ILNP After Midnight

Today's polish is one that I hemmed and hawed about for months, ILNP order after ILNP order, putting it my basket, taking it out, looking at swatches and putting it back in, reading reviews and taking it back out. Was it worth the indecision? Short answer: no.

Isn't After Midnight beautiful? Yes, it is. It's a deep, sapphire blue with big sparkly scattered holo fragments and gold flakes that you can sort of see in pictures but that don't stand out that much in real life (under daylight bulbs, anyway). ILNP makes such exquisitely lovely scattered holo jellies, I've collected most of them and I think they're just stunning on the nail and in the bottle. 

 What I'm not so crazy about is the formula. I'm pretty sure ILNP was the very first brand I tried jellies from; I think I got Lulu in my first order, which has an unusually good formula and which is still one of my favorite polishes of all time. Sadly, quite a few of the ones I've bought since have had the same problem: dragging. The second coat sticks to the first coat and as you brush, the dry polish gets pulled off the nail and the result is bald patches. This is supposed to be preventable by letting the first coat of polish dry completely before applying the second, but for some reason this doesn't work for me with ILNPs. The third coat always goes on fine and evens the whole thing out, so it doesn't affect the look of the final mani unless you've overworked the second coat trying to cover the bare spots and made gloopy globs, which I tend to do. I get this with quite a few ILNP jellies, sad to say, and  After Midnight is one of them. I still won't hesitate to recommend ILNP, I'll never stop wearing and loving their gorgeous polishes...but basically, Pahlish has spoiled me on jellies.

These were actually the first macro pics I took with my phone, which is why they are blurry as heck. I mostly just wanted to show the little gold flakes. They're the same burnished gold as in Mountain View (another troublesome jelly) and Storytelling (another favorite of mine with a very fine formula). All in all, I do like ILNP After Midnight, and I'm not sorry I bought it, but I'm not super into it, either. Join me on Friday for a polish that I looooved and can't wait to wear again!

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!

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!

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!

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!

Cupcake Polish Bat-chelor Pad

So you might notice something about today's polish: alphabetically, it comes before Zoya Bay. I had both of these when I started this blog, so it's not a matter of getting added late; I plan these posts out weeks in advance using Google calendar, and I had them on there in the correct order. Why did Bay appear last week? Well, remember the weird nail art I did using Balinese Bay and Regular Bay after I'd peeled them off? I guess I thought that was such a good and natural idea that I put Bay into the wrong week just so I could create it. I only bring it up to reassure everyone that yes, I am sticking to my loose, mostly alphabetical structure, and I do indeed know the alphabet. Anyway, here's Bat-chelor Pad.

 Bat-chelor Pad is from Cupcake's Fall 2015 Modern Vampire collection along with Bloodhound, which will be making an appearance here soon. This is a very dark navy blue linear holo. Like all of the Cupcakes I have, this polish has a super thick but very workable formula and dries rapidly.

This is a really beautiful polish! This tone of blue is not my absolute favorite to wear, but this is such a sparkly rainbow-fest on the nail that I love it. These pictures are with base and top coat (unlike Wednesday's polish...you'll be able to tell the difference, trust me) because I wore this as a full mani, but I don't remember how long I had it on for or what the wear was like. I'm assuming it was good. Come back Wednesday to see...Actually, if you want to skip Wednesday's post, that's probably for the best. Definitely come back Saturday to check out the nail art, though! It turned out pretty well this week!

Liquid Sky Lacquer Babi's Bur-Bindi

Here's a polish that was one of my first indie purchases. Liquid Sky Lacquer had a sale last summer, when I was still a broke student, so I spent the $8 or whatever that I had in my PayPal account left over from doing transcription jobs at her sale. I bought my first holos: a mini of Pure Luxury, and a mini of a red holo I can't remember the name of. It turned out to be out of stock, so Carolyn, the maker (as you can see on the label below) gave me a partial refund and included a sample of today's polish, Babi's Bur-bindi.

This polish was named after the blogger who runs Colorsutraa. I'm not sure if it was a collaboration shade or what, but it's definitely a unique color. The official description calls it a burgundy, but I think it's more of a mahogany. It's a reddish brown base with a rose metallic gleam in some lights. 

 I've gotten two full manis out of my sample bottle so far, and I'm pretty sure there's enough for a third in there. I feel like I don't hear a lot about Liquid Sky Lacquer, but they've really got some nice brown holos in the shop (this particular one has been discontinued). I think these were actually my first holos, and even though I love them, I haven't bought anything else from this brand. I should probably change that!

I had two holos and two jellies this week! Come back tomorrow to see if I was able to successfully combine them.

Saturday Nail Art - Chevrons

So, against all odds, the nail art I made from this week's polishes turned out...kind of OK?

