Blue Eyed Girl Lacquer giveaway

Blue Eyed Girl Lacquer, the maker of my fabulous pink holo, is having a giveaway! Prizes include one of her current polishes and one custom. Ooooh, my goodness, what would I ask for in a custom? Something ultra dainty and delicate, of course. Maybe a white jelly with silver and pink glitter. Or maybe grey. Grey would be good, right? You know how much I love my white glitters, but maybe I would want something new. Who knows!?

Find the giveaway here, and good luck! If you just can't wait, she also just recently opened up her store front, so you can buy yourself some pretties here!

Lucky Celestica

Black Cat Lacquers - Celectica and Lucky Star

Let me preface this post by saying that not all indie polishes are created equal. Some have very good quality control and strive to produce only the very best polishes for their customers. Others, well... don't. There is a look that I commonly see where a polish, particularly a glitter, isn't made with the right ingredients and the resulting mixture is an odd, strained sort of thing where the base seems too thin in a way. You'll see what I mean soon. (Don't get me wrong, I've seen commercial, and even high end, polishes do this, too. It just seems to happen more often with indies.) For this reason, I always try to find as many swatches online as I can before I make a purchase. This is one of the few times where not many swatches were available, and I went ahead and bought anyway. See where this gets me?

Celestica has a blue-grey-ish-white base with some shimmer and some iridescent glitter in square and two sizes of hex. It's a bit gloopy, but at least it has a small amount of self-leveling. Unfortunately, it's definitely got that too-thin-base thing going on. It's alright from afar, but close up? Blah.

Lucky Star, however, completely steals the show. She's an adorable mix of square, star, and various sizes of hex glitters, all in pastel aqua, pink, and lilac. Yes, there are stars in there, I just didn't feel like fishing any out.  I believe there are also iridescent bars, but they're not very prominent--just enough for one to show up and look a little awkward. Oh well! The base is clear, though since I put it on over the Sinful Colors Glow in the Dark mani I was wearing previously, you can kind of see it through a little. (The Glow still worked under both polishes, by the way, which I was excited to find!) Anyway, yes, super cute. I love it. <3

Here's a closeup of her. Isn't she adorable?

Wear: Celestica had tipwear within 24 hours. :/ I'll have to wear a different topcoat with it next time. And I already had a few layers of Rejuvicote on, so the thickness of it started to peel after two days.

Black Cat Lacquer sells for $9 at blackcatlacquer.com

Glow in the Dark

Sinful Colors - Glow in the Dark (Halloween 2013 release)

Hang on, something's wrong here... That's right, no pictures!

Well, I tried. I was excited to buy my first glow in the dark polish and come home to swatch it, but I was shocked to find that when I turned off the lights, though my nails did, indeed, glow, my camera couldn't pick it up! When I ranted to my husband that I had totally seen pictures of glow in the dark polish online, he tried to remind me that photoshop exists.

I refuse to believe that ALL nail bloggers are photoshopping their glow in the darks. That certainly can't be, right? So why won't mine show up?

Hmm... :/ Ah well.

Aside from the non-photogenic nature of this polish, the worst thing was probably the smell. It's probably whatever chemical inside that makes it glow, but something was certainly giving off a yucky fume. It subsided after a couple of hours, though, and at night while laying in bed, the glow was definitely worth it. :)

Robin's Egg, Take 2

Franken - Robin's Egg

To celebrate the bottom of my untrieds box, I decided to wear the first polish I ever posted, the one that made me decide I wanted to start a polish blog--a franken I made on a whim, trying to use the very last of a pretty hand-me-down I couldn't bear to toss out even though it was practically empty. It turned out looking like a beautiful, sparkly robin's egg, and I was in love. I've added a lot of thinner and even some clear polish since the first time I posted it, trying to get the consistency right, but it's still a pain to work with. Regardless, here she is. Let all of the growth (or lack there of) that I've gained in nine months of this hobby become apparent.

Wear: Three days. I could have made it last at least a day more, but I had a stressful day at work and nearly picked it off (thick with layers of Rejuvicote) on my way home.

Prospect Park's Adorable Blooms

New York Color - Prospect Park Bloom
L'Oreal - B. Adorable (Bijou Facets line)

I went into this mani with contempt for Prospect Park Bloom. Somehow I had already decided that I hated it. I guess I've just had pretty tough luck with cremes recently. But PPB wasn't actually all that bad. Sure, she was a little streaky, but I've DEFINITELY had worse, and at least she had a little self-leveling, which is more than we can say for some other polishes. It's a nice color, too, that pretty, soft pink that attracts me so. So I guess I'll be keeping her after all.

