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!

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!

Australia Day nail art, and some reflections on racism in Australia

January 26th was Australia Day, also known as the day where Australians like me sometimes get told to go back to where we came from by drunken, jumbo flag-waving hooligans (ironically, we're often doing just that - catching the train home). Given some of the unpleasant demonstrations of patriotism-cum-xenophobia that've occurred in the past (not to mention the lovely verbal abuse I get to receive on public transport approximately once a month), I'm slightly wary of leaving the house on any holiday tinged with patriotism. But I had a dance class in the CBD, and if I stayed home, that's just letting the terrorists win, right?

I went to an incredibly homogenous primary school (I was one of two East Asians in my grade. My high school, where 75% of the grade were East Asian or Indian, may have overcompensated for that). We were fed symbols of Australiana which we were (rightly) told to be proud of - our beautiful landscape, our weirdass flora and fauna, our sporting prowess. We had special days where we wore the national colours, green and gold, to school. I used to wonder why my parents were so bewildered by my enthusiasm for drawing gold kangaroos everywhere (by my infallible kid-logic, a country with kangaroos had to be the best country in the world). Given my trepidation whenever drunken white males enter my train carriage (augmented by the presence of flags, football scarves or Southern Cross tattoos), I can't imagine the alienation and paranoia my parents felt 20 years ago, as recent immigrants with thick Chinese accents, arriving in a country where, 8 years later, the unashamedly anti-immigration One Nation party would attract almost 10% of the nation's vote. Despite the greater visibility of migrants (no doubt helped by the work of Asian-Australian celebrity chefs), migration (more specifically, intake of refugees) vs. the dominance of Anglo-Australian culture is as big a political issue as ever.

Most Australians aren't overtly racist (cue "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist"). Most groups of drunken white males who get on my train could never imagine themselves hurling abuse at an immigrant. But often, sensible, intelligent, upstanding white people mistakenly assume that other white people also share these same views. My lovely, pasty white boyfriend shook with anger for hours after a girl on the bus repeatedly told me they "didn't like [my] kind" around there. To him it was unthinkable, lunatic behaviour that demanded violent retaliation. I just mentally crossed off October.

So how was my Australia Day? It was fantastic! I didn't witness a single racist incident, and I got to delightedly remind the boyfriend mutiple times that he's descended from illegal boat people, while I am a perfectly legal Cathay Pacific person (he's a tad embarassed about his ancestors, not because they were criminals, but because they were "dumb enough to get caught". Also their cuisine). Not to mention that Lacquerheads of Oz, the blog that a group of Australian nail bloggers/indie sellers/nail techs started for storing ALL THE POLISH KNOWLEDGE, launched!

To end possibly my most humanities-tainted post of all time, here's a shot of my nails (Pretty Serious VT100 with ulta3 glitter and stamping, by the way) with a work by possibly my favourite Australian, Nick Cave (fittingly enough, he's emigrated).

OPI...Eurso Euro chevron nail art

After I swatched a few polishes from OPI's Euro Centrale collection on my blog here last week, my friend asked to borrow OPI... Eurso Euro. So to make sure I was properly sick of it before sending it off on its little journey (sob) I thought I'd nail art it up a bit, with last year's tangerine (ulta3 Tangerine Tango).

I taped the white chevrons, but then I couldn't be bothered waiting for the white to dry to tape off the orange, so I freehanded it and it looked pretty good - I think my freehand skills have definitely improved!

And then before I took it off, I turned it into ALIEN COWS. Because clearly thesis writing has driven me insane.

I am totally in love with OPI...Eurso Euro - it's such a rich blue! Definitely a keeper.

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!

Neon stripe tape mani

I'm a big fan of tape manis - they're such a great way to get perfect crisp geometric designs! I did a watercolour mani with neon colours a while ago (which comes with a rare tutorial), and before I took it off I created a striped pattern with striping tape, using a black creme (aka neon's BFF that keeps it from turning Barbie):

Excuse the cuticle flooding - annoyingly the new ulta3 brushes are stiff and unwieldy, and I did this before I realised that the old brush lids were compatible with the new bottles!

[Note: I am no longer involved in So Nailicious.]

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...

Gold and purple all-over-the-place nail art explosion

Alanna of Pretty Purple Polish recently celebrated her first blogiversary by holding a nail art competition with a purple theme. She was one of my first followers and co-created Artsy Wednesday with me, and has really nice swatches and is generally all-round lovely.

