Hard to Find Friday: LOreal Masked Affair

If you've spent any amount of time as a nail polish junkie and following the community, you've noticed that there is usually one specific polish that everyone is rushing out to get because it has some unique aspect to it.  Whether it is a one coat blue that doesn't stain (RIP Sally Hansen Pacific Blue), a mainstream polish with multicolored flakes (RIP Color Club The Uptown), or something else all together (I still don't understand what the big deal was with Sinful Shine Prosecco), there is always something that us junkies are looking for.  And when we set our sights on something, they become that much more difficult to find.  Right now the current obsession is LOreal's Masked Affair from their Dark Sides of Grey collection.  This polish can be found only in the Dark Sides of Grey displays, and the only stores that have been carrying them are Rite Aid and Walgreens.  The kicker is that the displays only have two of each polish and they do not get restocked.  So if you like this polish, head out to look for it RIGHT NOW.

(sunlight)

(indoor lighting)

Masked Affair is a purple tinged, silver, linear holo, and a very strong one at that.  I used two coats for complete opacity.  The first was smooth and even, if not a touch thin, but the second left everything perfect.  From my understanding, there can be a bit of pulling with the second coat, so I would wait until the first coat is completely dry before adding more on top.

In the sunlight this polish is ridiculously holographic, pretty much to the extent of my Color Club Halo Hues I feel.  To see something like this at the drugstore level is pretty crazy I think.  My indoor lighting picture did not really do the polish justice.  Looking at my nails right now, in my apartment's terrible lighting, I still see a bit of a rainbow sheen and a touch of purple shift.  In the bottle you can faintly see the purple and I could not get this to translate into the pictures.

If you want this polish, you need to grab your polish loving bestie, or your very sweet significant other and go hunting for it.  I think it's totally worth it.

As the usual kind reminder, these products were purchased with my own money.  I am not cool enough to have companies send me free stuff to review them. ;)

Untried Wednesday: OPI I Don't Give a Rotterdamn and Funky Fingers Elsa

So I have a basket of untried polishes sitting on the floor by my desk.  Usually I am good about cycling through them, but I don't even know what happened lately.  I've picked up a couple of bottles here, a couple there and now I have a bunch.  Plus I have quite a few Black Friday orders coming in and two swaps this month.  So I need to get on the swatching of these babies!

This is OPI's I Don't Give a Rotterdamn from the Spring 2012 Holland Collection.  It is a elephant gray  with a heavy silver shimmer.  I have heard this described as dusty blue, but I don't see that at all.  It did have a bit of a sheer formula, so I used three thin coats for my picture and was perfectly happy with the opacity.  Strangely enough I don't really have many gray polishes so I'm glad to have it now.

I topped it with Funky Fingers Elsa, from their Frozen trio they came out with last year.  It is a glitter topped with small icy blue hexes and a few medium hexes.  I did just a single coat on the nails and it had a pretty good glitter pay off and dispersed pretty well.  I kind of wish that this polish had snowflake glitters like the other two in this collection, it would be fitting for the Snow Queen herself.

Don't forget!  My giveaway is still open until Saturday, so make sure you enter here.

As the usual kind reminder, these products were purchased with my own money.  I am not cool enough to have companies send me free stuff to review them. ;)

Swatch Saturday: A England Fated Prince

Yay it's Saturday! I am so excited to have to tomorrow off and do a little bit of polish shopping with some of my fellow San Diegans.  Don't forget to check back Monday for what my 100th post surprise! I think it'll be nice.  :-)

This is A England's Fated Prince.  Excuse the picture, but we are entirely cloudy in San Diego and I had to hunt around for a sunbeam. Fated Prince is a black holo we all already knew, I love me some dark gray/black holos and this was my first one.  A England's site lists it as a "a mysterious grey base hue with deep olive undertones, throwing off valiant prismatic flashes to herald the arrival of a certain destiny" and I think that is a pretty apt description.  It is not quite black, which I have said before may be because of the Spectralflare that is used to make it holographic, as it tends to gray out a color.  I used two coats for complete opacity.  It is a gorgeous color and it makes me want to go make a giant order of A England polishes on Llarowe.  No, I have to exercise self control and at least wait until after the holidays.  ;-)

I also did want to throw in a quick comparison of my three gray/black holos, Bliss Polish Jax 2.0 (1), A England Fated Prince (2), and Color Club Beyond (3).  The largest difference between all there is the level of holographic glitter.  Jax 2.0 is by far the most scattered of the three, and I feel that Fated Prince has a larger grade of glitter.  They are all beautiful colors though, and I do not feel bad owning all three.

