: Gardner + Spellfrost

Here is Zoya Gardner, which I got from the Thanksgiving-weekend specials -- I've already forgotten if it was actually Black Friday or Cyber Monday or somewhere in between...

It's really beautiful. Zoya describes it as "a deep periwinkle with a vibrant magenta shimmer in a dense foil finish." It really would not have occurred to me to call this periwinkle, although I suppose it's perfectly apt - I would just have said "blue-violet" instead. But anyway, that's nitpicking.

Gardner was chipping a little at the tips, so I decided to layer with it, and I added the one polish I got from December Polish Pickup, which was Spellfrost from Ethereal Polish. Spellfrost is a flakie top-coat in sort of complementary colors - a periwinkle-ish base and mostly cool-toned flakies. This picture is out of focus but you can still get the general idea of the color:

It tones Gardner down a good bitl

In focus, but these two were taken after several days so the tip-wear is even more noticeable here:

Less Bitter, More Glitter!!

This is another Nails Inc Duo, Less Bitter More Glitter:

This picture is kind of dark but I like that you can see the holo stuff on the box.

The swatch that's pointing at the polishes here is both of these polishes layered, which I like, but I have pictures of them separately as well.

 This one is Shake Your Baubles:

I like both these polishes, but this one is the standout. It is packed with pearlescent stuff, and it's really gorgeous.

The glitter is Get The Party Started:

It got pretty opaque on its own in three coats, and on its own the glitter shades slightly pink. Layered over Shake Your Baubles, it - unsurprisingly - goes back to being red.

I honestly wasn't sure I would want to keep this, but I do. (More on the returns issue later.) I have a lot of reds and I don't wear them a lot, but I still want this one, mostly because I'm in love with that pearlescent one.

(I was originally intending to do all the NailsIncs in one big post but I seem to be developing an aversion to long posts. I'm getting where if I have a bunch of pictures I want to post I generally break them up and do them in several pieces. I think it's a lot more readable that way. If you have any input about whether you agree about that feel free to speak up! )

Altered Skittles mani

I took the "skittles" manicure that I wore for Halloween and softened it using China Glaze Travel In Colour:

I do think this did what I wanted, which was to shift it away from being quite so obviously a Halloween manicure.

Travel In Colour shifts things towards pink, generally. It didn't seem to have much effect on the green (which is Chimera) and the gold (Casino Night) - maybe it softened the color just slightly (and of course it took away the matte finish that I had on everything before). But the others it shifted quite a lot. The black (Fetish) became a dark shimmery purple, the purple (Carter) became much more noticeably red-violet, and the orange (Destiny) became very noticeably coral-colored. (Destiny does actually have coral tones in it even without the help of TinC, but it's not very noticeable with two coats of polish and no top-coat.)

NOTD: MIA, Glass On Fire

I wore KL Polish MIA in the early part of the week and I do really like it:

Super-bright, not-quite neon, pearlescent with a slight blue flash. But as neons and near-neons tend to do, it was prone to chipping. (Not horribly so, just a little bit!) So as I  tend to do with such things, I patched it up and put something else on top of it. This week, that was Glass On Fire from Great Lakes Lacquer, a Polish Pickup selection):

It looks much more purple on the nail, but I think it actually has a magenta base and then purple and blue flakies/shimmer. Similar colors, but reads like a wine-color, almost.

Added: Here's Kathleen's video about the current Sephora sale, which I include here because she's wearing MIA in it.

NOTD: Aurora Borealis over Chimera

I was looking at that link I posted down at the bottom of this entry, where I did Aurora Borealis over a green base. I liked it over the green so I decided to experiment with other greens. This is two coats of A/B over OCC Chimera.

It like it. It's maybe not quite as awesome as the one I linked (which was over Frogtown) but it's nice. Chimera is one of those polishes that I like but I always forget about when it comes to picking out polish.

(Added:) I put this on early Friday morning, and now it's Tuesday and I've washed my hair since then and everything else that I usually do that messes my polish up, and I've still got this on and it's only got the tiniest bit of tipwear. I'm sure I'll do something new in the next couple of days, but I call this a big win, wear-wise.

Mindy, Charmed + Havana Heat

First of all, in case anybody missed it and is interested, Kathleen Lights' Havana Heat collection dropped. Not your typical summer collection (which is refreshing as hell, really) - very bright, but not neon. I can't see myself buying a bunch of these because there's too many warm colors - I might want the pink and the blue. (Not that the green is particularly warm, but it seems too similar to things I already have.) (Scroll down to the bottom for videos on this!)