 Nina Ultra Pro Art Walk, if you recall, is a hot pink creme with bright blue microglitter that just doesn't look right. Revlon Artsy has quite noticeable large bright blue glitter, and it seems like the colors actually go together (in a tacky sort of way). The subdued pink of Astra separating the two saturated colors ties it all together. I actually kind of like this.

I didn't remember to do a step-by-step for this art, but basically, I started with a base of Astra and then I used Scotch tape. Pretty simple. Join me next week when I finish up the A's!

Cirque Astra

So I swear I'm not some indies-only nail snob. It was not intentional that both the mainstream polishes (one salon, one drug store) would be hideous and the indie would be one of my absolute favorite polishes. I didn't invent the alphabet! Today just happens to be Cirque Astra.

 I had some indoor photos too, but the colors were off and just didn't do justice to this polish. I love taking pictures of Cirque Astra (my very first Instagram posts were of this polish!), and when I get my indoor lighting setup figured out, I'll probably take some more pics of it.

Astra, like Acid Wash, is from Cirque's Spring 2016 Speckled and Sparkled collection. The silver and charcoal specks make it look so much like marble when it's shiny; mattified, it reminds me a lot of easter candy, specifically those little chocolate eggs with the chalky candy carapace. Astra has the best formula of the four speckles, in my opinion. I considered leaving Astra out of this week's art, because it's clearly in a different league than the other two polishes, but I decided to just go for it. Come back tomorrow to see the art!

Cirque Acid Wash

Today's polish is from spring of this year, part of Cirque's Speckled & Sparkled collection.

It's actually the only one I had left untried

I had heard good things about Cirque, but had held off buying any until this collection. I picked up all four of the speckles, which are all crellies with little pigmented and metallic flecks in them. Acid Wash has blue and silver speckles in a white base, and it resembles a fancy countertop. 

I love this finish so much, and Acid Wash has a beautiful color scheme. All the speckles are among my favorite spring polishes. 

One downer about these polishes is they all have kind of a chunky formula. The base is slightly thicker than it should be, meaning that doing more than two coats is useless, since the flecks stop showing through. At the same time, it's almost always necessary for me to do three coats to get the polish even. These have a quick-drying (as in, "dry while you're applying them" quick) formula, and they don't self-level as well as I'd like. I think it's worth wrestling with them because they look so awesome.

KBShimmer Acetone it Down

Today's polish, like Wednesday's, has a punny name. However, not only does this polish's name actually describe it well, it's also simple, cute, and easy to type: Acetone it Down.

Acetone it Down is a holo, but it's a soft one. The base is creamy, smooth, and just a little sheer; sheer enough that the holo particles are visible through the polish, but opaque at two coats with really excellent coverage. This is another one with a stellar formula. It's also another exclusive, kind of; this is one of KBShimmer's "misfit" line of polishes, which are versions of the regular collections that didn't turn out as they should have. Acetone it Down is a version of a nude holo that got a little too much grey in it.

Like the name says, the polish is toned down. It's not a loud, bright, crazy linear holo; it's very soft and demure. The website calls this one a taupe, which it is, but I was really delighted when I put it on because to me, this is a greige. A greige holo! Isn't that cool? It's such a pretty polish that I didn't want to take it off...so tomorrow's nail art was done over the top of it. Come back Saturday to see the transformation!

KBShimmer A-Blazing

Today's polish is from one of the most well-known and beloved indie brands, KBShimmer, yet it's still obscure. It's called A-Blazing, and it's a creme with sparse, scattered shimmer particles. I've got to say...it's not one of my favorites.

It's pink.

This polish was an exclusive from A Box, Indied. The very last A Box, Indied, as a matter of fact, from June 2016. I had seen swatches of all the polishes before I decided to buy the set, but bloggers didn't say that A-Blazing was pink. It was supposed to be orange; one person described it as coral, but it sounded like a coral-leaning orange with orange sparks of shimmer. It is not.

The box's theme was campfire stories, and all the other polishes were named after spooky urban languages. A-Blazing was supposed to represent the campfire itself, an idea I really like. I feel like KBShimmer, as an enduring brand that has acted as a gateway to indie polish purchasing for many people, earned the right to occupy the central space. Unfortunately, I'm not really into the polish itself. The formula was great (this is 2 coats but with careful application, one would suffice), but the color, yikes. I also always find it kind of ironic that KBShimmer is a brand that is not known for its shimmer polishes, and in fact the shimmer in this is the weakest element. There is a little bit of sparkle in the sun, as you can see in the lower right of the collage, but it's not very much. The shimmer is somehow too subtle and obtrusive at the same time, and this is because it doesn't dry smooth. It's not textured or anything, just a little bumpy, but still. If I was into pink cremes, I would love the formula on this polish but still be a little disappointed with the chunky shimmer. I've got to give this one a meh. Things will look up Wednesday, though, with a polish that I found to be a pleasant surprise.