Lab Muffin's Top 13 Polishes of 2013 Part 1: Mainstream and Boutique Brands

2013 was a big year of swatching for me, and it was the year where I think Australian indie polishes really blossomed. It was very difficult to pick just 13 polishes that I loved, but I certainly tried! I limited myself to one polish per brand only, and to polishes that I discovered in 2013 (though they weren't necessarily released last year). Here we go, with the mainstream and boutique (i.e. small company but not hand-mixed) picks...

First, I obviously have to mention my collaboration shade, piCture pOlish Ultra Violence. The literary amongst you will know that the name is inspired by Anthony Burgess's book A Clockwork Orange. I love the holo iridescent glitter against the rich purple! I've included a bottle of Ultra Violence in my 2nd blogiversary giveaway here.

I blogged about the stunningly pretty Pretty Serious BSOD here earlier. What happened next was that while wearing it, my laptop did actually have a heart-stopping BSOD moment, in the middle of thesis-writing! Luckily I didn't lose anything, but Kaz was too sweet, and in her usual above-and-beyond customer service style, she sent me a few polishes to dull the pain.

OPI Keeping Suzi At Bay is a gorgeous blue creme that is both interesting and elegant. It may be my favourite creme shade ever. I think dark blue is actually quite work safe, but definitely not boring.

ulta3 Triple Threat was a big surprise for me. This is a complex holo glitter jelly that's indie-worthy, but comes at the ridiculously budget-friendly price of $2.

Orly Digital Glitter is one of my top 5 Orly polishes, ever. I usually think of Orly as a brand which does salon-friendly classic polishes well, but whenever they come out with something a bit different it's usually ridiculously cool (Fowl Play! Space Cadet!). I love the unlikely brown/purple/red combination - it's a bit steampunk in my opinion, and makes me think of Neal Stephenson novels. To top it off, the purple shimmer is duochrome.

I will be back soon with some of my indie picks of 2013 - hold onto your wallets!

piCture pOlish Blog Fest 2013

By now you've probably seen all the nail art tutorials flooding the internet for piCture pOlish's annual Blog Fest, which this year included over 130 bloggers, including me! Here's the mani I did, using the shades Hope, Dorothy and Ruby Blou:

Hop on over to my blog to see the full tutorial - it's pretty basic nail art, but I loved this mani!

piCture pOlish Paradise

(In case you haven't already seen via Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, I submitted my thesis last week, hurray! :D Now I get to play the waiting-for-examiners game...also the looking-for-a-job game. Oo-er.)

Today I have swatches of one of piCture pOlish's latest blogger collaboration shades, Paradise by Liquid Jelly. In the bottle it's a gorgeous shimmery mix of purple and teal with orange tinged holo glitter in a blue jelly base.

On my nails I find it a little too shiny - as you might know, I'm not too keen on blingy metallic glitters or foils, and this is squarely in both categories. But I know I'm in the minority!

These swatches are one thick coat over W7 Envy, a teal shimmer. Coverage is excellent, and the base colour barely shows through at all, although being jelly based, you'll need more coats to deal with visible nail line.

 

I love seeing blogger collaboration shades - they're always something a little different! What do you think of them?

piCture pOlish Splash

piCture pOlish have recently released a range of glitters. Today I've got Splash, a lovely bright blue mix of hex glitter in two sizes:

It's a very rich, bright blue - definitely lives up to its name! I used ulta3 Calypso Holiday underneath, and it makes me look forward to summer days here - sadly, I'll have a thesis to finish!

piCture pOlish Blog Fest 2012!

It's time for piCture pOlish Blog Fest 2012, wahoo! (Some of you might have already seen these swatches before, sorry.)

What this is (as you may have gathered, from the increasing flood of piCture pOlish swatches on the blogosphere) is an event organised by Aussie brand piCture pOlish where a whole bunch of bloggers (80+!) inundate your feeds with the exciting new shades that have just been launched.

I have two pretties for you today. I was originally going to post just a couple of pictures of each, but the ladies at piCture pOlish sent me such multifaceted shades that it wouldn't do them justice. So apologies for the picspam!

First up is Mirage, an iridescent milky blue/purple duochrome shimmer over grey - you all know I'm a duo/multichrome addict! Mirage comes from the new "Collaboration Collection", which features polishes created in conjunction with various bloggers. Sara Hassan is the lady responsible for this beauty! It was inspired by a bird with beautiful plumage.

This is 2 coats swatched over a black creme. In the shade it's a very pretty soft duochrome, with light blue with a teal tinge in the middle and pale purple lurking at the edges:

At an angle, it goes a soft lavender purple, before turning into a plum purple at an extreme angle. I don't have pictures of the plum flash, because at that angle my nail was barely a sliver, but here's the lavender:

Picture Polish: Mellow Yellow and Malteaser

Yay! My first two Picture Polish NOTDs. One is fabulous... and the other one, not so much. Both were sent to me for review by Picture Polish.

First the fabulous one:

Picture Polish Mellow Yellow

I love pastel yellow cremes. This is a perfect example of one and it went on so very well! If I had done thicker coats, I could've made do with two coats but I did three thin coats for this one and it was perfectly opaque and smooth (and utterly non-streaky) by the third coat. I wore this for a couple of days (using Gelous/Diamont) and there were no chips or shrinkage, and minimal tipwear. Decent dry time too with a quick dry topcoat.

Picture Polish Malteaser

This dark taupe creme was a nightmare. It applied a little goopily and was more sheer than necessary for the darkness of the color. It took three coats to get opaque... and it wasn't a fun three coats to apply. But the worst part was... it bubbled BADLY. I don't know if it reacted negatively with my basecoat or what but I had a ton of little bubbles on my nails. It drove me so crazy, I couldn't stand it for more than half a day.

It's so odd to me when a pastel yellow from a company applies beautifully... but a dark taupe doesn't. Oh well. Ten more Picture Polishes to go... :)

Bottle pictures from a new (to me) brand: Picture Polish!

Some informative soul on Nail Board posted about a website that sold Ozotics nail polishes to those living in Not-Australia. And when I dashed to go take a look see, I noticed that this website also had their own varied and interesting line of nail polish, called Picture Polish.

I LOVE finding new brands I've never heard of and so did not hesitate to contact the owners to find out more about their line. Turns out, you can buy their polishes as is or you can do a bit of a private label thing and slap your own label on their polish to sell. They generously sent me a dozen Picture Polishes to review. I haven't had time to swatch most of them (yet!) but I just LOVE the labels on them and wanted to show them off:

Camo green, how I adore you. The photo seems to show it off as more grey but it's actually a bit more green IRL. Is the "u" is in the wrong place there?

I'm strangely attracted to Heavy Metal. I didn't think I would be but it looks like it's gonna be a great glitter polish that won't need too many coats.

Yeah, I'm all over these two. Seriously. My two favorite colors of polishes, yellow and mint cremes!

It took me a few days to figure out what PMT stood for. I'm so used to it being "syndrome"; I've never heard of someone complaining about PMT.

OMG, greige!

These retail for AUS $9.95 (which is about US $9.90). I hope to have swatches up for you real soon!!

September 25th (30m cardio), September 26th (30m cardio + strength).