OPI Polka.com black jelly sandwich

I recently scored Camouflage Colour Black in a Lust Have It! sample box - at first I was disappointed, since it's just a plain black, but then I swatched it and discovered that it was extremely sheer. Hurray! Jelly sandwich!

I started with a couple of layers of Black, then dabbed OPI Polka.com, a pink/blue/purple glitter (see my original swatches of it here), and finished with an extra layer of Black.

The result reminded me of some of the indies in jelly bases floating around - I'm in love! It's made me want to collect jellies in all the colours (so 2012, I know).

Sephora by OPI Happy Earth Day to Me

Sephora by OPI Happy Earth Day to Me

A truly swampy yet kind of shimmeringly alive greenish-brown with gold highlights. Above is three coats; it could've used a fourth.

And because I just wanted to try the SOPI Blasted Glitters already... another ugly mani:

Sephora by OPI Blasted Turquoise Glitter over Happy Earth Day to Me 

No, I did not wear this long. The SOPI Blasted series of glitters were just weird. I can see a slight crackle effect but mostly, it looks like unevenly distributed glitter.

Shopping My Stash - Blue Creme Layering

It's been a while coming, but I finally got organised and painted my collection onto swatch sticks! This made my February No-Buy a bit easier as I fell in love with my cremes again. Here's a gorgeous blue creme I rediscovered - Face of Australia Ocean Villa. It usually has a matte finish, but I layered Nubar Black Polka Dot on top. But then I got stuck with the accent nail.

First I tried Candeo Smores (kindly gifted by Jen of The Nail Polish Project at the Sydney Aussie Nails meetup) over ulta3 Earl Grey, but that didn't look quite right:

Then I tried China Glaze Some Like It Haute over China Glaze Stone Cold. Much better!

Shopping my own stash has been the best strategy for my No Buy so far - with over 400 bottles in my collection, there are a lot of underappreciated polishes in there!

Christmas manicures (with added whinging)

I've been super busy (writing thesis, other blog stuff) that I've been bad and left poor minnie to do all the work here! So I'm going to try to make up for it by swamping you all with Christmas cheer.

Here are some ridiculous manicures I did, in between being a general Grinch and trying to get thesis writing supplies (instant coffee and chocolate) and beauty essentials (nail polish, fifty shades of blush) at the shopping centre where everyone walks so. damn. slowly.

Four Santas to ring bells in your face and smoke outside while in their costumes, making your brain explode as you try to explain to your toddler why Santa wants cancer!

One overpriced Christmas tree that smells better burning than sitting in your house, shedding endlessly!

Showers of glitter that stay in your hair, then one night when you think it's all gone you wake up with a flake in your eye!

Woohoo Christmas! (In the background is an NMR spectrum, which is the kind of thing I've been staring at all day - you know how on CSI TV shows they shove a sample into a machine and it tells them what chemicals are in it? Doesn't work like that in real life! Instead you have poor people like me staring at graphs, trying to work out whether the number of neighbouring hydrogens makes sense, and eyeballing integrals to try to work out if it's close enough to a round number to get away with. Yeah, science!)

*grinches away*

Loki's Lacquer 3 Wise Men

Today I've got swatches of my favourite polish from the Christmas Collection by Loki's Lacquer (swatched in full here) - 3 Wise Men. It's absolutely gorgeous: gold, brown and blue/green/purple shifting translucent glitter in a clear base. This is over Darling Fifty, a taupe creme that's both edgy and subdued, and actually works with my skin tone:

And (of course) with matte topcoat:

I'm in love! The little iridescent glitters remind me of crystals as seen under a polarising microscope, and add a certain something to the otherwise neutral glitter.

Loki's Lacquer is available here, and there's an option for international shipping.

Ozotic Beam

Ozotic have recently released the 900 line, a series of translucent polishes for layering. This is 906 Beam - it's a mix of different coloured iridescent particles in a clear base, and is meant to be layered over a base. One coat over black:

Like the Sugar series, one of which I swatched last week, it's very dense and only needs one coat.

I'm writing up my thesis at the moment - going through mountains of characterisation for my organic molecules. For those of you lucky to be uninitiated in the pain that is characterisation, it's what you have to do to prove that you synthesised the molecule you say you've synthesised - it mainly involves a metric buttload of numbers with decimal points, and I now have 100 pages of it. Not looking forward to proofreading 100 pages of numbers! The things I do for science...

