Polish or Perish: October 2009

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Happy Halloween!!!

Happy Halloween everyone!! Halloween is my favorite holiday and I have a few pics of some of my Halloween manis from the past week.

First, I wore OPI Glow-Ink the Dark over Rescue Beauty Lounge Underwear to help with opacity. Unfortunately, Underwear and I did NOT get along so this mani is kinda messy. Also, I smudged the corner of my thumbnail. Sigh.

This is 1 coat of Underwear and 3 coats of Glow-Ink the Dark.

Closeup on skull decal.

And this is my lame attempt at showing how well it glows. Despite this terrible picture, I promise that it really does glow like crazy!!

Next up is China Glaze Fortune Teller, which you guys have already seen a million times. This is 1 coat of FT over 1 coat of Illamasqua Boosh.

After a couple days I mattified it using Essie Matte About You.

And now my current, and favorite, Halloween NOTD, Cover Girl Crackle in Boo (1 coat) over Misa Speed of Life (2 coats).

With flash.

And just for fun, here are the 2 pumpkins my husband and I carved last night. Mine is the cat and his is the skull.

Thanks for reading and Happy Halloween!!!

Wrong holiday: Lippmann Happy Birthday

Lippmann Happy Birthday

I'm not a fan of supporting businesses or business people I'm not fond of but I couldn't help myself on this one! OMG, it is a birthday party in a bottle! I hesitate to use some high-falutin' word like "evocative" for stuff like nail polish but this is just... it's just reminds me so much of being at a kiddie birthday party with the multicolored balloons and conical hats and napkins with the balloon-and-glitter design. I'll try building it up some other time but I love the way this glitter spreads on the nail. It's not that even but it's not one of those glitter polishes that you run the chance of not getting any on your nail (like some of the bigger Nabi glitters). These pictures show two coats... and my half-stained nails. Concentrate on the glitter. :)

Close-up of Happy Birthday

I also had a good time layering it over Stargazer #232 (the one that's said to be dupey to Maybelline Mirror Image).

Lippmann Happy Birthday over Stargazer #232

Close-up of Happy Birthday layered over #232

Hint: Do not buy Happy Birthday for $18 shipping on the Lippmann website. Get it for $15 (free shipping on orders over $50, if you are inclined to order that much) on BeautySak.com.

Friday, October 30, 2009

I love Polish Swapping

There are two reasons I love MUA.

The Nail Board - Countless swatches aka "spam", tips and tricks, support, and the occasional hilarious character
The Swapping Community

On MUA you can swap your unwanted or ignored polish with others. It's a great way to try different polishes w/out the guilt.

Sometimes, I acquire a long sought after polish like Claire's Magic. (Which I put on my "wish list".)

(So nice I posted it twice. 2 coats.)

Or Sinful Colors' Daddy's Girl

(No Flash. Comparison w/ Milani's Totally Cool. DG = Middle and Pink, TC = Ring and Index. DG = 4 coats, TC = 3 coats.)

(Flash. Comparison w/ Milani's Totally Cool. DG = Middle and Pink, TC = Ring and Index. DG = 4 coats, TC = 3 coats.)

Or recent must-have China Glaze's Atlantis

(2 coats.)

Other times generous swappers include "extras" not discussed in the original swap agreement, like Maybelline Express Finish's Crimson Cramoisi

(2 coats.)

Or Fasville U.S.A. Vitamin Hardener's (lmao) Rose Wine

(2 coats. I think this is such a pretty color.)

Once every blue moon you can even get your hands on the occasional HTF like OPI's *holo* My Private Jet
...

...
(OK - sorry, too lazy to swatch this one. Plus you've seen it a million times!)

I'm still working on building up my swapping cred (w/ positive tokens) so other swappers will trust me more. Flinty, on the other hand, is a veteran swapper and actually the very first person I ever swapped with! Zoya's Nina is only one of the polishes I got from dearest Flint.

(3 Coats. This color makes me excited for work to start!)

SWAP SPAM!

Maybelline Express Finish's Purple Passion

(2 coats. Frankly I didn't like this one as much as I thought I would. Back into the swap drawer?)

