Milani, Tropical Fiesta and Glittur!

Maan, this picture quality isn't even close.  Tropical Fiesta is a hot, hot, hot pink that borders on neon--this just looks like it might be a deep salmon color. Picture-fail. Sorry about that, you guys.

Anyway, yes:  Tropical Fiesta is a hot pink, bright enough to sear your eyelids (if you can believe it). Perfect application, and applied in two smooth coats. No complaints here.

(Ugh; still demure.)

One of the things I like the most about this polish is the fact that it's so in-your-face.  It would make a great classic pedicure color during the summer, and a sour counterpoint to all the darks worn in winter. And seriously, the longer I look at these pictures the more they bug me. Why is the bright not coming out? Why?

After a while, though, I got bored and threw on pa a45, a sheer pink with gold square glitter (small and large) and tiny pink square pieces of glitter.  I used three coats in order to get the slight gradient effect that I have on my nails there.  The effect was more apparent in real life. :)The extra coats dried quickly and didn't really get in the way at all; glitter has a funny tendency to do that.  It dries smooth to the touch. pa a45 can actually do a glitter gradient notd on its own, with a little patience and a lot of coats, but I'd done that during that weird dark time when I couldn't find my camera. I should try it again, just to prove it to ya. :P

All in all, a fun notd! And, again, it's sparkly-pink. I need an imagination. D:

LA Girls Rockstar, Addict and a comparison

This is the last of my LA Girls Rockstar collection, and she is absolutely, absolutely lovely.  Addict is a warm, deep red that leans a little towards a brick color, a jelly, and it is interspersed with tiny little gold flakies. This is three coats.

Let me give you a side picture--click on it to see that awesome depth:

So autumnal.

But the polish sounds familiar, right?  I figured it'd be some sort of dupe to ChG Stroll, so I dug it out for comparison. And here it is:

From left to right: Stroll, Addict, Stroll, Addict.

Uuum, not even close, actually. Definitely related, and I don't think anybody who isn't a nail polish addict needs more than one, but there's a huge difference in color and flake. Stroll is far deeper at three coats and the flakes are heavier, sinking into the polish and giving it a pink, rather than gold, feel. Addict remains a lighter red and the flakes are both larger and lighter, thereby allowing the gold to peek through. I love both of them, and I'm not sure which I love more, so I will be keeping both. :)

And yes, I will be swatching Stroll sometime in the future! Keep your eyes open.

Maybelline Opti-Mist-Ic

First of all, thanks for all of the lovely suggestions and comments in the previous post! I'll be sure to pick up something while out... err, grocery shopping. ;)

Secondly, whooo! 150 followers! Thanks so much for even reading this little thing; it means so much to me. :) I did promise to do a giveaway at 250 followers, and I've also been planning to do one for the one year anniversary that'll show up during the summer, so whatever comes up fastest... *whistles*

Anyway.

This is Maybelline Optimistic (on the bottle, it says Opt-Mist-Ic; on the sites where I'm currently stalking its history, it says Optimistic. Which is right? Does it matter? I don't like weird hyphens) was released in the Maybelline Poptimistic collection for the holidays in 2009. It is misty indeed.  There's something complex and elusive about this polish that I absolutely love: to me, it looks like a light taupe with silver shimmer and copper microglitter, but one of my roommates popped in to watch me do my nails with this one and said, "That's a really pretty gold".

Gold?

Sure.

Then someone else said, "I really like that grey on you."

Grey??

This is what I mean, though:  depending on the lighting, it looks very different to different people. I wore it longer, and I have an obsessive compulsive Nail Polish Eye (as I'm sure most of you relate to), so I think I can say with finality that it's a color similar to AA Mouse:  a very light brown-grey (I dislike saying greige) with a very interesting finish.

That said, it applied in two smooth, thin coats, without fuss. It is slightly brushstroky, but I expect that from a fine, silver shimmer. It dried quickly and wore very well. I have nothing like it in my collection, nor have I seen anything like it when obsessively looking for online similarities. Optimistic is truly unique. :) 

pa A86 and a question. . .

Eeeek, this color is hard to capture, but I think I got it down right! This is a minty, seafoam green FROST (aaaaaagh) that applied pretty well, actually.  I took a look at the bottle and figured it would just about never 1) be opaque and 2) look good, so I slathered it all over my hands and hoped for the best.

pa applied in four coats (I'd been right about the sheerness), but it dried quickly and left very few brushstroke marks.  I also, surprisingly, found the tiny brush easy to manipulate! No cleanup, no nothin'. It is just as it is.

And a picture in shade--ignore the bubbling in that corner; it breaks my heart.

Oh, I have a question for you readers out there--I have, so far, gone through three bottles of Poshe and one of SV, as well as one bottle of CND Speedey.  I've recently finished the SV bottle and am now duking it out with  an old-school, slow-drying topcoat.  It's great (no shrinkage!) and glossy, but I'm really tired of sitting really still and moving really slowly for a very long time.  I'm looking for a quick-dry topcoat that I haven't tried before: Poshe and SV are nice and I like them, but part of the fun is continuing to look around, right?

If you guys have any quick-dry topcoat suggestions, please leave them! There's an ORLY In a Snap and that one brand's Out the Door around here, somewhere, that I'd like to try...

