Halloweek Spooktacular Day One - China Glaze Getting to Gnaw You

Welcome to Unsweetened Nails, scary Halloween edition! Even though I don't have kids or go to parties, I still think it's a downer that Halloween is on a Monday; to compensate, I'm going to be posting Halloween manis ALL WEEK LONG! I'm also going to be featuring brand-new polishes that I just bought at Walgreen's!!! An exciting week awaits! Let's kick it off with China Glaze Getting to Gnaw You.

Last year, the TJ Maxx closer to my apartment (not the one by my job) had quite a selection of China Glaze holiday polishes. I picked up today's, tomorrows, and I think All Wrapped Up (featured in August) at the same time for $2.99 each. This year, even China Glaze doesn't have China Glaze holiday polishes.

 Getting to Gnaw You has a similar, but better, formula as All Wrapped Up. It's a jelly so packed with small glitter that it has a textured appearance without topcoat, and a ton of gorgeous depth with it. The glitter is more copper than orange, but it's so obviously a Halloween polish that it reads orange to me.

I enjoy this polish. It's pretty with top coat and despite being packed with glitter, went on pretty smoothly. Also the name cracks me up. Join me tomorrow - yes, Tuesday! - for another Halloween lovely from China Glaze.

Saturday Nail Art - Golden Ghosts on a Gradient

This week went wrong in more ways than one. I schedule my posts ahead of time, and it looks like I accidentally scheduled Black Holo Witch for today, when it should have gone up Friday (it was also the last of my backlog; I'm writing this on the day it goes up, and it's going up late). I also messed up when I picked the colors for this nail art...I used CbL Black Gold, Texas Tea (which was featured this week) and ILNP Black Orchid (which has black in the name, and is a holo, but wasn't part of black holo week).

I did a simple gradient with a makeup sponge. These pics look to me like I used three polishes, but the purple in the middle is just the two mixed together.

I stamped it with Powder Perfect's Golden Stamping Polish and Halloween plate, then put a border of Revlon Black Magic around the edge.

Even though I used NYC Grand Central Station, my ghosts smeared a little bit. I really do love this stamping polish; I bought all five of them, and the stamper, and the three plates, and I've been stamping my heart out lately. I'm definitely not the most skilled stamper, but I've certainly been getting a lot of practice!

Because Halloween is on Monday, and I just took a trip to Walgreen's and picked up a few new seasonal lovelies, I'm going to be posting Halloween polishes and nail art all next week! I'm calling it "Halloweek" because I am a genius. Join me Monday for my first spooky polish!

F.U.N. Lacquer Black Holo Witch

Not sure what happened this week, but I've got a lot of pictures of various polishes that I love and think turned out great, and then I've got my photos of F.U.N. Lacquer Black Holo Witch.

I feel like I should say a few words here. This polish was part of a collaboration between the lady who makes F.U.N. Lacquer and the lady who runs the Simply Nailogical account on social media. I used to think Simply Nailogical was really funny, and I loved that she was combining nail art with comedy in her videos. I learned a lot about gradients from her blog when I was a newbie, she's the reason I started using nail oil (I still use Bliss Kiss Simply Pure, and I still love it), she's the reason I got on Instagram. Hell, I think her blog is the first place I saw ILNP swatches, which was my gateway indie.

The thing about being on Instagram, though, is seeing her fans, who are mostly terrible and too young to be on Instagram (that's not a cranky old person judgement call, I mean according to the terms of service). Seeing them throwing around her catchphrases and tagging her everywhere got annoying, and then seeing her actually encourage their obnoxiousness was it for me. She runs a second account on Instagram called SimplyNotlogical, and it's a repost account. It's awesome that she uses her popularity as a way to get other nail art accounts some exposure! It's not awesome that she also reposts poorly-thought out memes made by her ignorant fanbase!

And that's all I really have to say about that. I have exactly one other F.U.N. Lacquer (not that there aren't more I want!), and it's also from this collection. I was a fan at the time and justified the expense by thinking it was nice to support a nail artist I liked.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh, I totally forgot to talk about the polish itself. It's a really thick charcoal micro glitter. The formula is difficult to work with and the end result isn't that dissimilar from any other holo micro glitter (over black, I might as well have used China Glaze Fairy Dust). There are cool things you can do with this polish, but it gets all over the place and is very annoying. Join me tomorrow for some spooky nail art that breaks all the rules!

