THEME WEEK - My favorite nude!

Misa Whimsical Wish

I'm not one for nudes (kind of like how I'm not one for reds), but I really loved this one. Light, fairly neutral but with some beautiful shimmer. Go figure that my idea of a neutral nude includes shimmer. I have one of the RGB HIPP polishes but haven't found the opportunity to wear that one yet: I'm holding out hopes that it's the MNBB that I've always dreamed of (except not really, because I don't really wear nudes). But I loved this one.

Just moved earlier this week. Moving = urgh. Nails look like crap. :(

Misa Whimsical Wish and Pixie Princess (Wishes, Spring 2011)

I feel like my most recent posts should be labeled "follies of a nail blogger": nails dented with a crochet hook, smudged polish, unshaped nubbins. Man, Misa's never going to send me anything again. Every Wishes collection mani I've posted so far has some major flaw. And totally not on purpose. ...although, I gotta say, that's part of the risk of putting on four coats to try to get rid of VNL. Nails don't dry as fast, even with quick-dry topcoat. (It really doesn't explain the unshaped nubbins. That's just sloppiness on my part.)

Misa Whimsical Wish

I don't know what's gotten into me but I'm so into delicate neutral-like colors lately. I wore this one happily for days. It felt really...refreshing. Subdued yet sparkly. (Like me. ...yeah, right, who am I kidding?) It's a light peachy-ish shade... whose peachiness was more due to the pink and gold shimmer that infuses a strongly creamy ivory base. I actually can't remember if this was four coats or five. I get the sense that the Wishes polishes are meant to be worn sheer but... eh... no. Thanks, but no. Still, it was easy to apply so I didn't mind as much. (The longer dry time however...)

Misa Pixie Princess

This one was less to my liking. And not only because I had just chopped my nails to nubbins and, as always, the first day or two after nubbinization always look kind of rough on me. I liked Whimsical Wish a lot because it gave the sense of pinkish peachiness without being overtly pink and peachy (which kind of clashes with my skin as a rule). This one was pink and peachy with pink and peachy shimmer. So... a lot of pink and peachy. I think this was four coats? (Might've been three? Definitely no less than three.)

I am so lusting after several polishes from the Essie Braziliant collection, one of which kittytokaren posted about yesterday. None of them have ended up on eBay yet (for Buy It Now -- there are some that are being auctioned). eBay's my go-to for Essie polishes of late: if I'm getting a bunch of them, the combined shipping a lot of sellers offer brings the cost down to what I used to pay for Essie from the etailers (about $4-5). I'll pay $8 for an Essie if it's a color that's sold out everywhere else and/or if I'm having a bad day and indulging in retail therapy. Most days though... nah. I got spoiled way back when and $8 sounds steep in comparison.

Misa Genie in This Bottle and Fountain of Youth (Wishes, Spring 2011): a series of unfortunate manicures..

So... the week where I wore these two NOTDs, I was teaching myself how to crochet. And I kept overestimating the speed of my quick-dry topcoat. ...and then I wore the NOTDs for a couple of days anyway because I didn't have the will to change my polish.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Misa Wishes collection (which Misa sent to me to review). I thought I wouldn't be into the delicate, just-on-the-right-side-of-sheer, pale shimmers that populate this collection. But they're surprisingly interesting. Every one of them is made out of a mix of different color shimmers, with one major color that dominates. But the other shimmer colors show up very well, especially in the sun.

These were good TA colors. And by that, I mean, "fun without being loud" because I have to point to a lot of things in statistics.

Misa Fountain of Youth

Celadon green with, I think, brighter teal (?) and gold shimmer intermixed. Super shimmery. Some lights, it appears more green, sometimes a bit more gold, and sometimes even a bit blue. Five coats. Otherwise, there's major VNL. And even with five coats, there's still a hint of VNL. But who cares when it twinkles so prettily? This was actually very bright and noticeable, even though it's a soft color.

Misa Genie in This Bottle

WHY am I even posting these photos? It's embarrassing. Dents everywhere. Horrific. This was one of the more surprising polishes, I think: it's a lilac shimmer that's full of pink and purple shimmer. I was very iffy about this color in the bottle: it's got sort of a pearly grey going on, which seemed to desaturate the lilac. (I think the thought I had when I saw it was, "What a half-assed shade.") But, like Fountain of Youth, it changes depending on the light: sometimes appearing more of a blue-toned pink and other times, more purple. This polish had the odd (and awesome) quality where the contrasting color shimmer seemed to float just imperceptibly above the actual color. I don't know how else to describe it. Five coats. Many dents.