Photo from Elsa at Like a Candyshop

As the usual kind reminder, these products were purchased with my own money.  I am not cool enough to have companies send me free stuff to review them. ;)

Untried Wednesday: Bliss Polish Alice

Happy Hump Day everyone!  I hope you are all having a good day.  The weekend and Halloween are coming up, and I know all of us are looking forward to them.  Also to all of the writers, National Novel Writing Month is starting up on Saturday.  For those of you that don't know, NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days, which averages out to 1667 words a day or 6-7 pages.  This is going to be my fourth year doing it.  Anyone else doing it with me?  No?  Well then let's just move onto the nail polish swatches, I know that's why you're really here. :-P

This is Bliss Polish Alice from her NGF collection.  Yvette dedicated each of this collection of five polishes to herself and the four other ladies that make up her Nail Girl Family.  Alice is inspired by squishynpolished.  It is a dove gray linear holo polish that took three coats to be opaque.  The holographic glitter may not be as dense as my beloved Color Club Beyond, but Alice is a very pretty polish and a nice addition to any collection.  The formula is a little thin, but very easy to work with.  I had no streaking or pulling.  I was actually wearing this at the gym last night and got distracted by all the blingy holo, as usual.  ;-P  If you're interested, you can pick this up here, but I know that the storefront will be changing this Saturday and rumor has it that there may be a coupon code for the launch.  Make sure you follow Bliss Polish to keep up on it and all future sales.

As the usual kind reminder, these products were purchased with my own money.  I am not cool enough to have companies send me free stuff to review them. ;)

Hard to Find Friday: Bliss Polish Jax 2.0

Hey all.  If you've been following my blog for the past few months, you may remember a Mani Monday of mine where I used Bliss Polish's Jax.  I loved that polish.  It was a one coat charcoal with a hint of shimmer and dried to a matte finish.  So when Yvette announced that she was going to be releasing a second Sons of Anarchy collection in honor of the final season and that there was going to be a super limited edition, only 40 bottles being made, Jax 2.0 with holo, I had to have it.  

This is two coats of Jax 2.0.  It is not quite as opaque as the first, but two coats were perfect.  I am not sure how to classify the kind of holo that this polish has.  Yvette had described it as a scattered holo, but according to JessFACE90's video The Nail Polish Dictionary the rainbow arc on my nails makes it a linear holo.  By the way, everyone should watch this video if you have any questions what so ever about polish terms.  It may be 37 minutes long, but totally worth it.

Pardon the blurry picture, but that was the best way to show the holo with my camera.  What do you guys think, scattered, linear, or somewhere between both?

As the usual kind reminder, these products were purchased with my own money.  I am not cool enough to have companies send me free stuff to review them. ;)

Mani Monday: Leather and Studs

Guys, I have some terrible news.  My ring finger had a gnarly tear that I've been managing to keep patched up and I've been nursing for about a week, but it finally broke all the way though.  If you're following me on Instagram, you would have seen the break when it first happened.  So now I'm back down to nubbins.  I'm going to try to grow them out and hopefully be back to swatching for you guys soon.  In the mean time, I do have a couple of back ups and older pictures I hadn't been able to post yet.  This is one of those!

I like to pretend that I'm a badass.  I really am the exact opposite.  I'm more of a fluffy, cute, pink princess, glitter and sparkles, unicorns and rainbows kind of girl.  Once in a while though, I do like to be cool.  This manicure did that for me.  

I am wearing Bliss Polish Jax with Nails Inc Noho as my accent nail.  Jax is from Bliss's Son's of Anarchy collection and it's awesome.  For the picture I used two coats, but a careful one coat would be enough.  I just had the odd bald patch, so the second coat was done one nail at a time so that I could press a stud at the base of each nail.  It dries to a matte finish and its a really nice gunmetal shimmer.  A layer of top coat would have made this a lot more shimmery, but I loved it just the way it was.  Noho is from Nails Inc's Leather Effect line that came out late last spring/early summer.  This is my go to black texture and I love it.  This painted on the same way as Jax, almost completely opaque in one coat.  I placed four studs on my accent nail in the shape of a diamond and called it a day.

