OPI Liquid Sand: Quick Pics & Review

The latest trend in nail polishes is the textured polish, which seems to translate into "makes your fingernails feel like they've been covered in sand paper".  This might partially explain why OPI decided to make their new finish Liquid Sand.  For me, I really like how this type of polish looks but I don't particularly like my nails feeling so gritty and scratchy that I'm afraid to rub my eye for fear of cutting my corneas.  Here's some photos of what I've picked up so far:

Stay The Night from the Mariah Carey Collection

Never a fan of the singer's music but at any rate, I still very much like this polish with it's glitter that lacks all the sparkles which usually comes with a glitter polish.  If they made a version of this with orange glitter in it, I'd buy it in a heartbeat because it would like the the lava and ash from a volcano.

Jinx from the 007:The Bond Girls Collection

I hadn't planned on buying Jinx but when I saw it in the store, I couldn't resist it.  Its coral/orange/gold tones are a perfect summer shade and I'm going to be keeping this one on my toes for a while.  Mainly because Liquid Sand polishes take more time to remove than the more traditional polishes and I've found that using pure acetone is the best way to remove them.

Vesper from the 007:The Bond Girls Collection

This one was the shade I had originally stepped into the store for.  It almost looks like mud in the bottle and lacks reflective properties but I'm still found of it.  I love a deep dark purple.

What Wizardry Is This? from the Oz: the Great & Powerful Collection

You know what other colour I like?  That's right...Green!  What Wizardry is This? is more of a khaki and despite being a dark colour, it has lots of sparkle to it.  I took a purposely blurred photo to emphasis that fact.

What Wizardry Is This? from the Oz: the Great & Powerful, Out of Focus

I've noticed a few nail bloggers have found the dry time on Liquid Sand polishes are very long but I've found my experience to be different.  These polishes dry to a matte like finish which usually dry quicker than a more traditional polish does and that made these my "go to" polishes during tax season when I worked a lot of overtime and did have much "me" time.  I also like that they stick to your nails like glue and can wear them for up to a week at a time and not see a single chip.  Tip wear, yes but no chips!

So I'm not sure how long this trend will last. It wasn't long ago every polish company was rushing out "crackle" polishes that are now heavily populating clearance bins or magnetic polishes that are collecting dust on store shelves.  I guess I'll enjoy it while it lasts....

Only $250,000 per Bottle!!! Azature Black Diamonds Nail Polish

Officially the most expensive nail polish in the world, fine jeweller Azature is releasing a nail polish full of crushed diamonds at $250,000 per bottle.  I thought I had enough in my life that was bringing me down right now, but this crap sure isn't helping matters.  $250,000...Seriously?  It boggles my mind to think of what one could buy with that kind of scratch instead of a single bottle of nail polish.  Yeah, OK it wouldn't be able to buy you a house in Toronto, but it sure would make for a shorter mortgage.  If I had that kind of money, I'd actually be able to retire at 65 instead of dying of a heart attack behind a grocery store register at the age of 74, which, let's face it people, this is my future.  

Nail polish is supposed to be a fun affordable luxury, not a bitter reminder that 1% of people have 99% of the money in the world and the other 99% have 1% and that you will never, ever get to make out with Tom Hiddleston...

Pictured: Tom Hiddleston & NOT ME!!!!! AARRRRGGHH!!!!

I try not to swear on this blog and when I do, I dress it up with a little creative censorship.  But not today.  Fuck you Azature!  FUCK YOU!

Rock of Ages Nail Polish Strips from Sally Hansen

By now, Rock of Ages has been in the theatres for 2 weeks and has cemented itself as a colossal dud that people seem to be laying all the blame on Tom Cruise for its failure.  I don't know about you but I just sort of think that if you have a film that has two not so big names as the leads and then you pepper that same film with supporting actors that are a million times more talented than your leads, then you  film is going to have some problems.  Rock of Ages was one of the movies that I had actually hoped would have a polish tie-in, not because I was going to see the movie (never wanted to see it, probably never will either) but because I thought the polishes could be fun.  Instead we got the Sally Hansen Salon Effects Nail Polish Strips and some pretty uninspired designs.  I only picked up one of this said designs, Sticks & Stones.  Its name makes little sense to me unless it's trying to be the most half assed reference to the Rolling Stones that you can find.

 The better name for these polish strips would have been "Frankenstrat" since the designers had the good sense to literally copy the red, black & white paint job of Eddie Van Halen's most famous guitar called the "Frankenstrat" because he cobbled it together out of different guitar pieces but mainly out of Fender Stratocasters.  I don't see why they wouldn't go ahead and name it the right way...

link

 Yeah, well, this was my first experience with nail strips and I found that I wasn't too nuts about them.  The peeling, fitting, pressing and scraping just was so much of a hassle that it would have been easier to just slap on a few coats of anything else and be done with it.  I won't argue that for the price (I got them on sale 2 for $8) it's far cheaper than going to a salon and having a manicurist do this for you but don't print on the box that it'll last for over 8 days when I couldn't get it to last 8 hours...