OPI DS Fantasy

(1 coat bitches.)

Orly's Star of Bombay

(3 coats.)

All my MUA swappers hola at me!

China Glaze Spellbound

China Glaze Spellbound

Old news but still one of my favorites from this season. Look at all that silver and orange hex glitter packed on like that! (Three coats are pictured above.) Might be a bit too chunky for many people but you all know how much I adore ultra blingy glitter! Not that there's much sun to speak of in October (for most of us) but this one glitters like crazy in sunlight. A fabulous choice for Halloween, I think.

Video of Spellbound

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Kleancolor "neons"

Neon Purple

(2 coats)

I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a shimmer in it. This definitely needed 3 coats.

Neon Sapphire

(2 coats)

I bought this for the giveaway, but I loved it so much I had to buy myself a bottle as well. It really reminds me of RBL's Dead Calm. The photo is a little dim so the color is a bit lighter.

Neither of these are particularly neon but the blue is just absurd.

Some Misa Fall 2009 swatches: Can't Nobody Take Me Down and Sorry, Just Can't Help It

Umm, hi. These are practically opaque in one coat. It's incredible. There's still some VNL with one coat but these polishes are remarkably pigmented! For the first time in... well, since I learned that nail polish rarely looks good with one coat, I was tempted to just do a one-coat NOTD with one of these, just for the novelty of it. (I chickened out. I'm so not cool with new things sometimes.)

Misa Can't Nobody Take Me Down

I don't know why polishes that look browner on most people look redder on me. It's like how sweet floral scents turn into green scents with my skin. Anyway, this just looks dark red (with brown tones) to me. I find it sort of a conservative color: nice, acceptable, even pretty but not "OMG, GIMME". Still, I would rather not part with it because... dude, pretty much done with one coat. Too nifty to give up.

Misa Sorry, Just Can't Help It

Ah ha, much better! Love this dark amethyst/purple creme. Not as pigmented as the one above but still probably could've gotten away with one coat (if I was in a rush and... drunk or something).

As usual, Misa polishes are wonderfully easy polishes to work with. They ought to get more love than they do: reasonably priced but the quality is almost always high and they have a nice range of colors and finishes.

I'm starting to realize that I have no concept of what is an "acceptable" color is, by the way. This purple seems very work/school appropriate to me. In fact, most non-neon cremes fall into that category in my colorful little mind. Am I totally off?

In the meanwhile, I am soooooo not looking forward to my talk in a lab meeting tomorrow. I had hoped to have beautiful new results but I came up with an even bigger null dud than I started out with. This week, I spent about ten hours hunched over Excel, reformatting, messing up and un-reformatting and re-re-formatting my raw data so that SPSS could spend half a second running an ANOVA that spat out the saddest p-value on earth: 0.985. The max p-value is 1.0 and in psychology, people don't take notice of any results above 0.05. (There's obviously more to behavioral stats than just the p-value but let's not lie and say that that isn't the first thing people look at!) I mean, I couldn't even get a face-saving p-value of 0.10 (or even 0.40) which could indicate to blithe optimists that maybe, just maybe, I had tapped into some sort of "trend". 0.985 is just... embarrassingly non-significant. I'm beginning to wonder if I made some error in my data reformatting, which is throwing my numbers all out of whack. But probably not: there was a flaw in the experimental design somewhere. :(

Before I totally forget for the fourth day in a row...

D emailed me yesterday and was like, "You might want to announce the winner of the Kleancolor giveaway before people start thinking it was some sort of ploy to get more Google Followers." And I'm like, "Oh, I totally forgot to do that...!" ...and then I forgot to do it again. So, two days later, I am doing it now:

The winner of our Loyal Reader giveaway is the lovely Pinkginger! Congratulations! Pinkginger, you've got six gorgeous Kleancolor polishes coming your way! :)

P.S. Be sure to check out her wonderful blog, A Thing of Beauty.