For my entry, I decided to showcase a bunch of my favourite purples. I have a lot of purple polishes! I also had some big iridescent hex glitters, so I decided to explore a number of different nail art techniques on my nails. I only had 3 nail designs in total, because... I'm lazy :(

Thumb and ring finger: China Glaze LOL (Alanna grabbed this HTF for me from the mythical Bankstown nail supply shop - told you she's lovely! :D), glitter gradient with Essence Make It Golden, applied with a Q-tip

Index and pinky: These nails were the first I came up with. I wanted it to look like mermaid scales. The base is ulta3 Berry sponged over Rimmel Lively Lilac, then stamped with Mash-39 in ulta3 Gold Rush Fever and mattified with Rimmel Lycra Pro Mattifying Topcoat. I then stuck on hexes with clear polish.

Middle finger: one of my favourite but time-consuming and hard-to-get-right techniques - drag/needle marbling. I painted the entire nail with a thick coat of ulta3 Orchid, spotted some Gold Rush Fever on top, then dragged loops in the polish with the needle of a compass. Finished with Rimmel Mattifying.

For everyday wearing this felt over-the-top, but I think each of these would make good manis on their own, and I'll probably revisit them. What do you think?

ulta3 Spring Shower (slightly frankened)

Good pastels are difficult for me to find - for some reason they look wrong on me if they're not slightly dirty/grey. Something to do with undertones, maybe. Luckily there've been lots of grungey pastels coming out (OPI Pirates collection comes to mind), but I tend to franken most of my cremes. This is one of my favourite pastel shades to wear - NYC Blue Bird (dupe of ulta3 Spring Shower) with a few drops of black. Somehow, those few drops of black make all the difference - the normal polish looks weird on me, a bit too bright.

This is 2 coats without topcoat - see how nice the application is? ulta3 pastels have such great formulas, almost like OPI, at a tenth of the RRP. Love love love.

Annoyingly, it's suddenly become HTF - ulta3 are in the process of revamping their everything, and things are Not Quite Normal. I've been on bin dives recently mere days apart (bin diving for ulta3s is an Aussie polish enthusiast rite of passage, since ulta3s come tossed in massive tubs), and come up with completely different polishes. Happily though, they're now stocked in Coles and Woolworths, the two major grocery chains in Australia, making no-buys nigh on impossible... but a $2 polish really doesn't inspire much guilt!

Ulta 3 Mojito

This one comes courtesy of Labmuffin's giant parcel of joy. We didn't really give too many hints about what we liked, which as it turns out was a good thing, because she still managed to put together a package of exactly the kind of goodies I would buy for myself. Top of the list was this one - a really bright green with a slighty blue undertone, like Mint Candy Apple's more kick-ass sibling. Three coats, and it took some building up, but it was totally worth it.

Another toned-back glitter for me! Revlon Scandalous :)

I like relatively subdued glitters, such as China Glaze Some Like It Haute, and I've found another! Lise suggested Revlon Scandalous (Lippmann Bad Romance dupe) as a toned down glitter - it's magenta glitter in a black jelly base, which really gets rid of the super shine. To my eyes, it's as blingy as a flakie topcoat, i.e. not eyecatching enough for people to comment during a serious meeting. The black base really tones it down too. This is 2 coats over a coat of black. Of course, I couldn't leave it alone, so a few days later, I did some diagonal taping and painted ulta3 Twilight Fever, a Paradoxal dupe (purple shimmer in purple-brown creme) on half:

I really like Scandalous, much more than I expected to! One of my top 5 glitters so far, for sure.

ulta3 Gold Rush Fever

Another ulta3! I really love them. This is Gold Rush Fever, a gorgeous gold slightly frosty shimmer - 2 coats, not too streaky. I don't really like the look of this on my nails by itself, but it's a great base for layering and taping. It's also good for stamping. It's one of my favourites for nail art - I much prefer gold to silver! [Insert warm-toned-skin-can't-wear-cool-colours-or-I-look-like-I'm-going-to-keel-over rant here]

THEME WEEK - My Favourite Neon

Ok, so I have a massive thing for corals. Yeah. Bright pink, fluoro barbie hues. It's a bit embarrassing, but hey, it's not the worst skeleton to have in one's closet, right?

I've somehow collected a palette of neon corals, so instead of just swatching one coral creme, I'd swatch a bunch which had "coral" in the name and try to justify why I need (yes, NEED) them all.

L to R:

Kim Nail Polish Miami Coral - This was the first of my corals, so it was obviously justified. I bought it from Cotton On while waiting in the queue, so it was a snap decision. It's a bit too pink though, and dries really slow, and smells like industrial paint.

ulta3 Sunset Coral - I bought this as a less stinky, quicker drying alternative, so obviously justified. This applies beautifully and was $2.50.

Hello Kitty Kawai Coral - I won this in a giveaway so it was basically forced upon me. You can't refuse free nail polish, especially in your favourite summer shade and from a brand you haven't tried yet. Justified.