Misa Total Eclipse of the Heart (Spring 2010)

Got this one from Head2ToeBeauty a couple of weeks back. It was sort of a weird experience (the polish, not H2T, who shipped mighty speedily).

Misa Total Eclipse of the Heart

This is from one of their Spring 2010 lines (there are three apparently?). So... yeah... dusty medium purple creme. Except it applied almost jelly-like... which would be "gloopy" but it evened itself out on the nail. I don't know what happened. It looked like I was headed for a terrible application with the second coat sweeping the first off... but then it kinda just settled down evenly. Surprising. Weird. This is not what I was expecting at all since Misa usually have these lovely dense pigmented cremes that apply "like buttah" (as they say on NB).

I also tried out a bunch of the Mardi Gras collection polishes and overall, they were pretty bad. The yellow and green were actually gloopy and pretty sheer... and didn't do the magically settling down trick that this polish did. Very disappointed in Misa. :(

Some Misa Fall 2009 swatches: Can't Nobody Take Me Down and Sorry, Just Can't Help It

Umm, hi. These are practically opaque in one coat. It's incredible. There's still some VNL with one coat but these polishes are remarkably pigmented! For the first time in... well, since I learned that nail polish rarely looks good with one coat, I was tempted to just do a one-coat NOTD with one of these, just for the novelty of it. (I chickened out. I'm so not cool with new things sometimes.)

Misa Can't Nobody Take Me Down

I don't know why polishes that look browner on most people look redder on me. It's like how sweet floral scents turn into green scents with my skin. Anyway, this just looks dark red (with brown tones) to me. I find it sort of a conservative color: nice, acceptable, even pretty but not "OMG, GIMME". Still, I would rather not part with it because... dude, pretty much done with one coat. Too nifty to give up.

Misa Sorry, Just Can't Help It

Ah ha, much better! Love this dark amethyst/purple creme. Not as pigmented as the one above but still probably could've gotten away with one coat (if I was in a rush and... drunk or something).

As usual, Misa polishes are wonderfully easy polishes to work with. They ought to get more love than they do: reasonably priced but the quality is almost always high and they have a nice range of colors and finishes.

I'm starting to realize that I have no concept of what is an "acceptable" color is, by the way. This purple seems very work/school appropriate to me. In fact, most non-neon cremes fall into that category in my colorful little mind. Am I totally off?

In the meanwhile, I am soooooo not looking forward to my talk in a lab meeting tomorrow. I had hoped to have beautiful new results but I came up with an even bigger null dud than I started out with. This week, I spent about ten hours hunched over Excel, reformatting, messing up and un-reformatting and re-re-formatting my raw data so that SPSS could spend half a second running an ANOVA that spat out the saddest p-value on earth: 0.985. The max p-value is 1.0 and in psychology, people don't take notice of any results above 0.05. (There's obviously more to behavioral stats than just the p-value but let's not lie and say that that isn't the first thing people look at!) I mean, I couldn't even get a face-saving p-value of 0.10 (or even 0.40) which could indicate to blithe optimists that maybe, just maybe, I had tapped into some sort of "trend". 0.985 is just... embarrassingly non-significant. I'm beginning to wonder if I made some error in my data reformatting, which is throwing my numbers all out of whack. But probably not: there was a flaw in the experimental design somewhere. :(

The last throes of summer: some old yellow swatches I don't think I've posted yet

Days are getting shorter, weather's just a bit chillier (though we seem to have hit a mini heat wave here in the last few days), for those in climates where you have deciduous trees, maybe the leaves are starting to turn. (Or maybe they've turned brown and dropped off in the summer heat. :P) I miss New England in the fall. Hell, I miss seasons, period. Except for hot, humid summers on the East Coast -- those I lack all missingness for.

Since I'm on the quarter system, I still have a couple of weeks reprieve before school starts again: I'm going into the 2nd year of my PhD program. I'm starting to get really nervous, remembering how hard my first year was (for a number of reasons, both personal and professional). But there's no reason to suspect that anything will be different than the year before, except this year, I'll know what I'm doing. I'm even TA'ing the same class again as I did last spring, Psychology of Language. Except there'll be more papers to grade this time around: 5 essays in the quarter (i.e. every two weeks), 50+ papers for the two TAs.

For all you students who complain about having to write papers, let me remind you of your TAs (or, for the lucky ones, professors) who have to read and critique them. :) After TA'ing for the first time last year, I realized something: bullshit is obvious (as is ill-preparedness and lack of proofreading). I really wanted to write my college professors and be like, "I am sorry for not proofreading! I am sorry that it was so obvious that I had NO idea what I was talking about at times! I am sorry I made such a fool of myself on paper and didn't fully realize how foolish I sounded!"

