Halloweek Spooktacular Day Four - Sinful Colors Cloak and Swagger

Here's probably my favorite of Sinful's Halloween offerings, Cloak and Swagger. Haha! I love the name! And I love the polish, which is a gorgeous, vampy, plummy burgundy with the same fine grained texture and silvery sparkle as a Zoya Pixie Dust. I mean seriously...

 I adore Pixie Dusts, but I don't have one this color. Rather than using cute imagery involving sparkly fairies, Cloak and Swagger boasts a "tombstone matte" finish, which is just so spooky. It's so great!

 And it's maybe even greater with top coat. One coat of KBShimmer Clearly On Top eventually got sucked up by the texture, so that the finish was glossy but pebbly. Wet, like a tongue. Two coats makes it perfectly smooth; the silver glitter spangles the dried-blood base, and the result is a polish that is good all year round. Play Dead impressed me with its formula, but it was obviously a novelty polish.

Tomorrow I'll show another Sinful from this collection that also reminds me of Zoya, although it'll actually be another first for the blog: a comparison post! Come back tomorrow night to check it out!

Saturday Nail Art - In 3D

This week's nail art is either my greatest triumph, or my most abject failure. You be the judge, hypothetical reader.

OK, so I forgot to take step by step pictures of this nail art. I'll just describe what I did. For my base coat, I'm wearing 2 or 3 coats of Sinful Colors Bali Mist. For the...uh, let's call them "sculptural elements," I took my peelies of Revlon Balinese Bay and Zoya Bay and cut them up with a pair of scissors. I then used an old, gooey bottle of NYC Grand Central Station to stick them onto my nails in a random arrangement. So there you go.

The peel-off base coat I used was NYC Strip Me Off (two coats), and the pieces were fairly stiff. Still, it was possible to shape them to the contour of my nail, and they stayed on fine. I've never seen this style of nail art before, and I surely don't expect it to catch on because it's sort of gross, but if you want to try it out and put it on Instagram please let me know if you're able to come up with a clever hashtag, because it's just not happening for me tonight.

Zoya Bay

Oh boy, Zoya Bay! Remember a while back when Zoya said they were discontinuing the pixie dusts? They didn't! Summer 2016 saw the release of six pixie dusts (the "seashells" portion of the Sunsets & Seashells collection), and I have all of them. Bay is one of my favorites.

Zoya Bay has a regular pixie dust finish, so it's slightly gritty and very, very sparkly. Contrasting shimmer has been a big trend this year, and I think Bay falls into this category with its golden sparkle. It stands out brilliantly in the sun. I think this is three coats of Bay; like a lot of the pixie dusts, it's a touch sheer and dries rapidly.

I have all six of the seashells because of a Good Morning America sales code, so that's awesome. I thought it was so cool that I had a whole collection (well, half of one), and these were the first polishes I ever swatched. If you want to see the original swatches, many of which were taken with flash because I am such a pro, you can check out my Instagram. I loved Bay when I swatched it the first time, kind of forgot about it, then got to swatch and love it all over again.

One thick coat of Seche gives a glassy finish and makes the sparkle just explode. I absolutely adore this shade of sky blue, and the golden glitter in it gives me a Cinderella feel. This is a summer polish, but I really think it's delicate and pretty enough for spring, and icy enough for winter.

Even though pixie dusts aren't super awful to remove, I did wear a peel-off base coat under this and Balinese Bay earlier in the week. Come back tomorrow to see how peel-off base coat inspired some avant garde nail art.

Revlon - Balinese Bay

Boy, Revlon. This was one of my go-to brands just earlier this year, as I was getting really into collecting polish. Their Spring 2016 collection actually had a lot of good stuff in it, then nothing for summer and two polishes for fall - just like last year, actually, except last year we got Untamed, while this year there's like a hot pink with blue shimmer and some purple-blue glittery fake duochrome thing. I won't touch those, sorry Revlon. I do have a lot from this brand that I love, but I guess they must come later in the alphabet, because...

Today's polish is Balinese Bay. In all fairness, I do like this polish for what it is, which is an insane pink and black texture with scattered holo glitter. I mean, my god. I'm simultaneously delighted and appalled by this polish. I bought it at the Dollar Tree, along with a lot of Moon Candies and some Colorstays, and its collection mate Mayan Riviera. If you've heard that rumor that Seche Restore melts glitters, this is my evidence to the contrary. The same consistency as left over Nesquick at the bottom of a glass of chocolate milk, Balinese Bay has required a lot of thinning since I've had it. 

While I appreciate it as a matte texture, Balinese Bay can also be top coated with a couple thick coats of Seche Vite. You can see the little holo glitters popping.

For $1, I've actually gotten a lot of enjoyment out of this polish, and I've worn it a couple of times. I'm really not a fan of pink, but for some reason, this combo just makes me happy. While scraping Balinese Bay out of the neck of the bottle and trying to spread it on my nails is an ordeal, and the result is an extremely busy polish, I do really like the results. I used NYC Strip Me Off peel off base coat underneath, because this polish is currently 92% glitter, 7% Seche Restore, and the rest is actual suspension base. Join me Friday for another texture!

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.

China Glaze All Wrapped Up

I've said before that one of the reasons I started this blog was to rediscover polishes in my collection. I had worn this polish, China Glaze All Wrapped Up (which, like Monday's polish, also came out Holiday 2013), once before, and I remembered that it was a microglitter that was hard to get off. I wore peel-off base coat to help with removal. What I didn't remember was how much I hate the horrible sludgy formula.

Seche Vite on first two fingers, no top coat on last two

I bought this polish last December at my local TJ Maxx, brought it home, and put it away to wait for the inspiration to wear it. That spring, I picked up one of my favorite cremes, Revlon Irresistable. I thought All Wrapped up would make a great accent, so I took both polishes out and set them on the end table next to my boyfriend's and my bed (I didn't have my workstation set up yet). Disaster struck when my boyfriend knocked a pillow onto the table and sent my polishes flying. I found Irresistable quickly, but All Wrapped Up seemed to have disappeared. I searched the whole bedroom, under the bed, under the mattress, I used a flashlight, a dowsing rod, I consulted a psychic...no trace. I found All Wrapped Up on Amazon and was totally going to buy another bottle just so I could do this mani I had in mind.

Fortunately, I didn't have to buy the other bottle, because I found this one. I used to keep my purse in front of the end table (which eventually lead to my boyfriend spilling an entire drink into it, because he is a hazard), and I had searched it repeatedly since it was the obvious place for the bottle to have fallen. One day I turned my purse upside down and the bottle fell out; it had dropped into a pocket I never used and forgot was even there. Awesome story, right? Did I mention that this polish has a horrible, unworkably goopy formula that dries dull but not textured and is just generally obnoxious? Thank god I didn't buy that other bottle. Stop by on Saturday to see if I can redeem this mess.

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.

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.