Here is the only polish I've got from KL's spring (Ethereal Gardens) collection, Charmed:

This reads as purple but I think it actually is pink with blue shimmer. It's super-pretty.

And then I have Mindy, from the Winter Glamourland collection:

A deep berry creme.

I tried Charmed on top of Mindy, and it seems to have definite possibilities:

Here's Kathleen's chit-chat video:

aaand the "commercial" featuring her family:

Enchanted over Jan 2016

So I was wearing January 2016, as I showed the other day, and it was chipping a bit, and I had a flakie top-coat I hadn't tried out yet, so here it is: Starrily Enchanted. It's not really surprising, because I have had a thing for flakies from way way back, but I love this.

NOTD: The Pie Hole

I showed a mani with this same polish some time ago, but that time there was something under it and this time there's not:

This is Fanchromatic Nails The Pie Hole. This is not especially surprising, but if you look at the entry I linked above, this polish is considerably more neutral-looking by itself than it was over Bitter Buddhist. Actually, let's put that right here where we can compare:

Hmm. Wow. Actually I think what I'm seeing is considerably more extreme than what I saw in real life. These are both daylight pictures, but the top one is in direct sunlight and I'm guessing it washed it out some. I still have this on and it doesn't look nearly as pale as the top picture. And honestly I'm not sure that the greener version below was quite that green, either. I like this polish both ways, but I think I did like it better with Bitter Buddhist underneath. (Just don't expect anything quite this bright.)

(Try saying "a bit better with Bitter Buddhist" five times fast.)

NOTD: Sierra Sunset

This is SquareHue Sierra Sunset:

This is kind of a cranky polish - you can see the bare spots, and this is three coats, I think. I went ahead and did a fourth one and it looked better, but that's an awful lot of coats. The next time I try this I'll probably just put something underneath it. It's mostly not as red as it looks here - I thought it looked more like a burnt orange in most lights. It'll be a really good fall polish if I can figure out how to get it to apply a little better.

I have this because I happened to be poking around on SquareHue (for reasons I've now forgotten) and I found that they had marked some of the older sets down to $12 for sets of three, and I ordered two of them. I got the 1970s and 1980s sets, from the year they were doing decades - 2015, I think? (I'll get pictures of all of that up soon, hopefully.) (Added: links to some of the sale sets, down at the bottom)

And then after a day or so I got tired of looking at the unevenness and slapped Zoya Leia on top of it - I had Leia on the brain from talking about it one day last week, I guess. (Not to mention that I was watching Rogue One on Netflix the other day.) So of course Leia turns everything some degree of pink - very pink, in this case:

It was still pretty messy but Leia is so showy I doubt anybody but me noticed the imperfections in real life.

(updated: all of SH's website is now down except the front page)
SH sale sets still available as of 4/16/18:
1970s
1980s
also Scuba Hawaii (probably my favorite SH set ever)
also Hike Banff (which contains Lake Louise, another favorite, as well as a beautiful dark green and a neutral light tan)

NOTD: Rainbow Wishes

Well, after the pink Hot Couture mani crashed and burned, I had one more work day to go last week, and I wanted to do something that at least hinted at being pastel. Given that I'm not big on pastels, in general, the couple of weeks before Easter are usually the only time that I wear pastels very much. And what I came up with wasn't really pastel, but it was sort of in the ballpark.

I showed a swatch of this a couple of months ago - it's NailsInc Rainbow Wishes, which was in the Sparkle Like A Unicorn set. Here's the swatches for comparison:

By itself it looks pink, but over black it looked blue-to-purple shifty like it does in the bottle. I didn't really want to use black so I put it over a navy-blue instead, Orchid Playmaker. And I really like how it turned out. It's maybe more blue than purple, but the purple highlights are still there. Very nice.

Added: after I took this manicure off, I decided to try Rainbow Wishes alone, since it looks quite nice in the swatch above. But I didn't like it too much. The shift does still show up, but two coats are still very sheer and too much nail line shows for my taste. Sometimes that doesn't bother me but this one did. I really like it with the undercoat so why waste it wearing it alone?

