March Untrieds: Rainbow!

Hey everyone! Sarah, Amanda, and I decided March would be Rainbow month! What does that mean? Anything rainbow goes! Linear holos, rainbow glitters, skittle manis, nail art - whatever! As long as something untried is involved it goes! Today I used one of my untried linear holos, Nfu Oh 61. Nfu Ohs are a little temperamental in the application area so you must must must let each coat dry and you better work fast or it'll drag! I didn't use base or top coat for these photos and all went alright!

Sorry, no sunlight photos. I swatch at night 90% of the time so there was no sun to speak of when I put this on... which in hindsight was silly but too late now!

xoxo,
Amanda

November Untrieds Part 7

Hey, happy Tuesday! Madeline and I are almost done with this challenge and I'm already preparing for December: glitter. I have about 784731897487198 indie glitters that can use my attention so next month's challenge is perfect! Let me know if you'd like to join, Amanda already signed on!

Today I have Ray-diant for you which is from one of their recent collections that I actually totally ignored. I ended up getting this in a random grab bag and I kind of fell in love instantly - I can see this being a really great accent nail that would match a lot of other polishes.

I wish I could tell you what color this is but I honestly don't even know. It's primarily silver but there's a bunch of other glitters sparsely thrown in so just look at the enlarged version and see for yourself - it's quite lovely :)

xoxo,
Amanda

Work Inappropriate #7: A-England Merlin

Hey there, how's everyone doing? This is my last Work Inappropriate polish :( After this one, it was back to work for me. I thought I'd go out with a bang, so I ended with A-England Merlin.

Let me first, again, gush about how much I love A-England. Adina is the most spectacular person and she interacts with her customers, she makes a great product, and now she offers worldwide free shipping. She makes a great polish and she does it with class and a genuine love for what she does, which really shows. Oh, and she has this adorable kitten Tristam who is the cutest thing ever. (Shh, don't tell my grown-up cats I said that.)

Below you will see Merlin, which is a silver glitter polish (duh) that can be built up to be worn alone. I can't really see this as a topcoat, it's much too dense and I like it that way. This is three coats and some fast dry topcoat because it dried to a slightly gritty texture.



Here's a close up for texture purposes. You can see, it's a little Grit-ney Spears, but no biggie ;)

 I enjoyed wearing this one. I felt very regal the whole time I wore it, thinking of knights and queens and chivalry. :) Thoughts?

Work Inappropriate #1

Hey girls! This week I'm so excited to show you a whole bunch of polishes I don't normally get to share because I have to be work-appropriate. However, I'm off work this week so I'm wearing all the ones I've been longing for! Starting this off is OPI Crown Me Already! from the Miss Universe collection. I'm so glad they included this one, because it's a gorgeous, disco-ball, silver glitter bomb that is opaque on its own and doesn't require tons of coats. I used 3 coats for the swatches below and no base color: this is all glitter, baby!

In sunlight

In artificial lighting

Up close to show the texture and glitter

I really liked wearing this polish! I wore it for my friend's birthday because I figured it would match anything I wore (except gold, which I don't wear). What do you think?

xoxo,
Amanda

Zoya Jo

Hey girls! The subtitle of today's post could be "A Polish I'm Not Crazy About, But Not Sure Why". I have for you Zoya Jo, which was one of my picks in the buy one get two free promo Zoya recently had (I love Zoya, their promos are awesome!)

Jo is a perfectly nice blue with a soft shimmer and is a color I would definitely describe as "gentle".

But for whatever reason I just wasn't in love with it and I had all these polishes out and, next thing you know... This Wet n Wild dusty Super Silver made its way on top. Super Silver reminds me of the sparkle in No More Waity Katie, and I think it could make some excellent frankens! I loved it as top coat, but I wonder what it would look like within another polish.

(PS Sorry this picture below is only two of my fingers. You may notice in the pictures above that my middle finger is about to rip off, which was already occuring but the acetone to take off my previous mani didn't do much for it and I just kept it long for these pictures and then it got chopped, because it was literally falling off, so by the time glitter came into play it was long gone :( Poor middle finger...)

Thoughts? Do you love Super Silver as much as I do?

xoxo,
Amanda

Color Club Holiday Collection Swatches!

Hey hey hey ladies! My post today is kinda special because it involves two of my favorite things: glitter (yummm) and new collections! These are from Color Club's Beyond the Mistletoe holiday collection. I realize it's September 4th and I'm talking about a Christmas season collection, but deal with it. I rarely get to bring you collections first-ish (the only other time was Tronica) so I'm excited! Tell all your friends, tell your neighbor, tell your milkman! And if you still have a milkman, tell him to telegraph his best friend to let him know too! ;)

I ordered five of the six from Transdesign.com (all except the gingerbread one because I just couldn't see myself using that color) and three came in. I'm a little disappointed that two were out of stock and they failed to indicate that, but I'm glad they sent the order without them rather than waiting on all of them to come in. So these are the first three I received: Holiday Splendor, Sugarplum Fairy, and Candy Cane.