Anyway, instead of discussing the irritations of grading, I think I'll post some pretty nail polish pictures. Here are some yellow swatches I've done in the last few months but haven't gotten a chance to post here. I love yellow and am always on a mission to find the perfect yellow creme nail polish. For those of you who love yellow too, you know that yellow is often one of the hardest colors to work with: often streaky, goopy and hard to build to an opaque finish. Here are some of the better examples of yellow cremes I've found.

Chinoiserie Joy

Four coats yet still VNL. Not a fan of Chinoiserie. At $8 a bottle (plus the hassle of actually ordering Chinoiserie), for polishes that have largely disappointed me thus far... I doubt I'll be putting in a Chinoiserie order again.

OPI The "It" Color

I love this warm golden yellow (it almost tiptoes its way to a soft orange, but not quite): it's streaky and kind of sticky for the first two coats but by the third, it settles down into a lovely smooth finish with VNL that's only visible if you scrutinize it. If happiness had a color, it would be this.

Barielle Lemondrops

Fairly decent yellow: a shade too cool for me, I think, but as a polish, it was alright. Not the easiest to work with but nor was it a huge pain in the ass. Unlike the other Barielles from this summer's line, I found the formula somewhat hard to control.

Misa Happy Happy

Okay, maybe happiness would be this color. Seriously one of the best yellows ever: applied beautifully, three coats, no VNL. Gorgeously glossy finish. Better than OPI The "It" Color because TIC is more of an orange-y yellow whereas this is, like, the platonic form of a yellow: the color lemons are supposed to be. :)

Nubar Lemon Sorbet

I wanted this polish so bad for so long. And then I got it, and it just was waaaay too bright and chalky. A glossier, jellier finish would've suited me better. It applied fine in three coats, but just didn't look good on me.

And of course, check out my latest post on Illamasqua for Wayward (a couple posts down), a fabulous cool yellow creme.

Wet n Wild Craze swatches!

Thanks to Scrangie, Nail Boarders are now eagerly seeking the elusive Wet n Wild Craze polishes. Available at some drugstores, these $2 bottles are a nice improvement on the typical Wet n Wild polish colors. They are, however, definitely smaller than the average polish bottle but for $2 for a nifty color, what do you expect?

I didn't look too hard for these until today and they were in the first store I looked in. I don't know how many are in the collection but there were seven at the Walgreens I found them in. I bought six (avoiding the one called Lust that seemed to be your typical hot pink with neon-ish purple shimmer). And... the jury's divided on this one.

Wet N Wild Craze Nocturnal

Hard to tell in the photo but this is an indigo jelly: two coats and it's nearly black. Nothing super amazing about this but I do think it'd be great to try to franken an Essie Starry Starry Night with.

Wet N Wild Craze Shield

I really like this color: it's a foil champagne with fine gold shimmer but scattered bronze mini-flakes. Four coats to get rid of VNL but totally worth it.

Close-up of Shield:

Wet N Wild Craze Rustic

Orange-y bronze, foil-y finish. This one was thick and kind of hard to work with. It took three coats and while it's a pleasant enough color, it's not special. I'm very "eh" about it.

Wet N Wild Craze Inferno

Another "eh". Kind of a typical orange with gold shimmer. It's bright but I wouldn't have named it "inferno". "Campfire", maybe. "Inferno", no.

Wet N Wild Craze Morbid

This one reminds me a lot of Misa Toxic Seduction which I had had "meh" feelings towards. Somehow though, I like it better: it leans just the slightest bit more blue whereas Toxic Seduction was just a tiny more green.

Close-up of Morbid:

Wet N Wild Craze Glitz

I LOVE glitter. This one, though, fell a bit short of expectations. I think it's because I don't like hot pink/purple glitter a la Sally Hansen Rock Star. I think it's because it took five coats of a polish that's not that thin (unlike Quirius glitters which also can take five coats but are thin enough to not get goopy) to reach minimum opacity -- and because this glitter doesn't dry fast, you sit around waiting between coats so that you're not just brushing coats of polish off with every coat you try to put on. It also isn't as sparkly as I hoped.

Close-up of Glitz

All in all, I'm glad I found these because I was really curious about them. They're good but not fantastic, unique or special. But it's Wet N Wild for $2: I wasn't really expecting fantastic, unique or special! And that's alright. Some of these are still keepers.