Layered NOTD part 2: Hot Couture

I showed this one yesterday but I was falling asleep when I wrote that and kind of stopped in the middle. So continuing on from where I left off, this is two coats of Look At My Bow! and two coats of Color Club Hot Couture:

and I put matte top-coat on it. I'm not sure whether to blame this on having tried to finish while I was sleepy, or on too many layers. So here's the layers:

1. Cuccio base-coat
2. Look At My Bow!
3. Look At My Bow!
4. Hot Couture
5. Hot Couture
6. Matte All The Things

Hot Couture is a pale-pink top-coat with a lot of sparkle, and it's pretty thick. So I'm inclined to think it was putting the second coat of that on which caused the trouble. You can see here that the top nail, in the picture, is messed up, and it's not really wear. After I took this - or maybe it had already started on the other hand before this, this polish just started peeling off in big chunks. By the time I got home from work it had peeled completely off three nails on my left hand. The right hand (pictured) didn't ever get any worse than this. It was almost like I used peel-off base-coat, only I didn't. Anyway, it was really pretty while it lasted and I'll have to remember to give this combination another try this time next year!

(Hey, it's baseball season!!)

NOTD: Look at My Bow! +

I was talking to @thecakest on Twitter about Look at My Bow and Shelby, and I said maybe I'd do some more swatches and pay attention to how they applied. I didn't want to do my nails twice, so I only swatched Shelby on another wheel - it seemed okay, but not fabulous. I think that these two polishes go on rather similarly, really - they're pale pinks, and not chalky, so they're of necessity pretty sheer, and it takes at least two and probably really more like three coats to get them opaque.

This is two coats of Look at My Bow! - you can see that I really could have used a good ridge-filling base-coat. But other than that it looks basically okay.

But I didn't stop there. I'll explain what I put on top of it tomorrow!

NOTD: Leia over Maki Me Happy

I tried out Maki Me Happy and I wasn't in love with it. It comes out looking dark red and while that's okay, two coats of it weren't fully opaque at all. I just didn't have time to do a third coat and so I slapped Seche Vite on it and wore it one full day as it was. I doubt that anybody else noticed that it wasn't perfect. It was pretty, and every once in a while when the light hit it just right I kind of went, "ooh." But I didn't see that often. (It was a very gloomy day. Maybe some sun would have helped.)

So last night I went, "What can I do to improve this?" and eventually I added a coat of Zoya Leia to it. Here's a picture, although it doesn't come close to doing it justice:

Leia turns Maki Me Happy into a really dark, shimmery berry/fuchsia color. Unfortunately my iPhone completely didn't pick up how pretty it was. (I think what's happening here is you're seeing more of Maki Me Happy and less of Leia, due to some quirk of the light.)

Show Stopping

I'm starting to think about pinks and reds, since we're less than a month away from Valentine's Day, and so here's Sinful Colors Show Stopping (over some random red):

This is a pale pink microglitter with holo glitter mixed in. It's well-named, really, because it's very flashy. It seems to be discontinued but I bet it's findable if you poke around.

(If you want to see it over a paler color, here it is over a medium pink.)

And Further

Here is Lollipop Posse ...And Further:

This is a lot of purple stuff in a blackish base. By "stuff" I mean shifty pigments and holo glitter. That's Adrenaline Crush is at the bottom of the wheel here, and And Further is the nail above that. By itself it goes on rather thin-looking with the first coat, but it firms up nicely with the second. And then the other thing I was trying to do here was recreate this mani, where I slapped it on on top of Zoya Carter, and it was lovely. It's hard to decode my various arrows & abbreviations there, but I think the darkest one is And Further over Black Creme, and And Further over Carter is the one under that.

I believe these polishes are not actually findable right now anyway. I happened to get in on a pre-order (and I have to say I wish I'd gotten more than one!) - and the preorder is done now, and as far as I know this polish is gone.

NOTD: Rich Girls & Po-Boys plus Peak Of Chic

Rob gave me these two polishes for a Christmas surprise (I think they came from Tuesday Morning):

This is Essie Peak Of Chic (from the Encrusted Treasures collection of a couple of years ago) and OPI Rich Girls & Po-Boys (from the New Orleans collection, of course). I tested them out, as you see, and decided they would look very nice together. This picture is after I had been wearing this for days and you can tell, but I did like the result.

I just tried to do a snowy effect - I put more on some nails and less on others. Peak Of Chic is actually a bar glitter, and I usually am not at all fond of bar glittter, but somehow on this one, it works. (I think it's a smaller bar, which probably helps.) I swatched it by itself, also, and over black:

Peak Of Chic is more successful as a top-coat, I think (and even then only as a holiday specialty thing - I can't see wearing it again any time soon). It looks alright by itself, but awfully textured. I don't like it at all over black.

I didn't swatch Rich Girls & Po-Boys by itself since you can see perfectly well what it looks like anyway - a nice blue creme. I think it's lighter than all those blue cremes I was comparing last summer, but maybe I'll do a comparison at some point to check.