You can see the obvious problem at the top of the pinkie & middle finger, those chunks just came off right away and many chips quickly followed on the rest of my nails that resulted in my removing S&S two days after application.  Tsk!  Well, here's Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstrat in action with Van Halen's "Dance the Night Away".  I hope that there's enough cowbell in there for you!

Capital Colours from China Glaze

Yes, I know it's long overdue and many of us have moved onto brand new collections but I'm still going to put in my two cents on the remaining Hunger Games polishes from China Glaze I picked up a while ago.

Fast Track is a light gold shimmer that became a favourite of mine pretty much after I applied the second coat.  If you're looking for a subtle and simple hue with a good amount of shine that you can sport just about anywhere, then FT is a great choice.  It may need a third of fourth coat if you want to achieve bottle colour but I like it with just two.  I didn't experience any application problems and it dried quickly as well.

 

When summertime comes around, I cannot resist a good metallic polish, particularly a really nice bronze like this one.  When I looked at Harvest Moon in the bottle, I felt very sure that I was going to be having some serious streaking problems but fortunately, none of that happened.  This red toned bronze went on smoothly and I got about 4 days of wear out of it before my tips started peeking out.

 

Smoke & Ashes was extremely difficult to photograph.  The blue/green/black shimmer was a super thick polish that took extra time to dry and was surprisingly difficult to remove.  Some of the shimmer particular didn't come off without buffing and even after that I still have a few stubborn pieces that I don't think will disappear until the nail grows out.  I like how it looks but I don't like the hassle...

 

Blurred So You Can see the Shine!

Since I found that Smoke & Ashes was such a pain to remove, I don't know what I was thinking when I layered the Luxe & Lush flakie top coat over it.  I'm always going to buy a flakie polish when I see one.  They are in surprisingly short supply in the GTA and I much prefer them to glitter polish. So as much as I like its broken glass look, I had to use nail glue remover to get it off...Yuck!!!

 

Now about the movie...

I went to see the Hunger Games not out of a burning desire to see it but more out of a feeling of obligation.  I've spent too many years complaining about the lack of female action heroines (well, just a lack of good female characters period) and it would have been hypocritical of me not to go see it.  Plus I had a rare amount of spare time during a weekday afternoon, so why not take in a $7 movie?

While it's not one of the best movies I've ever seen, it's far from the worst too and frankly, if I was 12 years old, I would've that it was the very best movie ever made (until The Avengers came out) because Katniss is a smart, compassionate & noble ass-kicker who despite having two love interests, she pays more attention to the fact that people's lives are at stake.  I never got the feeling that she has deep feelings for Peeta, she's just not the kind of person who would leave some weakling in a hole to die all alone. At least it's the anti-Twilight.  If I had a tween daughter, I'd sleep better at night if she was into this as opposed to that sparkle vampire/ugly werewolf claptrap.  At least she might be more understanding of the fact that, guess what?  Life is hard and most of the time it's a huge struggle!

Owl's Night By L'Oreal

Language is a funny thing: take two words, swap their order and you end up with two completely different meanings.  The marketers at L'Oreal could have decided to call this polish Night Owl instead of Owl's Night.  One sounds like a nocturnal bird, the other like an awesome premise for a horror movie.  Either way, I ended up with a dark & sparkly polish that could have easily ended up looking green but instead is a black polish with abundant gold shimmer.  The formula is, however, quite thin and needs 3 coats instead of 2 in order to avoid bald spots and very obvious tip wear.

Edward Hopper's Nighthawks

I used to be a night owl but long gone are the days that I could stay up for days and days and feel no ill effects. These days, I find myself crawling into my bed at 7:30 PM on a Friday night and passing out immediately!  I sort of miss the days of stumbling into all night diners and donut shops to chow down for the morning and listening to the birds chirping away as the sun came up...

Pumpkin Spice by Sally Hansen

I've been seeing Sally Hansen's Pumpkin Spice on a lot of blogs in the last few weeks and I thought it looked pretty cute for a glitter polish (glitter is not my favourite).  Maybe I should have read their posts as opposed to just looking at the pictures!  Then I would have realized that I needed to put a black base coat in order to make this polish really look its best.  That's why that despite the fact that it looks pretty terrible in this photo (that's 3 coats)  I don't have anything negative to say about it's thin black base colour and orange glitter because I know that if I take that step, it will look great!

Adventures In Layering With Let Me Go & Onyx Rush

With the Spring season comes Spring Cleaning, some of which involved 2 years of sorting stuff, putting it in  bags and then jamming them into my closet.  I recently updated my nail polish list (that I started at the beginning of the year) so that I could have a better grasp of how many polishes I have and to help me to do a little bit of weeding out as well.  By the time I was done with the sorting and swatching, I found that I am the obsessive owner of 379 nail polishes!  Boy was I surprised:

Why, It Made My Head Spin...