Yes, I know what you're thinking: Is that glitter? In a holiday collection? And you would be correct. But no, Color Club likes to one-up ya, and they're gonna make it HOLO glitter in a holiday collection:

Le sigh. So beautiful. Nom nommmm. Here are some swatches with the bottles in the background, reverse order as above. (Candy Cane, Sugarplum Fairy, Holiday Splendor)

Candy Cane is the pink glitter on the far left. It's a very dense pink and silver glitter in a clear base. These swatches are only two coats, so I think CC could be built up to opacity for a holiday glitterbomb fest. I can't wait to wear this one!

Sugarplum Fairy, which you may notice is not plum colored, is a silver toned holo glitter in a clear base amazebomb (yes, new term). Lots and lots of holo glitter in this baby. Again, this is two coats so it's possible that this could be built up and worn on its own! <3

Finally, Holiday Splendor. What to say about this?! I love it. It was the one I was most on the fence about when I was ordering and it's the one I love most. It looks somewhat blue in the pictures, but it's definitely green in person and in the swatches, so use that for the color comparison. This one has a green base with the holo glitter in it, and it's gooooorgeeeeouuuusssss.

So what do you think of these three so far? As I said, two more are on the way and I also have the Color Club Backstage Pass collection (well, most of it) which I haven't heard much about but did seem to come out some time ago. I'm not sure if I just missed this one or if everyone did, but I like it a lot! I love everything about Color Club, so I have no idea how I missed an entire collection of glitters.
xoxo,
Amanda

Magnetic Shimmering Silver

*This is a scheduled post for today, as I'm away for the weekend! Please feel free to interact as usual, but my responses may be slightly delayed. I'll be back on August 28th!* update: looks as though I'll be home tonight since the hurricane is going to hit here badly. I may be without power Sunday and/or the days following so if you don't hear from me, that's why!

Hello my dears! How is everyone today? My NOTD post for today is a beautiful, holographic polish by Magnetic, called Shimmering Silver. Let me start by saying this polish is gorgeous, and I loved it, and my friends loved it... wait. My friends? Okay, okay, I did this mani while with my friends. Drinking. So maybeeee it's not my best application. Maybe it needed another coat. Maybe it needed better lighting. But can't we just get past that and enjoy the prettiness? If you are angry with me for the nails, please feel free to refer to the bottle for the true gorgeousness of this polish and how much I adore it. :)

So the moral of the story: don't drink and polish. This has been a PSA by Amanda, the Nail Polish Enthusiast.

xoxo,
Amanda

Holo Haul Skittle Swatches

Hello ladies, today I come to you with a serious warning. Caution: this post will contain many swatches of holographic polishes. If you are prone to fainting or lemming for polishes, I suggest you turn back now. Also, as you may have noticed from the title, I am feeling somewhat alliterative today, so watch out.

So between Nfu Ohs and my package from Dolores, I got five holographic polishes. And I have five fingers. Coincidence? Nope. So I decided to swatch some skittles to show them all off and also to point out the lack of purple-ness that is Nfu Oh 64.

Below on the thumb is Magnetic Shimmering Silver, pointer is Magnetic Powerful Purple (okay, these alliterations aren't me, the company really named them this), then middle is Nfu Oh 64 ("purple"), ring is Nfu Oh 63 and then pinky is Nfu Oh 65.

 Indoor to show the holo. (Powerful Purple is kind of a holo dud. Not linear, kind of scattered, still pretty. So when I had to sacrifice one of my fingers to hold the bottle non-awkwardly, Powerful Purple got the axe.)

 Here they are outside in sunlight, which shows the colors (and my streaky paint job on the pinky, that's what I get for doing this quickly in poor lighting) pretty well. You can see my middle three kind of all blend together and look like they're a series of the same color but, hey, maybe this is inspiration for a holo pinky purple ombre!

And finally, outside in the shade. Shows off the difference in the colors really well. PP is clearly violet purple, whereas 63 and 64 are pretty similar colors.

Favorites? Thoughts on 63, 64, or PP?

xoxo,
Amanda

China Glaze Crackle!

Hello again! As you can see, I use the weekends to catch up and this long weekend was perfect because I got China Glaze Crackles in and I couldn't WAIT to show you guys! I swatched each shade (yes, I got all 6) on a nail wheel over two different colors to show some diversity of what you can do and I think I was inspired for my next mani!

First up are the three "basic" colors: white (Lightning Bolt), gray (Cracked Concrete - whoops, called it Cracked Pavement in my last post!), and black (Black Mesh). I decided to show these over colors to highlight what they can do. Here they are over Petites Figi (for you researchers or people who had to take a research class, you might notice I used a "convenience sample" of my revently used polishes for these swatches).

Secondly, I layered them all over Revlon Rock. (Sorry, the right side is coming out dark for some reason. It looks fine on my camera but on my computer they came out dark?)

Next I used the three colored crackles: pink (Broken Hearted), blue (Crushed Candy), and purple (Fault Line). The first picture shows them layered over Finger Paints Easel Come, Easel Go, a really nice, bright silver:

And in other strange things my computer is doing news, this picture is rotated and I can't get it back... mostly because Blogspot tilted it so I can't fix it! But anyway, here they are over Sinful Colors Show Me White.

So what do you guys think? I personally love them, but know they aren't for everybody or every setting. I'm going to wear them today to play around with and maybe when I'm in class but they will have to come off for work! Which ones did you like most, which color combinations worked best, and are you getting this collection?

xoxo,

Amanda