Zoya Alicia

Today's polish is one where I wasn't really sold on it on the bottle, but on the nail...wow! It's the scattered holo from Zoya's fall 2016 Urban Grunge collection that I was the least interested in, Alicia.

I'm struggling a little bit with my pictures lately. What I need to do is decide on a couple of specific poses and layouts, and stick to those, but I'm very conflicted. I've figured out how to take macro shots with my phone, so a flood of gratuitous macros is to be expected (see below), but what's tearing me apart is...I'm kind of liking my phone pics better than the pics I take with the DSLR, which seem kind of washed out. The swatch above is taken with my phone (it's a ZTE Axon, in case anyone was wondering), and aside from the radial blur, I like it better than the swatch in the below collage, which was taken with a Canon Rebel T2i. Oh well, I'll work it out. 

 Now to actually talk about the polish: it's great! Alicia is large holo flakies suspended in a clear base with a pronounced yellow-gold (heavy on the yellow) shimmer. The charred edges of my nicotine-stained ex-smoker's heart just lit up when this baby hit my nails. A yellow-gold shimmer in a silver flakie polish is an edgy element that's actually perfect for a collection called "urban grunge." I used three coats, as usual, for these pics, and you can still see my nail line because the flakes are so big; however, like with an ILNP Ultra Holo, the sparkle in this is so pronounced that the sheerness isn't noticeable in person.

Alicia is sheer enough that I'm wondering if it could be used as a topper. I think it would look really cool over a lot of different colors, especially greens or warm nudes. I didn't think to try it when I was swatching, but hopefully I'll give it a shot at some point. Come back tomorrow and see what kind of nail art I decided to do using this week's polishes!

Halloweek Spooktacular Day Five - Sinful Colors Nice Guise

Tonight's post is a comparison. When I was picking out colors from the Guys and Ghouls collection, I hemmed and hawed over this one, Nice Guise. I thought, "Doesn't this look kind of a lot like Zoya Remy? No wait, isn't Remy greener? I've never even worn Remy so maybe I should skip this one."

 In the bottle, it does look a lot like Remy. The base color is a really similar deep blue, and it has a similar golden shimmer. Despite the claims of its sticker, Nice Guise doesn't really have any magical color-shifting chameleon properties. Still, I decided it would be worth it to buy it and compare the two. As it turns out, they're the same color but far from dupes.

In these pictures, I'm wearing Nice Guise on my index and ring fingers and Remy on my middle and pinky. Here they are at one coat; you can see the shimmer in Nice Guise is sparser, and while the base is pretty equally pigmented on both, Nice Guise applies a bit patchy.

 At two coats, Remy's shimmer is so built up that it looks like a completely different polish. It's very much a shimmering glass fleck, while Nice Guise is more of a sparkly jelly. Being so packed with shimmer definitely makes Remy look greener, too.

Here they are in their final form: under a coat of NYC Matte Me Crazy. Remy gets a glowy, mermaidy quality. Nice Guise, lo and behold, actually does do a little gold-to-green color shifting! Is it worth it to buy both of them? I mean, Nice Guise is only $2, so...sure?
For nail art Saturday, I've got a whole bunch of random nail art, a franken, and one last Halloween Sinful Colors. Come by tomorrow for the last day of the Spooktacular!

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!

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.

Maybelline Alluring Rose

Welcome to a new week of swatches! I'm pretty happy that I've managed to post four times a week all through August, even though I was on vacation for part of it. The weather is starting to go back to being cloudy and rainy, so I'm going to be investing in some daylight bulbs and taking more indoor pictures. Right now, here's a photo of Maybelline Alluring Rose.

One of my earliest polishes was Maybelline Bold Gold, which, like Alluring Rose, has the word "holographic" written on the cap despite not being holographic at all. None of the Maybelline "Holographics" (I also have a third, Blue Blaze) are holographic; in fact, they are all metallics, and this one is a sheer rose to gold duochrome. It reminds me of an inferior version of Color Club Sorry, Not Sorry, which has a more opaque formula and a stronger shift. Not that Alluring Rose isn't pretty in its way...

You can see a slight, foil-like sparkle in the upper right shot, but it's generally just a metallic gold that shifts to a pale rose. It has a smooth, thin formula, so even though it's lying about being holographic, it's not a bad polish. I can't think of a Maybelline Color Show that I've really had trouble with, and it's actually the brand that got me into polish! Check back Wednesday for an actual holo!

Saturday Nail Art - Stamped Textured Gradient

Welcome to Saturday Nail Art! I used two polishes from Holiday 2013 collections (OPI All Sparkly and Gold and China Glaze All Wrapped Up), but I used them to make non-holiday nail art.