A couple of green swatches (Orly Enchanted Forest, CM Night Beat & Misa Toxic Seduction) and another Essie/Orly/Nubar matte comparison

Good-ish news about the article I co-authored! The professor heard back from the journal triage (like an emergency room...) and though it was not accepted for review as was, the editors did want a shorter version of it that has a chance of being sent out for review. This is, of course, not any guarantee of publication, especially not in a journal as popular as the one that the article was submitted to, but it's the first hurdle. Apparently, my contributions were useful -- yay! All I wanted was to be helpful and it would seem that I was. To celebrate, here's some swatches of my favorite nail polish color, green!

Orly Enchanted Forest

Everyone's seen this one a thousand times already but it bears further showing because it's a lovely polish that was opaque in two coats (the picture shows three because I do three automatically) and applied super smoothly.

Misa Toxic Seduction

In theory, I like this polish. Nice dark green base with dark green shimmer. But somehow, it felt kinda boring to me. Like, the color is pretty but not gorgeous. It's kinda interesting but not stunning. It felt like one big "eh" to me... for no good reason, really.

Misa Toxic Seduction with matte topcoats

From left to right:

Index: non-mattefied (no topcoat)

Middle: Orly Matte Top, makes a slightly boring polish to me even more boring by making it just a bit duller (but still kinda sparkly in the sun)

Ring: Nubar V for Men, mattefies but still retains a bit of reflectiveness and the color of the polish.

Pinky: Essie Matte About You, mattefies more than Nubar V BUT makes it really dull and even darkens the color a little bit.

CM Night Beat

I enjoy my inexpensive polishes. I really do. This is a good example of one. It looks like it could be dupe-y to OPI At Your Quebec and Call (which apparently is HTF). Similar gorgeous olive-y shade and sometime when I'm not lazy, maybe I'll pull out AYQC and make a direct comparison (since CM Night Beat is fairly easy to obtain). The difference as far as I can tell is that the brushstrokes are more obvious in Night Beat, Night Beat is greener where AYQC is more golden-toned, and AYQC has subtle bronze shimmer that catches sunlight. Overall, AYQC is brighter but I think I like Night Beat better. (...not about to de-dupe by AYQC though.)

For more matte topcoat comparisons, click on the "comparison" label below.

Also, coming soon, as per reader request... After swatching LA Girl Disco Brites Hustle (and loving it!), I decided I had to get a couple more Disco Brites. I got five or six more, which I hope to swatch sometime in the coming week!

NOTM(orning) and NOTA(fternoon): Color Club Tru Passion + Misa Dance Fever

Once upon a time, I thought I might study visual cognition. It was easier to collect data. Sit people in front of a computer, have them click buttons when they see a circle (or whatever) and let the computer collect the data for me. Then I thought, "No, my real passion is in psycholinguistics."

Boy, am I an idiot.

This type of research is painstaking. Listening to endless hours of audio, transcribing it and analyzing it and... miscounting a lot. For someone who has been in school for 19 years (plus maybe an extra year for all those summers at nerd camp), I really don't seem to know how to add or subtract. Multivariate statistics, yes. Addition, no.

To reward myself for, you know, doing my job today, I decided two manis were in order.

Color Club Tru Passion



Misa Dance Fever


These are fabulous glitters! They are very fine and brush on very smoothly (unless I get impatient and gloop them on). Both of these are four coats each. The Dance Fever, especially, just GLOWS in sunlight: it may be burning my retina to stare directly at it. Mmm. Glowy burn.

In other news, I'm pretty miffed that my university's library is undergoing major budget cuts (like every other university library, I'm sure) and a professor sent around a list of psych journals that are on the cutting block. NOOOOOOO!! If there's no other reason to go to a rich private university, it's that they'll have more money to keep their resources up when the economy's down the drain and floating fast out to sea. Unless they're Harvard or some other imprudent Ivy League that got greedy and invested everything in high yield (and high risk) stocks. Yay for not getting my PhD at an Ivy League? (Besides that there was actually no Ivy that had an advisor I wanted to work with. And none who would want to work with me. Definitely not something to cry over though!)

Woot! 3 bloggers at Polish or Perish!

Polish or Perish now brags three bloggers, myself (flinty), xfoxglove and gracewaste! This practically guarantees our lovely readers (if there are any yet) a post most days of the week! We will have no set schedule for blogging but between the three of us, Polish or Perish should be good for a couple minute's procrastination per day. For all of us. :)

And just so this isn't just a boring blog update, two popular teal polishes, both of which apply beautifully and are reasonably priced:

Misa Dirty Sexy Money

Diamond Cosmetics Don't Teal My Heart Away