I got the studs from Born Pretty Store a while ago and they are awesome.  I got a plastic zippered pouch full of them for about $3 and they are great to have around when a rhinestone isn't quite what I'm going for with my nails.  

As the usual kind reminder, these products were purchased with my own money.  I am not cool enough to have companies send me free stuff to review them. ;)

Untried Wednesday- Deborah Lippmann Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Guys, I love Deborah Lippmann polishes, like so much.   I own fifteen, which if you think about that fact that they retail for $18-$22, is kind of crazy.  In my defense, I've only paid full price for one of them, which was Mermaid's Dream and I still regret nothing.  The rest I got cheap or as gifts from the Boytoy or Mama LacquerVixen.  I love all of my Deborah Lippmann polishes... except for this one.

This picture is three coats of Hit Me With Your Best Shot.  Now looking at it right off the bat, the color looks fine, just not particularly impressive.  It's a dark gray with the slightest bit of blue shimmer in the sunlight.  I kept trying to capture the blue, but my camera just would not capture it.  The very meh color could have been saved with a good formula, you know considering it is a high end brand and retails for $18.  This was three coats, and if you look closely at the right corner of my pointer finger there is a bald patch.  My right hand is worse.  I would have liked the polish a whole lot better if the formula was actually good.  Lucky for me, I bought this polish on clearance from Beauty Brands for $4 when they were discontinuing their Deborah Lippmann polishes.  If I had boughten this at full price I would have been very upset.  I was so disappointed I couldn't make myself even clean up the edges, I just wanted to move on to the next color as soon as possible.

As the usual side note, this polish was purchased with my own money.  I am not cool enough to have people send me polishes just to review them. ;-)

Swatch Saturday- Essie Chinchilly

Woah, look at me!  Two posts in two days? It's madness!

As I said before, in an effort to force myself to blog on a regular basis I've given myself a weekly schedule of themed days.  So henceforth, Saturdays will be swatch days!  I'm only counting polishes that I have already tried and that are readily available as eligible for this category.   My eventual goal is that when you look at my collection page, every polish I own will have a matching page with their own swatch.  The likely hood that I will actually get there, considering how often I buy polish, is minuscule, but let's try anyways.  ;-)

For today I picked a classic, Essie's Chinchilly.  It is a cool toned gray/beige (so greige I guess) cream with a hint of purple.  I actually keep this polish with my purple polishes, so amongst them it looks more purple than it does on the nail.  The formula is pretty good.  If I'm careful it is perfectly opaque in two coats, sometimes three.

Chinchilly is a good, universal color that is appropriate for most things.  I can wear it to work and still look professional or I can wear it on days off when I'm relaxing and still look trendy.  It is a good color to grab for an easy manicure when you just cannot decide.

As a side note, this polish was purchased with my own money.  I am not cool enough to have people send me polishes just to review them. ;-)

Mani with Essie Fair Play and Set in Stone

I was at the boytoy's house last week and he decided that he wanted to help pick out my nail polish.  So he dug through my bag of nail polishes that I happened to have with me (because I usually have my base and top coats, and a couple colors with me for some odd reason) and he chose Fair Play and Set in Stone to accent. 

Essie's Fair Play I got at ULTA on clearance, which is awesome because I never see Essie on sale.  It is a slate color that started out almost blue when I first put it on, but two days later looked entirely gray.  It went on pretty smoothly, I did two coats on my nails and three on my thumbs.  I guess because they're bigger nails there's more room to have balding?  The color was really pretty on it's own and demure, but I can't leave well enough alone.

Set in Stone is a awesome combination of glitter and chunky, reflective hexagons that I kept getting distracted by.  It sucked to get off, like all glitter, but it is one of my favorites right now.  I'm trying to keep myself from putting it on top of EVERYTHING. 

At the end of the day, I still love Essie.  I think I'm going to do this again after the damage from my acrylics grows out so my nails look smooth and pretty. :-)