I ran out of liquid latex, so I used NYC Strip Me Off as a barrier

All Wrapped Up was a bear to apply with the brush, and it dried matte but not exactly with the pebbly feel I think a polish needs to qualify as a texture. Sucking up the thick purple base with a sponge made application a lot easier, and the microglitters stood out enough to turn it into a proper textured polish.

I guess I must have been pleased with how this turned out...

...Since I took so many pictures.

After I'd done the gradient, I decided to stamp over it with Konad White. I used one Born Pretty plate and one Ejubias plate. I really like stamping over textures, I feel like it's kind of a rustic look.

I think this is one of the more successful nail art combos I've done on the blog so far. Of course, two of the polishes just happened to be textures, and I didn't try to work in Bonita All Things Blue (I thought that would be a recipe for disaster). Next week, I'll be swatching my first duochrome...well, sort of.

OPI All Sparkly and Gold

Today's polish is another mini. Unfortunately, this is an OPI mini. Like I said, I'm not a huge fan of OPI in general anyway, and their minis are kind of notorious.

The tiniest bottleI had to check my spreadsheet to make sure of the name of this polish, since the hilariously small bottle doesn't even have room for a name sticker. The little fluffy brush makes application a real pain in the butt, but the formula was quite good.

This is another gold texture, but it's less of a yellow gold and more metallic than NOPI A Heart of Gold. While I am a fan of gold polish and textured polish, this is another one that I got in a pack of minis. I have three other polishes from the Mariah Carey Holiday 2013 collection; I bought these on a whim from Amazon, I think the pack was $5.

With top coat, it's even more sparkly. I tend to overlook my minis, since I don't keep them within my Helmer, but this is a lovely polish and works as well in the summer as the holidays. Wednesday I'll have a much more season-appropriate polish.

Saturday Nail Art - Golden Giraffes

All the polishes this week went pretty well with each other, so I did a more elaborate look than last week. I took step-by-step pictures for this week. I can't guarantee I'll always remember to take step-by-step pics, but I will try to do it every once in a while.

I started with a base coat of Monday's polish, OPI 50 Years of Style. I decided to do a smoosh mani using 50 Years and Wet N Wild 9021Orange. I painted my ring and pinky nails using Nicole by OPI A Heart of Gold. The smoosh marbling didn't work super great because 9021Orange is much thinner than 50 Years of Style.

To combat the sheerness, I blobbed the polish directly on my nails and then smooshed it with my stamper. Eventually, I just dabbed 9021Orange onto the nail and left the blobs to dry. It's a fast dry polish, so this actually worked. In the last pic, I've got 9021Orange on A Heart of Gold, and all my nails have been mattified. At this point, I had kind of a gold and orange giraffe thing going on, which, it turns out, nicely complements the stamping image I put on last. 

Stamped with Konad Black + Wet N Wild Black Creme

BP-L010 is the strange Born Pretty stamping plate I used. On the website, it's called "Aztec Plate," yet the images are dreamcatchers and giraffes and pi inside a target that's partially covered in bacon? It's a very, uh, interesting plate. It's good quality, and picking up the images was fairly easy (even with my worn out stamper). I like the way this mani turned out! It was just dumb luck that these polishes ended up being in the same week, and I think doing this weekly nail art is going to get more challenging and I will probably end up cheating and rearranging polishes to avoid making anything too hideous. Monday will be another first: the first indie polish, not counting that horrible picture of Vapid Spellcaster in the first post.

Nicole by OPI A Heart of Gold

Today's polish has a bad reputation. I mean, the specific polish has no reputation that I know of...

It's Nicole by OPI A Heart of Gold

But it's part of two controversial categories. First, it's a NOPI. NOPIs aren't popular, and I believe it's because of the obnoxious bottle shape. It's got a rounded back and a flat front, so NOPI bottles don't fit in any drawer with any other polish or indeed with others of its kind. The brush in mine also sucked.

This brush has a more pronounced C-curve than my nails

I don't think I've talked about where I've gotten most of my polishes, but I will say where I bought this one. It was at a Walgreens, for $2.19. This Walgreens no longer carries NOPI, so I guess I bought it during a stock liquidation, As an aside, you know what store does still carry NOPI? My local Ulta. Why? Why can't they focus on their Zoya selection or getting new China Glaze collections faster? 

The second divisive aspect of A Heart of Gold is that it's a textured polish. Textures are a love or hate proposition for a lot of people. AHoG has a fine, sandy texture similar to a Zoya Pixie Dust, my favorite kind of texture. I have some chunkier textures that kind of bug me. Of course, if you're anti-texture, you can always slap on some top coat.