P.P.S. We're hoping to get a banner design contest underway sometime before the year is out. The major problem is figuring out a prize awesome enough to deserve someone's original artwork as our blog's banner... :)

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

L'Oreal Star Magnet

Purple

What color does this look like to you? L'Oreal thinks its purple. Moving on...

Magnetic Grey

There's a purple-y-ness to this polish in the bottle. But it doesn't show quite as strongly on the nail.

Two Nails Inc swatches: Spitalfields and The Serpentine

I have been dying to try Nails Inc polishes for awhile so when I saw a couple on eBay for a reasonable price (and reasonable shipping), I decided, "Hey, why not?"

Kinda wish I kept my money. Maybe these polishes are other peoples' cups o' tea but it ain't mine. They are, without a doubt, beautiful colors and super pigmented, but I found them hard to work with. (It almost felt like they were too pigmented... how weird is that?!)

Nails Inc Spitalfields

This one was a predictable nightmare: yellow, my sin, my soul... or not. Anyway, three coats, hard to get even (for me, other people have great experiences with this brand), and it looked a little too stark against my skin. Three coats.

Nails Inc The Serpentine

More nail polishes should begin with the word "The". This is a gorgeous cobalt blue that leans just slightly purple. Two coats. I thought this was just going to glide onto my nail. Nope, not so much. But on the up, it's more impervious to my usual NOTD tipwear disasters: the above photo is after a day with Diamont.

Truth be told, I'm kind of glad that I didn't like these polishes. They're more than I usually pay for polishes and even more expensive to get shipped to the US. So... yay. A brand lemming down!

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

iNOTD: China Glaze Metallic Muse from the Khrome collex

Maybe I'm using a bad basecoat for it (Nubar Nu Nails) but I have had no good luck with the Khromes yet. Millennium was a disaster on me (streaky, painted right off my nail and then Diamont ruined it even further). But Metallic Muse was not as bad. Still, it took three coats for me to straighten it out. :( I must be doing something wrong...

China Glaze Metallic Muse

Definitely, definitely needed a ridgefiller for this one. Still, I love the color (green-leaning light blue and so reflective, I kind of regret wearing it on a day where I have to TA). Dried super quick (as metallics are wont to do) and I didn't even use a topcoat. Admittedly, I didn't use one out of fear of messing this mani up like I did Millennium but it worked out fine. :)

I still feel like such a dork posting iNOTDs but I always end up forgetting to take decent photos of my NOTDs, especially now, when daylight's scarce. So I figure I have time when riding the bus to/from campus to snap some sad iPhone photos and do a quick little write-up on a blogging app. :)

Theme mani using Migi Nail Art pens

Thanks to another reader request for a lesser known brand I had never heard of (and therefore went to track down), I was able to get my claws on a free set of Migi Nail Art pens from the company. These are double-sided, double...tipped? B3F nail art pens. Each pen screws apart into two little vials of nail polish (0.16fl oz with free refills!) that are capped with a brush AND a nail art tip. They come in sets of four pens (eight colors); there are... four or five different sets? I received the Silver set which is mostly cremes: blue, magenta, yellow, red, white, green, black and orange (the last one is actually a shimmer).

Now, I'm a real nail art klutz. Due to a medication that gives me slight tremors, I'm pretty impossible when it comes to free-handing pretty designs: I don't think I've ever achieved a straight or even smoothly parabolic line. Still, I thought I would give a simple design a shot... mostly because today is the day that the new Tegan and Sara record is released and I wanted an excuse to talk about it. Don't have much to say about it since I haven't had time to listen to the entire thing yet really... and I probably should refrain from going on and on and on about music on a polish/grad school blog. :D

Anyway, the result of this desire to talk about this CD is probably the worst nail art or fan art that's ever been presented on the internet. And that's probably saying a lot.

So, here was the inspiration:

And this was the disastrous result (using the magenta, orange and black Migi pens with China Glaze White-Kwik-Silvr as a base):

Yeah, I'm totally embarrassed now. Really, I'll have a much better review of Migi polish pens at a later date. Right now, I'm just super happy to have another Tegan and Sara album to keep on repeat on my iPod.

