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.

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!

Spring pastel tape manicure with gold accents

This is a mani I did, inspired by the range of polishes Darling sent me. Darling are a new-ish Australian nail polish company, and their formulas are very impressive! They do that self-levelling thing that good polishes do, hiding fudgy application. As well as a range of gorgeous lacquers, Darling also carry mixtures of beads for caviar manicure (the Rock Candy range), and they've got some super exciting things in the works (super cute nail decals which I got to try out at the Beauty Bloggers Utopia conference, and something metallic for Christmas which I'm not going to leak too much about!

This is actually the NOTD I wore to the first day of BBU, which was a blast - chocolate for breakfast, learning exactly what Bioderma's "micellar water" is, hauling at IMATS, manicures in the media breakout room, going backstage at Legally Blonde The Musical with the founder of awesome sample subscription box Lust Have It! And of course, one of the greatest things in a beauty blogger's life has to be when other beauty bloggers gasp over your nails in real life! No complaints here :)

The polishes used are Darling's The First Corsage (lilac), Butter Wouldn't Melt (yellow), Hopelessly Devoted (pink) and likeomg (gold). And here's what the cremes looked like before the tape bonanza:

 

I think the gold really helps tie the skittles together!