Hard Candy Beetle

You know when you pass something by and kick yourself later, only to be given a second chance by another brand? THANK YOU, Hard Candy!

Please feast your eyes (yet again, as you've probably seen this fifty times) on Beetle by Hard Candy -



After passing over Orly's Space Cadet during a (rare) frugal moment in Ulta and kicking myself for days, I waltzed on in to a Walmart and was granted this little lovely. A color-changing wonder, this is another one of those car accident colors - a color so intriguing that you risk running into other cars while turning your wheel because "OOOOOOH look at that color!"

Here she is "in motion" -



Olive-gold-orange-pink, Hard Candy is all that an a bag of chips. Whether you opt for this one or Space Cadet, get one of these lovelies for your tips.

Happy day, all!

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Old NOTD: Hard Candy Stop

I'm baaaaaaaack!

(And dude, we're nearly at 500 followers! Damn, when did that happen? The response to this blog in the last half year or so has been incredible: sometimes, it's amazing to me that so many people voluntarily take the time out of their day to check out what we're up to. Thank you so much!)

Anyway... today, I have a polish for you that I had lemminged forever. FOR-EVER.

The first time I wore it was my senior year of college. I was in the Vagina Monologues (I was the Vagina Happy Fact) and someone had this backstage. All of us in the production put it on right before our first performance. It just seemed perfect then.

I don't think I properly remembered it on my nails, because I remembered primarily the bottle color:

Hard Candy Stop (in bottle)

Look at the gold! Just look at it!

So I yearned for the polish for a year or two. Then I discovered Makeup Alley and swapping. Sometime within my first hundred swaps, I enthusiastically swapped for Stop. And then being underwhelmed with it, I swapped it away a few months later.

Well, fast forward three years and I again seemed to only remember the bottle color. Gorgeous red with vibrant gold. Ahhh! Why did I ever swap it away? What folly was that, that made me swap it away... etc, etc, etc.

Some lovely Polish or Perish reader sent me an RAOK of a Stop mini (for which I am everlastingly grateful). But it was different than the one I remembered: instead of crazy gold shimmer, it had red shimmer. Huh. Weird.

A month later, I spot it on eBay and swoop it up (not for an exorbitant price, thankfully). It came in a good amount of time for a purchase from the UK and I see the pretty, pretty bottle and oh-so-happily apply it... and... I remember why I swapped it away.

Where did the shimmer go??

Hard Candy Stop, close-up on nail:

Hard Candy Stop

It applied gorgeously in two coats, is a lovely matte-looking (but not matte) metallic red with subtle yellow specks that I suppose is the gold shimmer. I'm not swapping it away again because I'll probably forget why I swapped it away to begin with then buy it again in a few years.

Argh. None of my lemmings seem to lead me anywhere good lately.

Anyhow, my brief vacation from the blog was good for me, although most of it was spent tearing my hair out over my work. ...actually, I also spent some time swatching polishes because next month will be an extremely busy month and I wanted to be able to post stuff through May. What is happening in May?

1. It's the last month of my academic year so... crunchtime, all around.
2. My birthday is on the ninth and I'm not celebrating it because...
3. Ten days after that, I have to present the sum total of the past nine month's worth of work to my department for my formal second-year talk. (Let's talk about how much I sucked at research this year some other time.) I'm actually giving my talk a week EARLY because...
4. I'm leaving for Boston the day my classmates are giving their talks. Why Boston (again)? I am presenting my first ever poster at the Association for Psychological Science's annual convention. Normally, I wouldn't bother at all with APS but it's in Boston. So if I can get a line in my CV and see my friends at the same time, dude, that's a good day's work right there. Also, the SO is accompanying me to Boston and we'll be staying there through Memorial Day weekend. AND I'm super excited that I'll get to meet up with my unofficial undergrad advisor while there as I haven't seen her in years. The SO is flying back home right after the weekend but...
5. I'll be going down to NYC for a few days after Boston but then coming right back up again for my first college Reunion. I'll be sleeping in dorms and eating dining hall food. Awesome possum. No, seriously, it will be a blast. I plan on spending a lot of quality time with one of my best friends from college and we'll be "reuning" (not a word) with a TON of people from our dorm our first year. And a lot of old, wise, spunky alumnae who are, like, 87 but can beat 19-year-olds at tennis. When I'm that old, I want to be that amazing. It's my life's goal to be like them.

So all in all, that's almost two weeks of travel. And kind of resembles the three-leg trip I did in November that I needed most of December to recover from. And the week I get back, I will have a ton of writing to do for my classes and my second-year paper... but then, it is summer vacation! ...where I will be doing a ton of research and even more writing. But still, it'll be "vacation" and I won't have classes for a couple of months. WOOOHOOO!

Of course, right now, looking at my coming six weeks, all I want to do is go *splat*.

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Hard Candy, Part III of III... finally.

With a couple of exceptions (Hot Pants which was just sad and Date Night which clashed incredibly badly with my skin), I'm very happy with my selections from this collection. When are they going to release more? $5 each plus $1 shipping from Walmart.com... not too shabby. The cremes and shimmers from these collections are beautiful, vivid and pigmented.

Hard Candy Frenzy

Turquoise creme. Maybe a touch greener IRL. Two coats, completely opaque, very glossy. So very easy to apply: I don't have the world's best application skills -- I always have a messy gap -- but good polishes are good at compensating for skill and care. ;) I don't know why it's named "Frenzy": I think it's such a happy and calming color.

