layers abound! purple jelly sandwich

I always love the look of jelly sandwiches :) there's a pretty depth to them that you can't get with regular polish!

This pretty layering combo is:

Sally Hansen: Purple Pizzazz (2 coats) +
OPI: Servin’ Up Sparkle +
China Glaze Snow Globe +
Sally Hansen: Purple Pizzazz (1 coat) +
Clarins 230

I took all these pictures and then realized I was just capturing the beauty of Clarins 230, but you can see the layers beneath, too :)

Sally Hansen Problem Child: Happy Mother's Day!

Look, I'm alive... and have polished nails. Who knew? (I've barely known. I think I've changed my nails three times in the last three weeks.)

In honor of Mother's Day...

Sally Hansen Problem Child

I'm not the biggest fan of the SH Complete line: the brush can be a bit too thick and the pastels never go over well (too streaky). But I love their dark shimmery colors. They apply so perfectly. If you apply thick coats, you can get away with one coat but this mani was two coats. It looks like a generic dark purple shimmer until you look really closely: it's actually chock full of blue and pink microglitter (or maybe just very bright shimmer) with coppery flakies! I wouldn't have thought it'd make a good combination, but it was lovely. Also, this manicure dried completely in less than ten minutes... and then lasted over eight days without chipping.

Close-up of Problem Child

But wearing a mani for eight days gets boring. So then I decided to layer Clarins 230 over it to see if any magic would occur. (Eh, it did not. Hence, no picture.) But I did have a bottle of China Glaze Broken Hearted crackle polish near me so on it went:

China Glaze Broken Hearted over Sally Hansen Problem Child (and Clarins 230)

If you click for a closeup, the cracks in the polish look a bit like sparkly lava. Sort of.

Well, my mother is finally coming back to the States from Taipei tomorrow (now that ALL the funerary ceremonies are done... you know... a month after my grandfather's passing) so I have no one to call for mother's day. I'm sending her a "Welcome Home" bouquet of flowers though to be delivered on Tuesday.

The past two weeks since I got back from Taipei have been such a blur. I seemed to have gotten a lot of nail polish. (More sparklies from Taipei, picked up a lot of Anna Sui at Duty Free, did the Zoya Exchange, ordered off of an etailer, bought Chanel Mimosa, and splurged on some Diors -- haven't decided whether I want the whole Pirates of the Caribbean collection. Probably not. Just a couple of colors. I REALLY want the Serena Williams Glam Slam France set.) This is just pathological because I don't have time to even really do my nails this quarter.

Hey, I needed something to do while procrastinating from making a poster for a grad school research symposium that I only had two days to prepare for. The "leaving it to last minute" thing was real smart of me.

Now til the end of the quarter is going to be hell.

• TA-wise: one more midterm, five more homework assignments, three more worksheets, three more sections, a couple more pop quizzes, and a final exam. TA hell will be largely over by June 2nd.
• Psychonomics 2011 abstract is due June 1st. My advisor and I hope to submit my newest study, whose results are very promising. I should start writing that today.
• Analyze the results of Exp 2 (currently running) for the June 1st deadline.
• Create and run Exp 3 and have preliminary results for the June 1st deadline.
• Do preliminary corpus analysis for another, completely separate experiment.
• Find an RA for the summer.
• Revise/resubmit a paper on the research I did the first two years of grad school to a journal before their imposed (90 day) July deadline. This is going to involve many hours of recoding and reanalyzing data. Not looking forward to it.

I just want to go back to sleep.

Couldn't bear to take OPI Jasper Jade off... so I put Clarins 230 on top of it

It's like the dance of the rare polishes... Between what I paid for Jasper Jade (~$6) and Clarins 230 (~$50)... this manicure ALMOST made up of two expensively (but not crazily) priced nail polishes.

Clarins 230 over OPI Jasper Jade

'scuse the many pictures! Whenever I take a photo of a polish that's as multichromatic as 230, I always feel the need to include ones that show "just a little more green" or "look, the brownish red instead of the orangeish red!" The green of Jasper Jade really shows through the edges of the nails.

First mani with Clarins 230 (over Orly Total Darkness)

Aaaack. Lightboxes just don't do justice to this polish. Yes, totally overpriced... and yet, totally, utterly, completely worth it.

Clarins 230 over Orly Total Darkness

Orly Total Darkness is an old Orly in one of those 0.75fl oz bottles (they were huge): it's this vampy, plummy, slightly taupe-leaning jelly. Totally hot color. It applied perfectly and looked super duper glossy. (The fumes almost knocked me over though when I opened it. It had probably been more than a decade since that thing was last opened. If ever.)

Anyway, as we've seen with the numerous 230 swatches elsewhere, the most prominent shimmer color that jumps out at you is related to the base you wear it on: in this case, wearing it on a reddish-purple vampy tends to bring out more of its tendencies towards red and orange. Kind of ordinary in these moments but still very twinkly. But then, you catch the green flash, and it's utterly magical.

Trying to coax out the green duochrome glitter. It's not usually this shy (actually, IRL, you see it a lot, especially in low light situations) but it doesn't like the camera!

Ah ha! There's that green!

And now, some obligatory bottle pics:

So pretty. :)

A couple of Clarins swatches

Like most other NBers, my heart yearns for Clarins 230. It really does. I've emailed every online retailer that may have once had it in its inventory and alas, nothing. ...well, one place sent me a 10% off coupon because they couldn't locate it. (So hint: email places, the worst you could get is a 10% off coupon? Most likely no answer, but sometimes they'll try to bribe you...)

Alas. I shall have to make do with what Clarins I have.

Clarins 202, Metallica

Photos do NOT do this polish justice. At all. What makes this polish special is that it's not just any ordinary dark silver: it's silver with red shimmer. Very faint red shimmer, but it's there! This was such a random find -- the best kinds of finds! -- that I picked up right before Filene's Basement closed for those major renovations in Downtown Crossing in Boston (something like $6). Should've picked up more Clarins when I had a chance! Should've looked for 230! Hard!

Clarins 209, Bleu Abysse

Sigh. The perfect blurple creme. Look at it: it's blurple creme perfection!

And because there has been some small-scale explosions on this topic of late, I'd like to say now that 1. the POLISHORPERISH coupon code for OCNailArt has been raised to 30% off and 2. nobody in this blog receives a commission/kickback or even free stuff from this company.