Gloss 'n Sparkle Above Deck and Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure

Like a lot of other people, I tend to gravitate towards the same colours - for polish, it's purple, red and green. But for some reason, the real stunners in my collection that I often unexpectedly fall in love with are blues. Gloss 'n Sparkle Above Deck is the latest blue I've been blown away by. Two coats:

One of the non-glitterbombs in the Gloss 'n Sparkle range, this is a rich teal shimmer with tiny blue and holo glitter. On the nail, the holo glitter is largely tinted teal by the base, but the occasional holo sparkle comes out in the light. It's perfectly named - it really reminds me of the sparkling surface of a Mediterranean sea as seen from the deck of a boat. If you can't tell, I'm just a bit in love with this shade!

I had to fiddle around with it, of course, so I layered my new (after a long period of lemming) Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure, a red/green multichrome flakie on top:

I quite liked this combo - it looked like land masses in the ocean!

I have good news for non-Aussie Gloss 'n Sparkle fans - Shoppe Eclecticco now stock them, and ship worldwide! So you overseas girls can finally get your hands on some of these beauties :)

What unexpected polishes have you fallen in love with?

Inglot 913... now transformed into an ugly manicure.

Blue Cross Meteorites Shooting Star

I love bar glitter. Or rather, I love the LOOK of bar glitter in the bottle. I mean, look at how festive it is! (Also, I didn't know Blue Cross sold polishes at some point. Yay eBay.) But then I try to apply it and...

Shooting Star over Inglot 913

Talk about a hot mess, eh? I could have picked a better polish to put under Shooting Star. Three coats of unevenly dispersed gold bar glitter. Some people can really pull off this type of glitter. And they have some magical way of applying it beautifully. I am not one of those people. 

Summer neon gradient with black and white glitter

One of my long-time lemmings was Lynnderella's Connect the Dots, so I was overjoyed when I found out that one of the many black and white glitters that followed in its wake was available in Australia. I layered Peita's Polish Zebration over a gradient of Darling Teenage Dream (pink) and Endota Spa Ephraim Island (soon to be renamed Paradise Point - neon yellow/green):

Teenage Dream is the first neon I've tried which is properly neon without white creme underwear - it only takes 2-3 coats as well, which is very impressive. Ephraim Island/Paradise Point is an interesting polish - one coat over white is neon yellow (the most neon yellow I've ever seen by the way - in person it sears your retinas!), but 4 coats on the bare nail is definitely neon green.

I'm so glad a similar polish has successfully killed off my HTF lemming - HTF lemmings are the worst!

CND Sapphire Sparkle over OPI Y'All Come Back Now Ya Hear?

CND Sapphire Sparkle over OPI Y'All Come Back Now Ya Hear? 

I'm super lazy of late so I generally apply a creme, jelly or a very, very subtle shimmer, wear that for a few days, and then layer something on top of that and wear it for a few more days. CND Sapphire Sparkle was maybe not the most intuitive choice to put over Y'All Come Back but I rather liked the combination. It didn't really show off how pretty Sapphire Sparkle could be (as when put over a dark polish) but it gave the orange a slightly unusual look. This was applied on day four of Y'All Come Back and I think I wore this particular combination without chippage for another few days after that.

THEME WEEK - My Favorite Glitter

Revlon StreetWear FX Flash (Green Version) over a dark creme (I forget which)

Whoa, my nails were long. I've gotten a couple of requests in the last few months about where I get all my StreetWear polishes. It was a place in Midtown Manhattan but the last three times I checked, there were no SWs to be found. Or anything else of much worth. :(

Either way, this is one of my absolute favorite glitters: I'm not a fan of it needing a dark base but otherwise, I just love the green-gold duochrome-y glitteriness of it.

I'm maid of honor in my best friend's wedding today. I don't like Zoya because it doesn't last on me, but I accompanied her to an organic salon (in another state!) for her to get her hair done and all they had was Zoya. So I got Zoya Tru on tips and Zoya Barbie on toes. Both looked prettier in the bottle. If I have time today, I'll post a photo from my iPhone of my tips and toes (in really sparkly silver shoes!!).

A lot of big "meh": some LA Girl Glitter Addict swatches

I really love LA Girl polishes. They are generally inexpensive (especially if you catch a good Cherry Culture deal) and awesome (even if a little slow to dry sometimes). So I was ecstatic when I heard about the Glitter Addict collection. Ordered the whole thing on impulse before I saw many swatches. And I'm kind of annoyed at myself because now I just have a lot of new layering polishes (and I don't really like layering polishes). Without exception, all the glitters are suspended in clear jelly.

LA Girl Synergy over Orly Frisky

Gold hex glitter shows up as kind of holo in the bottle but is very sparse. And the holo doesn't really seem to show up unless in direct sunlight. Two layers. 