Hard Candy Splendid

It's like cheer in a bottle! If you've read this blog for awhile, you know I'm nutsy about yellows. Bright, strong medium yellow, definitely not pastel. Streaky during coats one and two (par for course for yellows), evens out just beautifully by coat number three. No weird bald spots! :)

Hard Candy Lava

This was the biggest surprise of the collection for me. It looks like it's bright red shimmer with tons of gold shimmer but when you put it on, it's sparkling burning orange embers all the way. Very light-catching. Heck, very eye-catching! I got so many compliments on this one. One woman commented it looked like I had Christmas ornaments on my fingers. It sounds like a weird compliment but really, she said it so enthusiastically it was hard not to interpret that as a REALLY nice thing to say about a manicure. Pictures do NO justice to this manicure at all, especially when there's no sun out to help it out. I almost didn't buy it because it looked like your run-of-the-mill-red-shimmer-with-gold-shimmer but I was looking for a replacement for my long lost Hard Candy Stop... I thought maybe this would be a dupe. Alas, it is not Stop (for which I am desperate, for sentimental reasons) but it's beautiful and I'm glad it was what it is.

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Hard Candy, Part II of III (mostly Mr Wrong and a variation on it)

Hard Candy Mr Wrong

I love this color! It's like a dusty blue-purple-grey shimmer with gold and silver foil! Someone on NB said it looked like SH Opulent Cloud on crack and I'm wont to agree with that. Another hard-to-pin-down color. Three coats, an absolute stunner. There are about seven colors of shimmer in here and they complement each other very well.

Close-up of Mr Wrong

So when I saw Hard Candy Break Up in the bottle, I was super excited:

I knew it wasn't going to be opaque on the nail so I didn't even bother trying it on without layering it over something. So after my above Mr Wrong swatch, I layered Break Up over it:

Hard Candy Mr Wrong with Hard Candy Break Up

REALLY messy. VERY busy. Dizzying. Clashing. Fun but extremely ugly, imo. The opalescent hex glitters do not spread evenly at all on the nail. The above shows three coats of it. Does look a bit like a mermaid's tale, doesn't it? Except one that's been through a blender. With paint.

Close-up of Mr Wrong with Break Up

Video of Mr Wrong with Break Up

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Walmart Hard Candy swatches, Part I of III

AAAAHHHHHH!! Busy busy busy week! I'm flying cross-country to Boston for the annual Psychonomics conference this Thursday and then taking Amtrak down to NYC on Sunday. (And then on Wednesday, I'm to SO's family's home for Thanksgiving.) 4 states in 10 days. 3 of those are conference days. Anyone who has been to a conference can probably attest to the fact that they can fry the brain up good and crispy. It's information and social overload. Tons of people. Tons of new and interesting research. Tons of opportunities to feel really, really, really dumb and insecure.

I'm so totally nervous about the travel aspect of it all: I always get sick, I'm always jetlagged, and, let's face it, I'm not smart enough to understand how a big metal tube with engines doesn't just fall out of the sky for no good reason. (The statistics make me feel better though. We are, after all, more likely to die from a car crash than a plane crash. Stats, I understand. Physics and engineering, I do not.) For someone who hates travel, that's waaay too much travel for me. I try to focus on the positives though: I get to see about a dozen of my friends (not to mention my family) and probably a few of my former professors as well. Grad school, for me, has been a pretty alienating experience so it's a real treat to spend time with people I only will realistically get to see once a year (or two, or three). I will also get to revisit old stomping grounds and, you know, experience the joy of being in a city as opposed to a small town.

Anyway, the point of my outlining my plans for this week and next is to say that I have more HC polishes that I haven't had a chance to swatch and so will not post them until I get back from my travels. But I have had these swatches for about a month now and don't want to wait any longer to post them. :)

Hard Candy Hot Pants

Sheer dark dusty purple jelly with large and small holo hex glitter. Impossible to build up to full opacity (the above shows three coats -- doesn't look like it, huh?), which sucks because this would be incredible if it weren't so sheer. Probably would make a fun glitter topcoat... although you need at least two layers of it to get a decent (imo) amount of hex glitter on the nail.

Close-up of Hot Pants

Bottle pic of Hot Pants:

Whimper. Looks so fun in the bottle. Really disappointed with this one.

Hard Candy Envy

Extremely dark green with forest green shimmer. Was pretty easy to apply and could've been fine at two coats (the above is three). One of those polishes that just lights up when the sun hits it.

Hard Candy Sweet P

Left to right: four coats (index), three coats (middle), two coats (ring) and one coat (pinky)

I really like the lime green color of this fine glitter polish but omg, it takes a long time to build up (and needs some time in between coats). It's also practically nonexistent at one coat... but then builds up really quickly for the second one. I'm starting to get really picky about my glitters. I have so many of them that ones that don't apply in predictable ways kind of annoy me. But I'll be keeping this one (probably) because I don't have any other fine lime green glitters. Really gorgeously sparkly in sunlight though!

Video of Sweet Pea

I'm a little disappointed in the rings. I had some Hard Candy back in the day and I loved the jelly-textured rings. These are just hard and plastic that have no traction on the tops of the polish bottle and I've probably lost most of them already. These bottles are also small for $5 (plus the $1 shipping each that I paid for at Walmart.com): 0.35ml! I guess that's better pricing than before but considering the difference in volume, probably not by much.

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