Halloweek Spooktacular Day One - China Glaze Getting to Gnaw You

Welcome to Unsweetened Nails, scary Halloween edition! Even though I don't have kids or go to parties, I still think it's a downer that Halloween is on a Monday; to compensate, I'm going to be posting Halloween manis ALL WEEK LONG! I'm also going to be featuring brand-new polishes that I just bought at Walgreen's!!! An exciting week awaits! Let's kick it off with China Glaze Getting to Gnaw You.

Last year, the TJ Maxx closer to my apartment (not the one by my job) had quite a selection of China Glaze holiday polishes. I picked up today's, tomorrows, and I think All Wrapped Up (featured in August) at the same time for $2.99 each. This year, even China Glaze doesn't have China Glaze holiday polishes.

 Getting to Gnaw You has a similar, but better, formula as All Wrapped Up. It's a jelly so packed with small glitter that it has a textured appearance without topcoat, and a ton of gorgeous depth with it. The glitter is more copper than orange, but it's so obviously a Halloween polish that it reads orange to me.

I enjoy this polish. It's pretty with top coat and despite being packed with glitter, went on pretty smoothly. Also the name cracks me up. Join me tomorrow - yes, Tuesday! - for another Halloween lovely from China Glaze.

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!

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!

Orly Black Holo

This is such a weird polish. It turned out to be Black Holo week on Unsweetened Nails, and to prove it, I've got a polish here called just that. Now, when I picked up this polish in the store, I was stunned. I mean, look at it in the bottle!

It's got a crazy warp-drive look to it

 Black Holo is indeed black and holo. Sadly, it's black holo bar glitter, so applying it is a mess. It doesn't stick up, so that's nice, but it requires a lot of manipulation.

Index: 1 coat over Revlon Black Magic
Middle: 2 coats
Ring: Sponged on
Pinky: 1 coat and sponged tip

It looks weird, and it inspired me to do some weird photo editing.

If I recall correctly, I got this polish at my local Bed, Bath, and Beyond during a big liquidation they were having. They were the only store in town with a Color Club display, and one of the few places I have ever seen Orly Color Blast. Which is good, because Orly Color Blast is a rip-off. The bottles, as you can see, are 11 mL and I think they retail for like $7. I don't know much about them, since no one buys them if they can avoid it, but I'm under the impression that a lot of them are just regular Orlys decanted out of their giant bottles into these little ones and sold for $1 less.

I do like the name "Color Blast."

While tagging this, I realized this is the first Orly I've ever posted about. This is also Unsweetened Nails' 50th post! Yes, a polish I would never actually wear from a brand that I have like six polishes from (OK, I checked and I have 13 Orlys. But still.)! Well, I started this blog with an obscure polish, so I guess it makes sense that my 50th post would be something equally obscure. Come back Friday for another black holo with black holo in the name, although this is a polish you will probably have heard of and seen before.

Colors by Llarowe Black Gold, Texas Tea

This is a nostalgic polish for me. It was my first ever black holo, and one of my earliest indie purchases. It's an absolutely stunning, inky blue-toned black and I love it so much I wish I could sleep in a vat of it.

It's kind of in-between an old school, fussy holo and a newer formula; it doesn't need aqua base coat or anything (thank goodness), but Seche does dull the holo, so all these pics are sans top coat. 

I have a few other pitch-black holos in my collection now, but this one blew me away when I got it. I bought this as a response to Color Club Beyond, which, as you may recall, is a silvery charcoal grey holo. I wanted so badly for it to be black that I went on the hunt and found this polish, which I love so much that I made two overly busy collages featuring it.

It's a bonus collage!

I was delighted to discover Colors by Llarowe when I was first starting to look for polishes that weren't super easy to find when when I was looking for them, like pitch black holos or translucent flakies. I don't really buy from the brand any more, but I do love the CbL polishes that I have. Black Gold, Texas Tea isn't the most wearable polish due to the top coat dulling issue, but I'm sure there's some trick to get around that ( I didn't try putting clear polish over it, that might work). The formula is excellent, although personally I'm not the biggest fan of these little square bottles. Join me Wednesday for some more black holographic goodness.

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.

Sally Hansen Black Diamonds

Today's polish is one of my oldest. It's not vintage or anything, I think I bought it on clearance at Sally Beauty in 2011. In real life, it's a flat black with dusty silver flecks that reads charcoal. I kind of hate it on me in person. In these pics, though, I kind of love it!

 See those teal sparkles? I never notice them in person and was surprised to see them on camera. And while you can't see the fill line in any of these pics (I assume because this polish is so thick it clings to the sides of the bottle), I have worn this a few times and it's about half gone. I think I've thinned this with Seche Restore, because I remember hating the formula of this, but I had no problem with it this time.

 Mattified, I don't like this but I feel like if you were doing roadwork-themed nail art, this would be a good base. I didn't do nail art at all this week, but check in tomorrow to see something lovely.