Lay It On Me [blue]

So first of all, this polish does not work. And that strikes me as an odd thing to say, because I’m not really sure what I’m expecting the polish to do. How could this possibly do anything special??? Well, it’s good that my hopes weren’t high, because…it doesn’t do anything special. Ah well, the bottle is really neat looking!

On the nail it turned into a well-mixed, opaque light blue with glitter-bumps. I can’t see it ever looking any different than that, because the brush doesn’t really reach far enough down into the bottle to get to the red layer.

I’m ashamed of these pictures – somehow they’re blurry, and I don’t particularly want to use this polish again to redo them, so this is it!

Maybelline – Night Affair

I am having some issues. First, I took pictures of the polish I wore today (one of my Dollar Tree Maybellines, Mod Mauve), then immediately redid my nails, and when I plugged my memory card into my PC…no Mod Mauve pictures. WTF? Maybe the card wasn’t seated properly in the camera. And THEN. None of my pictures will upload to WordPress tonight! My connection seems slow this evening, I guess I’ll just try again tomorrow.

This color is pretty blah. Very pretty in the bottle, but on the nail it’s very dark and the sparkles don’t show up very well. It actually is red, just a sort of brownish red. The glitter in this is both red and silver. 3 coats:

Maybelline – Twinkle Twinkle

This is Twinkle Twinkle, and it’s kind of awesome. Silver glitter in a semi-jelly blue base, and the blue is light enough that the polish doesn’t look black in any light, yay! 3 coats:

Sinful Colors – Glass Pink

I’m really not into sheers lately, but I quite like Glass Pink a lot. It’s nice and subtle, but it’s also seriously shimmery. No hope of opacity, of course.

I wanted to fancy this up a bit though so I added french tips in Sally Hansen VIP Pink, and it was a fail. VIP Pink is too sheer so I had yucky buildup on the ends of my nails from so many coats of polish.

The polishes work well together though, because they contain sort of the same kind of shimmer.

China Glaze – Emerald Sparkle

I like this polish. I just don’t love it like I was expecting to. I was picturing this as a green version of the fantastically awesome Ruby Pumps. And again…it is, but…somehow it’s not as amazing. Part of my problem may be that I used 3 coats, which I think darkened it up more than I’d have preferred. Next time I’ll try two, more careful coats.

Oh, AND ANOTHER THING: All of the Wizard of Ooh-Ahhs polishes were basically just like this in different colors, right? That’s my understanding since Ruby Pumps was the lone survivor of the old collection. Well, I always wondered why in the world this wasn’t included and called Emerald City. Everytime I type Emerald Sparkle, it feels wrong.

Zoya – Gabrielle

This applied much better than the other Zoyas I’ve tried. I also really like the short brush on the Zoyas after I’ve been using so many polishes that have really long brushes.

The color of the polish is lovely – a tangerine-ish shade, not too bright. I haven’t yet decided if I’m enjoying the finish or not though. It’s obviously a glitter, but it comes off on my nails looking kind of silvery and frosty. It is also depressingly sheer. This is five coats. Five! I normally give up way before that, but I wanted to give this one a chance. It took FOREVER to dry! And even 2 days later it’s still dentable.

Sinful Colors – I Love You

I Love You is very, very sheer. Lots of fine glitter. I don’t have that much more to say about it really, it’s not a favorite. These pictures show a couple of days of tipwear.

Lubu Manicure

This morning I was sitting at the breakfast table thinking about the manicures I’ve been wanting to do that I haven’t had time to do lately (a Lubu manicure, for one). Then I started admiring how long my nails had gotten, and I decided to file them down some, because really it’s just tempting breakages when they’re that long, plus I just like the look of them better when they’re a tad bit shorter. Anyway, so there I was halfway through when I realized, YOU DON’T SHORTEN YOUR NAILS UNTIL AFTER THE LUBU MANICURE, DUMMY.

Sigh.

So here it is! This was actually kind of interesting. I did the red under-tips first, using a tiny little flattened square nail art brush, and it went on fairly painlessly and pretty neatly. I think I got to three coats before deciding I’d achieved the opacity that I had in mind. As I always am, I was startled by how beautiful Ruby Pumps is – it really is probably one of my favorite polishes ever. Man, that shimmer!!!!

Then, the Lubu Heels. I sit under a lamp to do my nails, so I was directly under a light source, and the red glitter was sparkling like crazy. And I considered rethinking my opinion that this polish sucks – until I walked across the room out of direct light and my nails just looked black again. 😦 I think that for me, Lubu Heels is nice in theory but not so great in actuality. Vampy black polish with secret red shimmer/glitter!!! That sounds awesome!!! But, the glitter just isn’t noticeable enough for me. If I want a black polish, I will wear black polish!

When I was all done, I needed a little something extra. It just wasn’t awesome enough yet. So, I painted the edges of my nail tips with Ruby Pumps, and I think that kicked it up a notch, at least from 5 inches away!!

I think that I really did need longer nails for this. with there not being too much nail to paint the underside of, I went down as far as I could, which, as I found out when I tried to remove it, was a total mistake. I’m left with little lines of red polish deep under my nails that I just can’t seem to get out.

Sally Hansen – In The Navy

In The Navy is actually a pretty inoffensive dark polish. It is very dark, but it’s also most definitely BLUE, not BLACK. I hate dark polish that are black in most lights. This is shimmery, pretty, and of course it’s an Exxxxxtreeeeeeme Wear polish, so it applied great!

NO time to change my polish for a few days, so I tried to change it up some with a glitter topcoat – this is China Glaze Fairy Dust. Eh. As with most glitter topcoats that I’ve tried that aren’t by Sinful Colors, the glitter sits flat on top of the colored polish and looks silly.

Orly – Blue Suede

Oh wow. Wow.

This is TERRIBLE.

I hate this polish so much. The general opinion on this Orly collection (and Blue Suede in particular) seems to be pretty bad, but I just thought the pictures I’ve seen were so pretty anyway that I had to have it, and it’s been on my wishlist for a while now. It looked like such a pretty, dusty blue, and it is I guess. But…this finish is AWFUL. It’s like I painted my nails with acrylic paint or something.

Big smudge on my ring finger cause I splashed my polish remover and didn’t care enough about this manicure to fix it.

Even Seche can’t save it, it darkens it up several shades and now it’s very close to one of those “might as well be black” polishes that I despise.

After a day of wear I tried to fix it up a bit by adding a coat of Sinful Colors Hottie. It’s much better now. Lucky, because I have no time for a real manicure right now!

It was very gritty, I had to use two coats of Seche on top of Hottie, which will effectively glue the glitter to my nails for the rest of my life.

I like how Hottie contains more than one size/color of glitter, because that creates much more depth than throwing a normal glitter topcoat on top of polish. It looks like it’s sitting on top of the polish, whereas a glitter topcoat like Hottie is much more interesting. However. There’s not a ton of tonal color to it, is there? I thought this would be a good topcoat for blue polish since it looks so blue in the bottle, much like Call You Later is for greens, but it’s just not really all that blue. Drag! Still pretty though.