NOTD: Magic Wishes

... What can I say?  I wanted an exuberant, eight-year-old manicure. It worked.

This is two coats of You're Such a Kabuki Queen by OPI, from the 2005 OPI Japanese Collection. It applied in two absolutely perfect, fuss-free coats, dried glossy, and was generally just awesome.  It's not a color that I'd call unique--a very cool-toned warm pink, just a few shades from being obnoxious--but it's lovely. I then put on two coats of pa A44, which contains holographic stars and round holo glitter in a sheer blue shimmery base--and it turned me into a maniac. Stars are HARD to fish for! And then putting them on top of the nail in a regular sort of pattern is impossible. I should've taken an orange stick and pressed them onto the nail, but I'm insane and decided to fish for them anyway. Then they wouldn't stick properly and kept either scratchimg on random surfaces, or simply tear off--see the two indents on the pinky? Goodbye, stars.

That said, the way these stars shimmer is incredible:

The light they reflect is ridiculous.  I wore this to a dance event and even under dark lighting I could see them glisten. Woot. :)

Aaand one more pic, because I feel bad about the sudden disappearance (although for good reason. I have a GIANT post coming up soon.)

Another look, in shade. :)

How do the rest of you deal with shaped glitter? Suggestions would be... awesome.

OPI, Tasmanian Devil Made Me Do It

Two coats of OPI goodness. A color I'd classify as straddling the line between orange and red, and vibrant to boot. Perfect application, awesome, awesome, awesome--chippy.

Admittedly, this is the wear of day two, if that explains all the scratches and the tiny chip on the side.  Am I having bad manicure week, or something? Because there's something horrifically wrong with everything I've been wearing lately.

It must be the lack of quick-dry topcoat. Yes.

Anyway, I love this color. Vibrant, bright, easily applied, and screams high-energy summer days. :)

L'oreal, Tribal Treasure

WARNING:  bad 'cure and frazzle comin' your way. Not safe for infants and young children.

Have we got that out of the way? Good. Feast your eyes on this beaut:

It's not... a bad color, right? It's flattering. Good for my skin tone. Really good application, actually:  I discovered that I quite like the L'oreal brush (bodes well for Essie's new... er, alliance). It's--okay; it applies like a true metallic in that it's super brushstrokey and you have to be a raging anal-retentive perfectionist in order to get the strokes right, but it's okay!

And then it bubbled.

It bubbled badly. I don't even know why.  I waited for each layer to dry (which was grueling and I sat there smelling fumes for a longer time than I wanted), I didn't shake the bottle, etc. etc.  I think it just didn't like me.

Tribal Treasure (for those of you who want to know) is from last year's L'oreal summer collection. It's a very pretty, soft, yellow-gold metallic that was opaque in 3 coats.  It's quite flattering on a tan, which I find myself sporting, lately. That and some horrible cuticle frazzle that I can't explain. D:

But I don't like it, for obvious reasons. Raging anal-retentive perfectionist, me. Can't stand the bubbles. Each time I remember the squishy blue perfection of RBL Bikini Bottom I remember the bubbles that the polish gave me, and the god-knows-how-many coats I'd have to put on in order to achieve it, and then I feel better about not buying it again. That is how I feel about this polish, except that it isn't squishy jelly perfection but a brushstrokey metallic and, therefore, has no excuse.

Then it peeled off of my nails in less than 24 hours. Augh.

OPI, Absolutely Alice

I own a lot of blue sparkly stuff. I can't seem to keep my hands off of them. I'm not a huge fan of the sparkly, but sparkly blue things are another matter entirely. So it's not a huge surprise that I picked up Absolutely Alice. I'm a huuge Alice in Wonderland geek to begin with and it's... a sparkly blue thing. It just seemed right.

And, as I'm sure as this image shows you--Absolutely Alice is REALLY sparkly, really dense blue glitter in a clear base interspersed with little flecks of gold. How dense? Two coats. The flecks of gold really bring it to a completely new level--I keep thinking that it's really peeking out and glinting against the blue. It's charming and surprising and whimsical in ways I hadn't really thought that a sparkly blue ever could be.

And here it is in shade. Shade always captures glitter particle really well, but I'm sorry about the corpse hand thing.

See the glinty-gold?

And an unintentional blurry shot. Absolutely Alice is so sparkly it broke my camera. :)

I did discover, however, that perfect app and gorgeous color, etc, aside... Absolutely Alice chipped in far less a time than I had expected. Glitters wear like iron on me. Absolutely Alice came off in sheets in three days. Boooo.

LA Girls Rockstar, Groupie

Y'know something? I thought I didn't like purple. I wasn't sure why. When I flipped through swatches on the nail board or on a couple other blogs I've always sort of glossed through the purples. They never interested me until I put one on, just for fun--that polish, I still remember, is Milani Totally Cool.

Well, I love purple. I have a theory that it's my warm-color equivalent of the green madness:  it's a color that I can't quite find as often as I can, say, reds and pinks, but it's vibrant and interesting and looks great on my skin. :)

That said! Groupie is a beautiful violet (urgh; purple never captures right on the camera. It's a true purple, guys, and a couple shades cooler than Purple Pizzazz) base with violet microglitter.  It takes three coats to reach bottle color.

I'll just stop talking and give you more pictures.

I really like the LA Rockstar line. That is all.