Orly Black Holo

This is such a weird polish. It turned out to be Black Holo week on Unsweetened Nails, and to prove it, I've got a polish here called just that. Now, when I picked up this polish in the store, I was stunned. I mean, look at it in the bottle!

It's got a crazy warp-drive look to it

 Black Holo is indeed black and holo. Sadly, it's black holo bar glitter, so applying it is a mess. It doesn't stick up, so that's nice, but it requires a lot of manipulation.

Index: 1 coat over Revlon Black Magic
Middle: 2 coats
Ring: Sponged on
Pinky: 1 coat and sponged tip

It looks weird, and it inspired me to do some weird photo editing.

If I recall correctly, I got this polish at my local Bed, Bath, and Beyond during a big liquidation they were having. They were the only store in town with a Color Club display, and one of the few places I have ever seen Orly Color Blast. Which is good, because Orly Color Blast is a rip-off. The bottles, as you can see, are 11 mL and I think they retail for like $7. I don't know much about them, since no one buys them if they can avoid it, but I'm under the impression that a lot of them are just regular Orlys decanted out of their giant bottles into these little ones and sold for $1 less.

I do like the name "Color Blast."

While tagging this, I realized this is the first Orly I've ever posted about. This is also Unsweetened Nails' 50th post! Yes, a polish I would never actually wear from a brand that I have like six polishes from (OK, I checked and I have 13 Orlys. But still.)! Well, I started this blog with an obscure polish, so I guess it makes sense that my 50th post would be something equally obscure. Come back Friday for another black holo with black holo in the name, although this is a polish you will probably have heard of and seen before.

Colors by Llarowe Black Gold, Texas Tea

This is a nostalgic polish for me. It was my first ever black holo, and one of my earliest indie purchases. It's an absolutely stunning, inky blue-toned black and I love it so much I wish I could sleep in a vat of it.

It's kind of in-between an old school, fussy holo and a newer formula; it doesn't need aqua base coat or anything (thank goodness), but Seche does dull the holo, so all these pics are sans top coat. 

I have a few other pitch-black holos in my collection now, but this one blew me away when I got it. I bought this as a response to Color Club Beyond, which, as you may recall, is a silvery charcoal grey holo. I wanted so badly for it to be black that I went on the hunt and found this polish, which I love so much that I made two overly busy collages featuring it.

It's a bonus collage!

I was delighted to discover Colors by Llarowe when I was first starting to look for polishes that weren't super easy to find when when I was looking for them, like pitch black holos or translucent flakies. I don't really buy from the brand any more, but I do love the CbL polishes that I have. Black Gold, Texas Tea isn't the most wearable polish due to the top coat dulling issue, but I'm sure there's some trick to get around that ( I didn't try putting clear polish over it, that might work). The formula is excellent, although personally I'm not the biggest fan of these little square bottles. Join me Wednesday for some more black holographic goodness.

Saturday Nail Art - Flakie Edition

So today's nail art is sort of a cheat. I really just wanted to take a bunch of pictures of Nfu-Oh #51.

Here's a collage of just bottle shots! 

 I did do a little nail art as the base of this mani: a gradient of clear and black polish (both Wet N Wild; I tried to use China Glaze Liquid Leather, but the base was too crelly-ish). This is just a simple gradient done with a makeup sponge.

L: Before top coat
R: After top coat

Writing this post, I'm wondering why I bothered to top coat before I applied Nfu-Oh #51; I think it's because I had brushed - rather than sponged - Wet N Wild Black Creme onto the tips, and was afraid it wouldn't level. Probably not necessary, but anyway, here it is after two coats of Nfu-Oh #51.

I bought it on Amazon for $12.50. 

