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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

Saturday Nail Art - Jelly Sandwich of Sorts

This week's nail art is a little bit of a hard sell. I had two polishes with holo in them, and two polishes that were a jelly finish. I did a little experimenting (outtakes at the bottom of the post) and realized that Zoya Aurora and LA Colors Atomic actually combined to make a pretty awesome deep plum.

I decided to go with a dry brush mani. I did a base coat of Aurora, then swipes of Atomic and Liquid Sky Lacquer Babi's Bur-Bindi, the polish I was afraid would clash hard with the other two. In fact, it got kind of lost in the Aurora sandwich. I knew the formula was pretty opaque in one coat, so I thought I would see if it stamped...

...and so it does! The red-brown still doesn't stand out super well against the warm purple, but maybe you can tell that these are roses. I am pretty sure this pattern was from a Born Pretty plate, although I am terrible at making a note of what plate I used or remembering what they are called.

Not sure if I would call this mani a success, or just a surprisingly pleasing failure. 

Here's the test run, when I discovered how cool the two colors look together and that Babi's could be used to stamp a lovely little fern. This was a pretty good week overall; come back next week for some stranger things.

Zoya Aurora

Oh my gosh, you guys, the first Zoya! I was pretty resistant to Zoya when I was newer to polish because I had heard that some people have problems with it if they're not using Zoya base and top coat. It chips fast or doesn't apply well, those sorts of things. I took a chance on Zoya during one of their Four Free sales, which is essentially a 50% off sale, and long story short it's now my favorite mainstream brand.

Aurora is one of Zoya's scattered holos, and is probably the most renowned. It's packed with holo flakes in a sheer but pigmented jelly base. I'm not going to lie, I'm really, really glad that Zoya came out with Finley because I prefer a blurple to a red-violet like Aurora, but that's not to say Aurora isn't gorgeous.

 I mean, look, I couldn't stop taking pictures of this polish. It's amazing in every light. I also love the Zoya bottle so, so much. It's got such a great shape! Another great thing about Zoya is it's really easy to get featured on their website if you use the hashtag #everydayzoya on Instagram. I've gotten a few on their and it's very gratifying. Join me next time for another holo!

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!

Revlon Artsy

First off, I'm just going to apologize for the poor quality of this post: I'm sorry. I'm sorry about my bad retouching...

 The lighting isn't so great either...

There's some really inconsistency in the photo editing...

And what a lack of variety in the hand poses!

Overall, a really inferior post, even for this blog. But you know what? I can't bring myself to reswatch this polish. Monday I mentioned the mental garbage pile? Yeah, this one is in there, too. I'll be generous and say this polish was "challenging" to apply. Lots of pushing glitter around in a thick base. This isn't a polish you brush on; you dab it, or better yet, you don't buy it in the first place. It does look pretty cool matte, I'll give it that. Join me Friday for this week's good polish, which happens to be my favorite pink.

Wet N Wild Megalast 2% Milk

Today's polish is a sheer nude. It's a well-loved, accessible, affordable, and effective YNBB (your nails but better) polish from classic cheap drugstore brand Wet n Wild. I bought this because it came so highly recommended by the nail community, even though I hate sheer nudes. I don't want my nails to look milky and shiny! It grosses me out, just like actual milk. Maybe it's not so much a YNBB; maybe it's more of a YNBS (your nails but slimier). This is the slimiest polish in the galaxy.

This is a heavily edited photo. 

This kind of polish is seen as essential that everyone should have in her collection, though. It's versatile, subtle, and is appropriate for a wide range of situations. If you need a sheer nude to round out your collection, you could certainly do worse than 2% Milk.

In the end, I have to say I do like this polish. It applies really well, with very little streaking and no dragging. I did 3 coats for the pictures, but I wish I had left it at 2; more layers make the polish more gelatinous-looking, rather than more opaque. To really make this one shine, you need a matte top coat.

I edited this with the Windows 10 image viewer, so it's technically not Photoshopped..

Speaking of cheap-yet-high-quality drug store polish, here's NYC Matte Me Crazy on top of 2% Milk. Mattifying gives it a frosted-glass look that I love. I'm not a huge matte polish person, either; there's just something about this color with this finish that makes me feel like my nails are made of porcelain. I feel like the daintiest.

The plan for tomorrow is to show nail art made using this week's polishes. It's nothing super fancy, but I wore it all day and kept admiring it (even though I'm still missing my long nails). Check out tomorrow's post to see.