Baroness X (obligatory unicorn body fluid)

Welcome! I've gone ahead and hopped back to the beginning of the alphabet, because I've recently acquired some amazing polishes that I want to blog about. First up is this beauty from Baroness X that I'm going to call (oubf). The name is silly, but it actually does make sense considering that the origin of this polish was the unicorn-themed December Monthly Mythical Mystery box. Unexpectedly, it doesn't appear to have unicorn pee in it (unlike so many gorgeous BX polishes). It's jam-packed with other pretty things, though.

(oubf) is a teal jelly that is just loaded with silver flakies and the iridescent firefly glitters that have become very popular lately, with a sparse amount of holo microglitter scattered in. I did three coats here, but the jelly formula is so good, and the polish is so crammed full of stuff, that I feel like you could easily get away with two. Especially if you do thicker coats. While I was adding tags to this post, I realized it's the first one starring a Baroness X polish! This seems really weird to me, since BX is one of my favorite brands and I've been posting a lot of BX manis lately on Facebook and Instagram. Unfortunate that the first one on my blog is one that you can't buy!

If you're not familiar with them, the Monthly Mythical Mystery box is a darling package you can buy from BX every month (or you can subscribe). The boxes have a pre-order window, and then go out around the beginning of each month. Like this polish, the MMMs are always full of wonderful things: there's always a polish and some kind of bath or body item, and a cute little insert listing the contents and explaining the mythical inspiration behind that month's theme. When I swatch the other MMM polishes I have, I'll include a pic of the inserts; the unicorn box was a little different, in that it had so much stuff in it that the insert didn't have room for any info about unicorns.

Besides my blog and my nation, another casualty of November was my old phone. I'd had it for the better part of two years, it had died and had to be refurbished, and it was cheap as hell to begin with. So when the screen got smashed, I wasn't exactly broken-hearted. I've been posting on Instagram a lot more lately, because I now have a phone with a much better camera than my old one...and today, I made a breath-taking discovery:

I can take macros with my phone! I feel like a lot of people are kind of over macros, because when you buy a polish based solely on macros, you are guaranteeing yourself some disappointment. Since this blog is just cataloging random polishes, many unavailable or undesirable, I'm really not worried about accuracy or selling anything. So I'll be taking a lot of macro shots from now on. Check back in on Wednesday to see macro shots and other pictures of a polish that you can actually buy!

Halloween Spooktacular Day Two - China Glaze Howl You Doin?

Today's polish is a real beauty. It's a rich, red-toned violet jelly filled with little purple glitters and orange flakies. It's so rad!

 Apologies for the sticky stuff on the front of the bottle, pretty sure that's reside from the price tag. This polish is super neat, although I did get a little dragging. I wanted to stamp over this mani, but I wore peel-off base coat under this polish and it wrinkled and slid around my nails when I pressed down with the stamper. Maybe next year!

It looks amazing matte, too. It's so tragic that China Glaze decided to just re-release cremes this year for Halloween instead of making some more great flakie-packed jellies. We've got indies to fill the Halloween void, I suppose, and there's a drug store brand that really knocked it out of the park this year. Join me tomorrow for my first swatches of an excellent spooky collection!

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.