China Glaze - For Audrey

I know everyone has probably seen this lovely polish 4,593,789 times by now...but it's a recent a addition to my collection, and this is the first time I've worn it. I think I overlooked it due to my former aversion to cremes (which thankfully, I'm getting over now).

For Audrey is a gorgeous, robin's egg/Tiffany blue creme polish. It applied like a dream, with minimal streakiness on the first coat, and absolutely none on the second. It was also perfectly opaque in two coats, and I think if I were a more skilled polisher, it might have been good to go in one! I think this dreamy blue polish is helping me over the last of my mild dislike of cremes, since part of my problem with them was how hard it can be with some cremes to get a non-streaky finish in less than four or five coats, particularly for someone with a noticeable lack of patience and steady hands, like myself. Now that I know a creme polish can apply this flawlessly even in my clumsy paws, I foresee a bright future full of beautiful cremes on my fingertips! :) Thanks, China Glaze!
All pics are two coats, plus base and top coat.

Thanks for looking, and happy polishing! :)

Not Dead Yet - And Savvy Femme Couture- Prince Ala Charm

Sorry for my abrupt disappearance over the past week or so; I haven't given up and abandoned my blog, despite how it may look. I've been having some pretty serious trouble with my internet connection, which, combined with some camera difficulties (mainly caused by me being a bit of an idiot noob about digital cameras) knocked me out of commission for a while as far as posting or commenting goes.

But...I'm back...and I have a beauty of a polish to show you all today. Well, a hidden beauty. Let me explain...

When I saw Prince Ala Charm tucked into a display at Sally's earlier this summer, it was love at first sight - or at least strong like at first sight. Such a pretty, shimmery, glistening blue. I have a weakness for blue...and shimmer. Done deal. I brought it home and tucked it into my untried stash.

And dug it out yesterday and tried it on. And promptly fell right out of love. My prince was a frog! Even though it doesn't look it in the bottle, it's sheer. Extremely, extremely sheer. Seven-desperate-coats-and-still-not-bottle-color-or-opaque sheer. Not at all pretty, just very washed-out looking. So, determined to make this doomed relationship work somehow (yeah, I have relationship drama with my polishes; I said I had a passion for nail polish, and I meant it! ;) I tried layering it over white. No dice. It was a little less sheer, but still disappointingly blah and watery-looking.

I was about to give up and resign it to my small never-to-be-worn-again polish box, when I figured: Well, why not see how it looks over black? And this is what happened:
With the kiss of a layer of black polish, my frog turned back into a prince - a gorgeous, shimmering, almost glass-flecked looking blue prince! It reminds me of the color of a blue morpho butterfly's wings (which I meant to add a picture of for comparison, but I forgot, and now I don't think my internet connection will hold up long enough to add it in.) Here it is with flash, since there was no sun to be found today:
And here, again with flash and deliberately blurred so youo can get an idea of the beautiful depth and shimmer:
So my fairy-tale romance with Prince Ala Charm had a happy ending after all; I just have to remember the next time I want to wear it, to layer it over black or another darker color. It's practically pointless on its own. All pics are three coats layered over Wet'n'Wild black polish plus top coat.

So glad to be back to blogging again; I've really missed it, and all the beautiful blogs I read regularly.

Color Club - Sexy Siren

My camera really doesn't seem to handle glitter well. Either that, or I just haven't figured out how to take really good pictures yet. That's entirely possible - it's a new camera (it was a birthday present from my very sweet boyfriend about a month ago) and I'm still not always sure if I'm using the right settings, etc...Anyway, these pictures didn't come out entirely accurate as to color. This polish is actually much less turquoise than it looks here. Weirdly enough, the bottle in the first photo is fairly color accurate. (Why will it show the right color in the bottle but not on my nails in the very same picture??)
Sexy Siren is part of the fall 2008 Color Club Glitter Vixen collection, all of which I coveted at the time, but never got around to actually buying. So when I spotted a lone bottle of Sexy Siren on a dusty shelf at the back of one of the local beauty supply stores, I pounced.
It's a very pretty medium blue glitter in a clear base. It went on very smoothly, and would have been opaque in three coats, but I used four, since I never quite know when to quit when there's glitter involved. My mind goes blank, except for the single thought: "MOAR GLITTER!" as I gleefully glop on coat after coat...Yes, I have issues. ;) It dried pretty rough to the touch, as so many glitter polishes do, but a top coat helped smooth it out.
I layered the polish over black for added opacity and to make the color of the glitter "pop" a little more. All pics are four coats plus base and top coat.