Like so

AHoG is sparklier with top coat, since like most textures it dries matte. One coat of Seche Vite is enough to smooth it completely because of its fine grain.

 So I don't like NOPI as a brand, but I do like textures and I like the formula of this polish. These pictures are three fast-drying coats. Sadly, I also don't like the color that much. It's gold, but it's such a yellow gold that I don't like the way it looks on me very much. I had some problems with my lighting, apparently, because no two of these photos turned out to be the same color and they were all too dark. So I know you can't tell what color this is from my photos, but it is not very gold and not metallic at all and not shimmery. It's a yellowy texture. I had more positive feelings for this polish after I swatched it, but before I wrote this post. I'm surprised I wrote so much about this! I think if I write any more about this polish, I'll talk myself into hating it! That's all for A Heart of Gold. Tomorrow is nail art Saturday, so read to see how I put this week's polishes together.

OPI 50 Years of Style

Today's post is another gold polish, OPI 50 Years of Style. I'm not a huge OPI fan, so all the ones I have, I bought on sale. 50 Years of Style came from an $8 two-pack at TJ Maxx.

It's metallic

The other polish in the 2-pack was a re-labelled glitter called "Golden Waves." TJ Maxx sometimes has old OPIs that have been renamed; I've read that they're polishes that are from collections that were associated with a particular celebrity or brand. When the license runs out, the polish has to be renamed, was the theory. That makes sense, although I wonder why 50 Years of Style not only didn't get renamed, it still has the horse-patterned wrapper on the cap. (I've also never been able to figure out what Golden Waves originally was - maybe by the time I get to the G's, I'll have some readers and someone will recognize it)

I'm always looking for nice gold polishes. This one I bought some months ago and never got around to wearing. I actually like it a lot! This is two coats. It's slightly sheer and has a very smooth, fast-drying formula. I'm not usually a person who mattifies all the things, but I thought 50 Years might glow a little under a matte top coat.

Honestly, I don't have a lot to say about this polish. It's nice, but nothing really special. Join me Wednesday for something orange!

Saturday Nail Art - Stamping

Part of the point of this blog is to wear polishes I wouldn't have otherwise gotten around to. I've just shown swatches up to this point, but I think part of getting to really know a polish is using it for nail art. I didn't find the time to do anything really ornate this week, but I did want to see if Sally Girl 24 Karat would stamp well.

I edited this pic a bunch, but I didn't add the lens flare. That was in the picture already and I thought it looked cool.

Stamping isn't something I'm an expert at; even using a clear stamper, I have a hard time lining up the image on my nail. I used two images from the Uber-Chic succulents mini-stamp plate. I love succulents, so this was the first stamping plate I felt like I had to have. 

Stamped with Konad White and Sally Girl 24 Karat

The plate has a lot of cute images on it. I picked a design that actually appears twice on the plate in different sizes; the small one is perfectly pinkie-sized. I swear I'm going to stop blabbing about how my nails used to be long, but I actually swatched this week's polishes on them before the break. They turned out looking pretty bad, and I didn't get sunlight shots, just desk lamp. I thought I would show a couple even though they suck and I didn't edit them.

L: The plate
R: My nails dwarfed that tiny bottle :(

Join me next week when I resume swatching and eventually get to a polish whose name starts with a letter!

Sally Girl 24 Karat

Hello again! So in my introductory post, I didn't outline the premise of this blog. Basically, I'm going to be swatching polish from my stash and posting pics and thoughts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Saturdays, I'm going to post nail art that is hopefully made from that week's polishes (unless they are completely fuggo together, in which case I have some alternate features planned). I'm going to post in roughly alphabetical order; this blog was almost called something like “alphanailmeric,” but I didn't want to commit to only swatching in alphabetical order and also that name looks stupid.

Without further ado, here's today's polish: Sally Girl 24 Karat!

Indoor lighting

For those of you who aren't familiar with this brand, Sally Girl is sold only at Sally Beauty...or was, it's actually been discontinued recently and replaced with something else. Not the most auspicious polish to start with, now that I think of it!

Sally sold these little tiny bottles for 99 cents, which made them both temptingly cheap and a complete rip-off. Swatching this basically emptied my bottle, although in 24 Karat's defense, I did a mani with this prior to nubbing. I considered putting the pics here, but trust me, they are terrible. 24 Karat is a perfectly average gold foil; there's absolutely no point in reviewing it, since you're not likely to find it anywhere, and the tiny brush is pretty miserable to use anyway. 

That was my first set of swatches! Join me Friday for a polish that is the opposite of this one in a lot of ways (by which I mean, you can and should buy it)!