So I didn't get into polish until spring 2015, and a lot of the trends seemed to be in decline at the time. I feel like I was reading a lot of people expressing delight and relief that crackle and texture were going away. I don't have a single crackle in my collection, and honestly I think they're hideous. I can see how they might be useful for nail art, but I never like the look of just crackle over a color. I do have quite a few textures, but the only ones I really love are Zoya Pixie Dusts. These clear flakies were also not as popular as they once were; 2015 seems to be the year that UCC (Ultra Chameleon Chrome, which sounds awesome) started taking over, and now I see a lot of UCC flakies in holo bases. It's a wonderful time to be alive.

The bottles are shaped like ladies, it's really adorable and weird.

My point is, this polish was all the rage back in like 2012. When I started getting into polish, I was a broke college student, so my collection was strictly drug store. I think I bought this lovely lady when I was temping at my current job and $12.50 started to see, like a reasonable price to spend on amazing polish. Mostly, I was so shocked to see this come up when I searched for it on Amazon (sometimes a surprising place to find discontinued polishes: I also scored Zoya Kotori and Crystal on there) that I knew I had to get it.

In a couple of pictures, you can see my thumb, which is three coats with no undies. The flakies shift from red to green to gold over black, but suspended in the jelly, they just flicker like little chips of ruby. Mattifed, the olive to gold shift becomes more prominent, but I honestly didn't like most of the photos I took of it matte. I'm going to put in one more picture of Nfu-Oh #51 and encourage anyone who might be reading this and not in possession of this beauty to search Amazon for it. It's still on there at the time of this writing.

Sally Hansen Black Diamonds

Today's polish is one of my oldest. It's not vintage or anything, I think I bought it on clearance at Sally Beauty in 2011. In real life, it's a flat black with dusty silver flecks that reads charcoal. I kind of hate it on me in person. In these pics, though, I kind of love it!

 See those teal sparkles? I never notice them in person and was surprised to see them on camera. And while you can't see the fill line in any of these pics (I assume because this polish is so thick it clings to the sides of the bottle), I have worn this a few times and it's about half gone. I think I've thinned this with Seche Restore, because I remember hating the formula of this, but I had no problem with it this time.

 Mattified, I don't like this but I feel like if you were doing roadwork-themed nail art, this would be a good base. I didn't do nail art at all this week, but check in tomorrow to see something lovely.

Fantasy Makers Bloody Marie

Gosh, I feel like every week I work on this blog, I learn something. Like just now, I learned that, while it's great to take pictures and schedule posts ahead of time, sometimes you need to be wearing the polish while you edit the pictures because you can't remember what color it really is

It could be any of these! Just kidding, it's definitely not as dark the upper left box, but I think it's not as bright as on the right. Lower left is probably the most color-accurate. Not that you're likely to find this polish around, anyway...

It's a Fantasy Makers by Wet N Wild, and as far as I can tell, they don't appear to be a thing this year! They weren't even that impressive last year; I saw all four for $2 each at Rite-Aid and bought them all, mostly because I thought the bottles were cute, and Bloody Marie here turned out to be the best one. The others are a crappy black that I frankened with clear polish to try to turn into a jelly, a crappy white, a glow-in-the-dark that only glows in the bottle, and this red jelly that is basically a dupe for China Glaze Masai Red. 

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 Since I didn't have that many pictures of Bloody Marie, and the ones I have are ridiculous, I thought I'd better flesh out this collage with some pics I took of Wet N Wild Black Creme. Since it's the only polish I see at the Wet N Wild Halloween makeup displays this year, I guess it's officially a Halloween polish now, huh? In the upper left is the black Fantasy Makers polish, Black as Knight; that is not what I'm wearing on my nails. Black Creme is a great polish, Black as Knight sucks and was a streaky, watery mess before I even messed with it.

 I took these when I wore Black Creme under Bali Mist, so they are summer sun pictures and my nails were still pointy. This was the indoor pic under my horrible old bulb. I decided to go for it and just make the picture black and white...I mean, holding black polish with black nails in a black and white photo is a great idea, right? Friday will continue our spooky nail polish times with another black polish.

Bonita Big Dipper

I realized several things when I was editing the pictures for today's post. First, I realized that I bought this polish last winter, when Bonita had several sparkly things on offer at the Rite-Aid by my job.