Here it is with flash: (There was no sun when I was taking these pics, more's the pity; it was another cloudy afternoon.)
I may just have to try to hunt up the rest of the Color Club glitter polishes at some point.

Claire's Ocean Breeze

Blue skies and butterflies...

I admit, I bought this polish purely out of curiosity. I had never tried a layered polish before, and I wondered how it would come out on the nail. It was also part of the ten-for-ten-dollar polish sale I lucked into a while back at Claire's, so for a dollar I figured I'd give it a try.

Well, it came out blue. I'm not sure why; as a sticker on the top of the cap instructed, I did not shake it, and I tried to be careful to dip the brush all the way down into the bottle to try to pick up some of the layered colors. It still came out blue.

It is, however, a very lovely blue, a color that makes me think of cloudless summer skies. Here it is in the shade:
And in the sunlight:
Although the polish seemed a little thick (I'm guessing maybe it has to be to maintain the layered effect in the bottle instead of all mixing together) it went on very smoothly, dried in a perfectly reasonable amount of time, and was completely opaque in two coats. (The fact that it's flooded onto my cuticles in the pics is entirely the fault of my shaky hands, not any flaw in the polish consistency itself.) The wear is good, as I've found it to be with all of the Claire's polishes I've tried so far - no chipping, smudging, dinging, or tip-wear after two days.

Before I took the pictures, I decided to fancy it up a bit with some pink and white butterfly and flower nail art stickers on the middle finger (which is usually where things go horribly, tragically wrong for me because I'm apparently sticker-challenged and always end up with the darn things stuck firmly somewhere I don't want them, and then ruin my manicure trying to pry them off and re-stick them. That's why I only did one nail on each hand; it turned out pretty well this time and figured I'd best not push my luck!)
I absolutely love this shade of blue! :)

I wonder, though, is there a trick to applying layered polishes that I just don't know? Has anybody else tried them and gotten a multi-colored effect?

N.Y.C. - Empire State Blue

First of all, welcome to each one of my followers, and thank you!! :) I'm so thrilled that there are people who actually want to read my ramblings! When I started this blog, I didn't know if I'd ever have any followers at all; I can't believe that now I have ten! I can't tell you what a joy it is to be able to share my love of polish with people who actually understand and share my obsession. I hope I can continue to make my blog interesting to all of you.

Now, on to the polish:

I couldn't get a color-accurate photo of this one, no matter what I tried. In real life, it's several shades darker than it looks in these pictures, and it also has a lot more blue in it. It's a peacock blue with blue-green shimmer.

This pic (in sunlight) is the closest to the actual color, although it's still a little too light:
I dearly love blue and green polishes and I have (far too) many of them, yet I don't think I've got another blue quite like this one in my collection. However, I thought it didn't look quite as pretty on the nail as it did in the bottle for some reason. The shimmer didn't show up quite as much...I guess polishes can be funny that way sometimes; occasionally what looks stunning in the bottle will turn out to be just kind of ordinary on, while a polish that looks a little average in the bottle can turn out to be a real knockout when you wear it.

I still think it's very pretty, though.

With flash:
It went on much more sheer than I expected. I ended up using a white basecoat to hide the dreaded VNL (Wet'n'Wild, my standard white) and it took four coats to reach bottle color. So all the pics are four coats plus base and topcoats.

L.A. Colors Color Craze - Wired??

Just a quick post tonight. I've not been feeling well, and today was kind of stressful, so I'm running a little low on energy. I wanted to get this one posted, though.

I think this one is "Wired", from what I can tell by looking at color swatches online. The name's not printed on the bottle anywhere, and I absent-mindedly threw away the packaging the name was printed on. (Incidentally, I hate it when companies don't mark the name or at least a number somewhere on the bottle. I always intend to label those bottles myself, then I always forget, because I can be a bit woolly-minded sometimes.)

Anyway, this color is a really pretty deep, bright blue, almost a cross between a light navy and a glowy cobalt. It applied with no problems at all, and the pics show two coats plus base and top coat.

However - and this is one of my pet peeves - there was one major problem with this polish. I did my nails with this in the early evening and went to bed five hours later with my manicure in perfect shape. And - to my annoyance - woke up with sheet marks all over my nails. You can sort of see them in the pictures. I just don't have any patience with polishes that stay tacky that long. I really do like the color, though, so I'll probably give it another try sometime in the future to see if it dries any better.

I found this at the Dollar Tree along with about eight or nine other colors. I certainly hope they don't all have drying-time issues, since I bought one of each. Has anybody else tried these and had a similar problem or was it just me?