Max Factor Diva Coral - Bought this in a sale for $0.50. Name brand polish for under $1 is always justified. Sample-sized bottles are always justified. DOUBLE WHAMMY JUSTIFIED.

Forefinger to pinky: Miami, Sunset, Kawai, Diva. For some reason, in the sun they actually all look different, and I think this could almost pass as an ombre mani. But in the shade, it's just a bit embarrassing how similar they all are.

OK, if you held a gun to my head and made me choose one, I'd probably go for ulta3 Sunset Coral (middle finger) - it's neon enough to be strictly summery, but orange enough to not be completely girly. But since that's never going to happen, they're ALL MINE. FOREVER. Yes. Ha. I win! The, uh, coral-collecting race. Yes. :\

THEME WEEK - My Favourite Holo

I don't have enough sun to swatch a holo properly - since I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, I'm sitting here shivering in my ugg boots with a mug of hot tea! So this is an old swatch of China Glaze TMI, a salmon-pink holo polish from the OMG collection. I don't know if it's my FAVOURITE holo - holo is holo is holo is awesome! Other ones I love are DV8, LOL and Nubar Reclaim... plus I have a DIY spectraflair topcoat, so argh. How is one supposed to pick a favourite??

I guess this is the dilemma that mothers supposedly have when they can't pick a favourite child. I used to think it was weird when people said they couldn't pick their favourite fur baby - I mean, it's an animal, not a child - but now here I am with my holo kids. Sigh.

Mmm rainbows! Here it is with some stamping - ulta3 Orchid with a BM plate.

THEME WEEK - My Favourite Red

I love red! It's probably the colour that looks best on me in clothing, so it was hard to pick just one red, but I managed.

This is ulta3 English Rose. ulta3 is a great little Australian drugstore brand of polishes that have (generally) excellent formulas and are incredibly cheap - $2 a polish.

It's a lovely red jelly full of gold microglitter. 3 smooth coats, delicious! Here it is in the sun:

ulta3 Molten Metallics - Cocoa

A new-ish ulta3 from the Molten Metallics range today - there are so many disappointed reviews coming out about this collection. Basically, they're streaky, probably due to a combination of being too frosty and having tricky stiff brushes.

This is one I really like though: Cocoa. It's a shimmery dark brown which luckily isn't too streaky. This is 2 coats. I added some dots of Jade (green frosty shimmer) in different sizes with my new dotting tools (squee - yeah, the size gradient was just so I could use them all). I'm still trying to get the hang of making the dots perfectly round though... early days.

China Glaze Midtown Magic + stamping + glitter

Midtown Magic is a gorgeous brown shimmer with green-toned gold shimmer throughout. I'm a big fan - smooth and beautiful in 2-3 coats.

Of course I couldn't leave it alone... so I stamped over it with a pattern from BM-206 in ulta3 Gold Rush Fever (PRC version - great for stamping!), then added a glitter topcoat of ulta3 Gold Digger. I am such a ridiculous fan of ulta3 - it's impossible to feel guilty over buying a $2 bottle of nail polish from the grocery store. Utterly impossible.

Introduction, with stripey nails!

Hi Polish or Perish readers! I'm Lab Muffin, and I'm stoked join the PoP ladies. Some of you might know me already from my beauty science blog, Lab Muffin.

A few things about me:

- I'm currently doing a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry - this means I wear a sexy labcoat covered in dirty chemicals, and desperately avoid getting acetone on my hands. I'm working on ways of making new drugs... hopefully it'll be useful in the future!

- Things I love: most food, anagrams, efficient public transport, holo, TV comedies, bunnies, my boyfriend (also a synthetic organic chemist), candles, green glitter, Stephen Fry, dancing, tea, cheesy kung fu movies, octopuses, cryptic crosswords, stationery, bunnies, cheap IKEA stuff, nerdy webcomics, HTC phones, lists, bunnehs.

- Things I hate: inconsistently formatted references, tipwear, mouth ulcers, science-illiterate politicians, distracting Powerpoint backgrounds, trying to buy just one thing from IKEA, frosts, crappy tweezers, liquorice, hangnails, losing my lab goggles, soggy bread.

- I'm from Australia, so I'll be using some different polishes from the other ladies. I love nail art... I can't wear a polish on its own without stamping or freehanding over it within a day.

I love bold patterns, so for my inaugural mani, I decided on some freehand stripes!

Colours used: ulta3 Sizzling Red (red), NOPI City-Pretty Rose (pink), Sally Hansen Sun Kissed (orange), ulta3 Honolulu (yellow).

I'm really happy with this colour combination - it's so cheerful and summery! It's probably going to be my final summer mani since we're halfway through autumn here, but the sun seems to be holding out, so who knows!