Big Dipper, Golden Girl, Flirty Shirley, Flamingo, and Tinman's Brew are some of the gaudy, glittery, and even holographic Bonita polishes that I have, and I picked up almost all of them at the downtown Portland Rite-Aid on my way to work. This year, that same Rite-Aid has the summer neons still out, and no other Bonitas in sight. Bonita! Where did you go? I need cheap holo glitter that sparkles under fluorescent lights to get me through the miserable rainy winter!

 Another thing I realized is that I like making overcomplicated collages. Since I got my new lighting set up, I have been taking enormous amounts of pictures and deleting most of them, and I'm also starting to really enjoy taking bottle shots. I realized that I stole the idea of the collage with close-up bottle shot from Nicole at Bedlam Beauty, but while she makes consistently clear and well-balanced collages, mine are kind of a mess. I'm not worried about it, since I'm blogging for myself and not to provide any kind of service to others. I'm gonna call it art.

The third thing I realized: The brand name is "bonita by Royal Essence." I have never, ever heard of Royal Essence. Who or what is Royal Essence? I googled them and found a jewelry/candle company, an essential oils company, and a perfume company all by that name, as well as at least one salon.  

 Bonita has their own website, and on the about page they call themselves "Nono Cosmetics." The website says nothing, anywhere, about Royal Essence. I'm sorry this blog post raises questions it can't answer, but Royal Essence will just have to remain a mystery for the time being.

Oh, I guess I should talk about the polish itself, huh? Big Dipper is a mix of medium and small silver metallic and silver holographic glitter. I've got one coat on my index and pinky, two coats on my middle, and I sponged it on my ring finger. It's jam-packed with glitter, but the base isn't goopy or hard to spread. If you ever happen across a bottle of it for $1.75, as I did, it's a nice little holiday-feeling glitter topper. I'm wearing it over Wet N Wild Black Creme, which I was going to include solo shots of in this post before it turned out to be inexplicably long. Join me Wednesday for a more seasonally-appropriate polish.

Saturday Nail Art - Watermarble

I don't watermarble very often because it's very messy, and I never feel right pouring the water down the sink at the end. I don't know what else to do with it, and there's no polish in it, but it feels wrong. Anyway, I recently got a bottle of Girly Bits Border Patrol, so I decided to use it to keep my fingers clean and do a watermarble.

I started with a base of Monday's polish, Cupcake Berry Good Looking, which I wore for an entire week. I tried a couple of different combinations on my right hand; Color Club Beyond and ILNP BFF's both spread easily in the water, but Berry Good Looking didn't, and I also tried a coat of BFF's over BGL topped with a watermarble of Beyond and a clear polish...but I didn't like it. I like this way the best, which is rings of Beyond and BFF's over a base of BGL.

I don't feel like this turned out super impressive, both because the colors don't contrast and because I'm not skilled at watermarbling. It's not as hard for me as it seems to be for some people, but again, I don't do it that much, so actually drawing the patterns in the water isn't something I'm good at yet.

This week had kind of a spooky palette! A nice coincidence! Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be getting into some spooky black polishes and some Halloween specials!

ILNP BFF's

When I went to add tags for this entry, I was shocked to see that this is the first ILNP to be on the blog. I actually got After Midnight recently, but after I had already gotten through the A's on here. Someday I'll have to do a catch-up week where I go back to previous letters. In the meantime, here's ILNP BFF's.

I have this polish listed in my spreadsheet as "BFFs," no apostrophe, but it is actually BFF's. It came out in Spring 2016 with several other deliberately sheer holo jellies. These pictures are three coats, which is my standard for most polishes and especially ILNP.

ILNP was my first indie brand, and if I had to pick one brand to wear for the rest of my life, it'd be my choice. The formula always applies and last so well on me, and there's such a wide selection of colors and finishes, and I just love all of them. I also love the way the collections are split into two sets, one seasonal and one based around a finish or theme (Spring jellies, Summer shimmers, and now the Fall neutrals).

 The jellies are great for nail art, although I don't feel like I used it very wisely this week. They're really great for reverse stamping, dry marbling, and syrup gradients.

I don't talk much about availability, but you can get this polish on ILNP's website. Join me tomorrow for some nail art using this week's fabulous sparkly polishes!