I was hesitant to put B. Adorable on over it, considering how many layers that would put me at. A few days of Rejuvicote, plus two of PPB, plus this, PLUS another coat of Rejuvicote when I was done? Yeah, that's going to last, especially considering my track record with polish-over-Rejuvicote, and also especially considering that tomorrow I'll be taking a shower and I'm learning that Rejuvicote hates water. But... come on, B. Adorable was my last untried! How could I possibly say no!?

It was overcast today, so my pictures of PPB didn't turn out as well as they could have, but by the time I had B. Adorable on, I was losing what little light I had fast. I didn't make it outside in time, so I had to settle with pictures inside. Meh. So needless to say, I couldn't capture her at all. She's actually a sheer, pale blue tinted, micro-fine bar glitter with shimmer. Not like you can tell from this picture. I'll have to get it again after my month of Rejuvicote is completed.

Wear: Yeah, no. Dented immediately because of all the layers. Removed after the pictures were taken.

Lush Lavender

LA Colors - Lush Lavender (Color Craze)

These might be the worst looking pictures I've taken. Lush Lavender is more of a sheer bronze shimmer than a lavender, and it only server to make my yellowing nails yellower. My application isn't great (the brush wasn't made for accuracy), my nail shape is wonky, and my middle finger is peel-y. Awesome. But I don't hate the polish, so I decided to upload anyway.

On Wednesday, I decided to give Rejuvicote another go. I'm going to be applying it every day for a month, and we'll see how my nails look around my birthday, October 14.

Wear: Removed after one day

Calla Lily

Revlon - Calla Lily (ColorStay line)

Calla Lily has been on my lemmings list for quite a while. It's not uncommon; you can buy it at any drugstore, but it's a little pricey for a drugstore polish at $8, and I just postponed getting it. So imagine my surprise when I found it at Big Lots for $1. I mean, it wasn't just any polish. It wasn't just a polish that looked like I might enjoy it. It was specifically the one that I was lemming! That doesn't happen often!

And she didn't disappoint, either. Calla Lily went on smooth as silk and is the exact delicate, elegant sheer that I adore. It's a beautiful sheer white with golden shimmer, and I love it! <3 Plus, it completely killed another lemming I had, Zoya's Gaia, which is similar but appears to be streakier than this.

Wear: Removed after four days to start my next Rejuvicote treatment trial.

Pearlfectly Romantic

L'Oreal - How Romantic
Essie - Pure Pearlfection

Wooooah, what happened? How did I go from such a nice, neat mani to such a subpar one? Several things must have gone awry..

 First, uuuuugh, streak. I have yet to find a L'Oreal that works with me. But the internet makes it look so good! How do they do it!?

Second, where did these lobster claws come from? WHY are my fingers so red here?

Third, what's up with my middle finger? I swear I've been moisturizing.

Fourth,  the pretty shimmer of Pure Pearlfection hardly even showed up...

Bah! I know that it is entirely possible for me to just not post these pictures, but here we are. Mostly because I like to archive every polish I wear so I can remember how well I liked or disliked them, but also, this following story: I was at PAX Prime, recently, a gaming convention, and, during a panel, a comic artist from the reality internet show Strip Search (perhaps it was Erika Moen?) announced that she posted the artwork she deemed inferior to embarrass herself into improvement. I thought that was clever, so I'll pretend that that's what I've been doing all along!

Wear: Four days

PEU4

Blue Eyed Girl Lacquers - PEU4 (prototype)

Oooooh my goodness, look at those RAINBOWS! This is my first linear holo, and putting it on for the first time was almost surreal. I kept looking at my nails because surely they couldn't be mine. Plus, PEU4 went on like a dream, smooth and perfect (not to be confused with Sally Hansen, this beautiful holo is something only Blue Eyed Girl Lacquers could create!). I applied three layers, just to make sure that my rainbows were good.

And then I went outside and took a MILLION PICTURES! It was near impossible to decide which to choose! So I decided on many. And it's a good thing, too, because my camera decided it wanted to show many different tints. The true color is somewhere in between everything I've posted. In fact, at some points, it seemed almost too pink for me. In some photos you can see how barbie girl pink it can be. I think I might like it better if it just stayed at the pale, dusty pink that's shown in the other pictures, but what can you do? Who can deny those rainbows, after all?

Aaand, just for the heck of it, here's what it looks like inside.

Wear: An unexpected five days, no top or base coat! For what it's worth, it removed remarkably easily, as well. Just a dab of normal acetone-based remover, and it's completely gone. So nice!