LA Girl Celebrate

Celebrate... what exactly? Sparse multicolored small and large hex glitter. The above is... I think it was five layers? At least it was interesting to look at and might be cute over a black or white polish. 

 Closeup of Celebrate

 LA Girl Euphoria over Sally Hansen Lavender Cloud

Lavender glitter with lavender and holo hex glitter. This one looked fabulous in the bottle: the combination of lavender and holo was stunning. On the nail, not so much. Four layers. 

LA Girl Flamboyant over Orly Fresh

I actually liked this one a lot. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because it looked like an ordinary orange glitter/orange hex glitter combo in the bottle and maybe because by this time, I had my expectations dialed down to zero. So when this came out looking as expected (two sizes of sparse orange glitter), I wasn't disappointed. Four layers.

How to drive a manicure over the edge: Orly Rock Solid... with LA Girl Inspire... with Color Club Smash Hit

This is what happens you're lazy and easily bored like I am. Let this be a lesson to you all. 

Orly Rock Solid

Part of Orly's Mineral FX collection, it looked so promising in the bottle. Black with strong silver shimmer and a heck ton of holo glitter. HECK TON. Yet it was kind of flat (and somewhat gritty) on the nail. The black shimmer ate the glitter almost entirely. Three coats. 

Closeup of Rock Solid

LA Girl Glitter Addict Inspire over Orly Rock Solid 

But I really wanted a glitter manicure that day, yet was loath to take off Rock Solid. So I decided to try out one of the LA Girl Glitter Addicts on top of it. (Btw, that collection was the most disappointing LA Girl collections ever but we can discuss that another time.) There seem to be two types of pink glitter: magenta and this old-fashioned rosy pink that seems to be the go-to pink glitter. Inspire was the latter and, as is usual for this type of pink glitter, it doesn't look so hot. I figured the polish wasn't going to be opaque so I might as well have a bit of contrast going by putting it over a dark polish, right? (Wrong.) Turns out, Inspire was even more sparse than anticipated: the above is three coats and the Rock Solid is still very visible. 

Closeup of the mess

Color Club Smash Hit over LA Girl Glitter Addict Inspire and Orly Rock Solid 

Having NOT learned my lesson -- and now having the double disincentive of removing a dark polish AND glitter -- I decided that I might as well layer on a polish that was sent to me by Color Club: Smash Hit, a black crackle. And I actually liked it better with the crackle than without. Still and all, it was pretty damn fug. 

Closeup of the coup de grace...

At this point, I had eleven layers of polish on my nails (bc, 3 Rock Solid, tc, 3 Inspire, tc, Smash Hit, tc). Well, this was just ridiculous. And kind of very unattractive. After I took this photo, I waited for the entire thing to dry and then peeled off the monstrosity off of all ten nails. (I know, I know. Gross. When you have that much polish on, once dry, it really just pops off with a little nudge.) Would it have been easier to just remove Rock Solid when I realized that I didn't like it? Probably. 

The reason I have so much polish: LA Girl Glitter Addict Explosion and OPI Crown Me Already comparison

I wonder sometimes why I have so much nail polish. And when I go to de-dupe my collection, it is very obvious to me why I do. 

LA Girl Glitter Addict Explosion & OPI Crown Me Already

Looks pretty similar, right? Silver hex glitter and silver glitter suspended in clear polish. I figured I could get rid of one of them (if not both). 

LA Girl Glitter Addict Explosion (index/ring) & OPI Crown Me Already (middle/pinky)

over Orly Rock Solid

When I applied them side by side... sigh. I see them as very different creatures. Not only do they contain different sizes of small glitter and hex glitter (Explosion has bigger glitter than Crown Me Already), they apply very different as well.

Closeup of Explosion

Explosion is pretty clumsy and clumpy. It doesn't go on that smoothly (because it has bigger glitter) and it takes a bit of finagling to get even vaguely consistent coverage. The above shows three coats. If I wanted it to be opaque, I could've added one more coat... and spent an extra ten minutes finagling.

Closeup of Crown Me Already

In comparison, Crown Me Already goes on very smoothly (due to the smaller, more easily manipulated glitter) but is much more suited to being a layering polish. The above shows four coats. If I wanted it to be totally opaque, six coats would probably do it.

Another really striking difference is that when I went to remove the polish shortly after taking these photos, Explosion was still entirely wet and came off easily. Crown Me Already actually needed a little muscle to be removed.

My final verdict? They are different. I like them both. Therefore, I need both. ...and this is how one accumulates too much nail polish.