NOTD Zoya Ki

Actually this is yesterday's NOTD since i've changed my mani this morning but it's raining cats and dogs out, so no pictures of my current mani. So i've been growing my nails out for the past two months and this is where they are today. Unfortunately, this morning at the post office while rummaging through my handbag, my pointer fingernail on my right hand got torn off exposing the nail bed :( I'm incredibly saddened. It had a tear in it for about two to three weeks and I had been using Orly nail rescue on it. I guess it finally gave out this morning :( It's looking pretty bad and is beyond repair.. all I can do is wait for it to grow out :( I refuse to file all my nails down to nothing, so I'll just have a dumb looking nail. ha! It's really strange typing with it too!! It's just a sad looking nubbin lol ok ok onto the mani!

You need to click on the pics to enlarge them to see this polish's awesomeness!! It's a green/purple duochrome!!!!! I was able to capture it very easily. Most duochromes for me are almost impossible to capture and it takes me like 80 frames, this one only took about 10. It looks purple most of the time, but at certain angles you can see the duochromeness. I used three coats of polish over a base coat and it is topped with Diamont topcoat. Went on very smooth, but it did take quite a while to dry... like very long, more than two hours. I don't know how often I will be wearing this np because of its awful dry time. First time it has ever happened to me with Zoya.

I'd also like to thank Siobhan from the Nailphile for featuring us on her blog!! Very sweet of her and a great way for readers to get to know the contributors of PorP a little better :)

Monday, October 26, 2009

Halloween NOTD China Glaze Dreamsicle and Lippmann Fade to Black

Some news I learned today made me stop and remember how grateful I should be for every day that I am here with my loved ones. It is so easy to take everything for granted. I've lost sight of my gratitude for my life lately in the midst of my miserably busy life as a graduate student, when I should be daily giving thanks for being able to be a graduate student.

This is all due to news about a former boss of mine who suddenly passed away in a car accident on Thursday of last week. She was a wonderful person and I am keeping her family in my thoughts.

For lack of a better transition....Halloween is coming up! It has always been one of my favorite holidays, even in the midst of all of the offensive Halloween costumes.*

I'm very sorry for so many crappy, indoor, nighttime pics! I simply am never home when there is sunlight anymore. :( I need a lightbox!

This is 2 coats of China Glaze Dreamsicle and 2 coats of Lippmann Collection Fade to Black. I know that Deborah Lippmann has had some really dumb ideas about nail polish lately, but I do love Fade to Black. I could have easily done 1 coat of it but for some reason I can't do only 1 coat with any polish, regardless of its opacity! I am also comforted by the fact that I purchased FtB for half price ($7.50) when it was on sale at Bath and Body Works. However, Wet 'n' Wild Black Creme is also a fabulous black creme for $.99.

Anyway, here goes...

With flash:

The picture with flash shows Dreamsicle more true-to-life than the other 2 pictures but it's a little less bright orange than that. It was easy to apply and dried very fast.

You can purchase Dreamsicle from most of the e-tailers and Sally Beauty Supply stores now. Lippmann Fade to Black may still be up on the Bath & Body Works website for a discount as well as on Lippmann's website for full price.

Thanks for reading!

* This link takes you to Jezebel, a feminist blog that I love to read. However, I know of a lot of other women who hate Jezebel, so read it at your own risk. :)

OPI Holiday 2009 swatches: Ginger Bells and Sapphire in the Snow

Two more swatches from the OPI Holiday collex! Not as interesting as Merry Midnight or Holiday Glow but gorgeous cremes nonetheless. :)

OPI Ginger Bells

It was hard to capture this color. A muted orange: not a common color and likely one that most people will pass up. It's not really a "beautiful" color but I love it anyhow. Easy to apply but needed three coats to be opaque. I think I'm getting a little better with the Pro-Wide brush...

OPI Sapphire in the Snow

SO PRETTY!! Dupish to Diamond Cosmetics' fall collection's Crushed Velvet. A bit more blue and a tad glossier than Crushed Velvet but not by much. Three coats.

Polish or Perish