Color Club Beyond

Today's polish is one of the wonderful Halo Hues, excellent metallic holos that stamp like a champ. Beyond is what passes for a black holo, although the enormous amount of silver holographic pigment lightens it up so it reads as charcoal grey.

 I just hate the way this color looks on my skin, but this is still an amazing polish. Amazing formula, killer holo flame (even in low light), and I'm also really in love with the super-reflective holo cap.

 I bought this as part of a set from the Color Club website back in February. They have great sales from time to time. The Halo Hues are an absolute classic; even though I have lots of gorgeous linear holos and these are so silvery that none of them has a very saturated base color, these are so fool-proof and versatile that I use them a lot.

 I've stamped with Beyond quite a few times, but somehow there's no visible fill line in the bottle. Speaking of the bottle...

I got my exposure and white balance settings fixed up today, so I'm going to be including more bottle shots and close-ups. Join me tomorrow to see more overly dramatic photographs of nail polish!

Cupcake Polish Berry Good Looking

Hello! It's October, and today's polish is from last summer, but somehow this warm purple feels right for fall. I actually wore this polish for a whole week last week, which is an eternity for me. When you've got perfection on your nails, though, it's easy to leave it alone.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was planning on getting some daylight bulbs and a second light source. Well, I did! It's autumn in Oregon, which means lots of rain and very little sunlight, so I knew I had to make a change. I also realized that the indoor shots I was taking under a regular light bulb were not the best. I'm really enjoying taking pictures in my new lighting setup, and it seemed like Berry Good Looking was a perfect polish to start this new phase with.

It's perfect partly because it's such a crazy-looking polish that I immediately got a lot of practice by taking a million pictures of it. It's also perfect on a more symbolic level. When Berry Good Looking came out last year, everyone went nuts over how amazing the color and the holo flame were. It got a ridiculous amount of hype, but I held off buying it because I thought it was pink.

It's hard to take accurate pictured of BGL, and it's also completely different in the bottle than on the nail. I was justified in thinking it was pink, because in the bottle, it is! On the nail, though, the polish pops such a supernaturally strong blue flame that it darkens up and becomes the most mind-blowing, saturated hot purple.

Just like I put off buying BGL because of my uncertainty, I put off stepping up my lighting game for the same reason. If all this pontificating and metaphor-making seems like stalling, well...it totally is. I stuck to the same format for all my previous blog posts: indoor light photo with some kind of cheesy editing, collage of outdoor shots, repeat. I still want to do collages, but I feel like in a way, I was using them to distract from my posing and photography. So I am planning on including more full-sized pictures, more bottle shots, working on my poses, and just generally having more variety. I realize this was more of a meta post about my blog than it was a post about Berry Good Looking, but honestly, doesn't everyone have this already? 

Saturday Nail Art - Are You Plaid to See Me?

So first off, you might notice in this nail art something I alluded to earlier in the week: a change in my nail shape. Yep, I filed 'em square. I did this for a few reasons; I had a peelie on my left hand that looked like it was going to get worse, I had a hard time filing my points evenly and wanted something neater-looking, and even though I never hear anyone talk about this, it's been my experience that pointy tips get tip wear faster. Your mileage may vary.

 As you probably guessed from this post's hilarious title, this week I was inspired to do some plaid nail art. Remember last week, when I inadvertently switched Zoya Bay and Cupcake Bat-chelor Pad? It actually worked out for the best this week, too. I started out by hand-painting striped of Bat-Chelor Pad and Wet N Wild Be More Pacific over a base of China Glaze Bend Over Backwards, which would not have gone as smoothly if I'd been trying to use a texture.

 I love this color scheme, makes me think of old wool blankets. I stamped with Konad White, as usual, and the plate was from Born Pretty.

To me, this is probably the most successful nail art I've had on the blog yet. I only did it on four fingers, but I would definitely recreate it maybe as an accent nail. Next week might get a little awkward, as I have three holos to swatch and the weather is starting to turn gloomy. I'm about to get daylight bulbs and invest in a second lamp so I can take better indoor pictures, since that's what I'm going to be stuck with starting in a month or so. Fortunately, next week's polishes are super sparkly, super holographic, and gorgeous in any light!