I remembered a promise I made to myself a few months ago that I would try some layering with Sinful Colors Let Me Go, a very sheer lavender.  I slapped it over Maybelline's Black Onyx (my go to black polish for layering).  You can imagine that I was surprised by the results, since I expected to still see some lavender or purple in the combination or something that looked milky and crappy.  There was a little bit of bubbling but check out the green & blue douchrome results:

At least it was a good surprise!  Here it is with flash:

Frankly, my ass is so broke that I expect that I'll be trying a few new combinations pretty soon,  especially since this one turned out so well. I hope everyone has a great weekend!  I'm planning on watching Ken Russell's 1988 horror cult crazy-fest, Lair of the White Worm,  which I don't think I've seen since I saw it in a theatre that same year.  It stars Adam Ant's ex-girlfriend, Amanda Donohoe & Hugh Grant and it's about the shenanigans that arise when an English Lady moves in next door to an English Lord, you know, British stuff...

Actually, Your Weekend Could Totally End Up Like This in the '80's!

Simply Smashing & Black Shatter

I finally came across Serena Williams’s collaboration with OPI, Simply Smashing with the Black Shatter top coat just before I headed over to my friend’s place for some Friday night wine!  I was really starting to wonder if I was going to miss out on it because the stores that I usually shop at haven’t been stocking anything new and I was really itching to get my hands on it.  Now I have mixed feelings about it.  Why? Two words: Black Shatter...

 See, I think that Simply Smashing looks great all on it’s own, granted that you’ll need three coats and not two (as pictured) if you want more even coverage and I find it suits my skin colour, but I can’t say that I was really feeling it when I applied Black Shatter on top of it:

It just seems like the polish underneath just gets lost under all that crackle.  Granted, it applied well, dried quickly and performed as advertised but I wasn’t wild about it.  Now that I come to think about, I kind of don’t like not having the option to choose the polish that I really wanted and being forced to buy something that I might not have in the first place.  I don’t know what OPI has planned for the remaining Williams polishes but I hope that it will include more choices.

I think that I will try Black Shatter with some different colours and see if I don’t find a combination that I like.  I noticed that other nail bloggers are using a bright pink base but I’m bored into tears with that colour combination...too tweeny for me I guess.

 And now, for no other reason than this is the CD that I am listening right now, The Damned with the Shadow of Love:

 Until next time, don't break a nail!

212 Sephora by Sephora by OPI

I recently picked up 212 Sephora and it's described on the Sephora website as an "opaque smoky black with iridescent, gold and copper chunky glitter".  Well,  they're not selling themselves short on the description of the glitter, because there is a lot more colour going on in it besides gold and copper.

That's a lot of colour going on in there!  You can see the flakies pretty well at the bottom of the bottle and the glitter is fairly dense too.  I took a picture that was deliberately out of focus  so that you can see the colours more specifically:

It's Like Christmas Lights in the Dark!

I really like all of the different colours that are reflected in the polish.  One of the odd things I like to do is to look at the lights on a Christmas tree and squint so the lights get blurry!  This polish reminds me of that.  since there's so much glitter up in here, it sort of dulled the shine of the polish and was really bumpy, so I put a coat of Seche Vite just to smooth my nails out a bit and to give it it's shine back.  It's a sparkly change from plain old black polish, not that there's anything wrong with basic black!

Happy Halloween With Some Layered Polish

Rise Charming by OPI & Sally Hansen Nail Art Pen

Happy Halloween to anyone out there!  It's lightly snowing here in Toronto, so the trick or treaters are going to have to cover up their costumes with coats!  Boooooo!  I hate it when that happens!

As far as polish goes, I still wanted to take a little break from dark colours, so I dug out Yee Haw! by China Glaze from the Rodeo Diva collection a while back. 

It's a lovely peachy colour that I usually like for spring.  Peach and Orange colours often flatter me but I guess I was still feeling a little bit restless about colour choice.  The next day, I applied two coats of OPI's Fireflies on top of Yee Haw!  Here's the result:

Now that's a summer colour!  Peach with a yellow green shimmer.  Very pretty!  I'll definitely try this combination again.

This wasn't my only example of polish layering this week.  Although I had done this combination before, (as have many other nail bloggers)I didn't photograph it.  I layered Hidden Treasure by Sally Hansen over black polish.  This time  used Onyx Rush by Maybelline because I wanted my dry time to be quick.  It's a great combination and the orange and green reflection sort of give it a Halloween feel:

The durability of this combination is very good.  I've started a Xmas temp job at a record store doing receiving in the back room.  I was handling product and lifting boxes all day long and I didn't have one chip to my polish at all!  On top of that, my manicure surprisingly matches the cover of the next record I plan on buying, The Easy Star All Stars Dubber Side of the Moon:

I hope everyone has an awesome Halloween!

Go Goth Collection By OPI

 From Left to Right: Freddy Kruger, Unripened, Nevermore, Sanguine & Obscurity

Halloween is just around the corner and it's one of my favourite times of the year! There's always candy everywhere and TV networks tend to crowd up their schedules with horror movies, so what's not to love about that? A lot of polish companies come out with Halloween themed polish collections every year but this is one of the few times I've been able to find some without ordering online.  I found the set in Winners (yes, Winners again...) for $12.99 CDN.  First off, I really liked that they stayed away from putting an orange polish in this collection.  I might love Halloween but I hate the sight of orange and black together, ew!!! But as a former Goth girl, I have to say that these are exactly the kind of colours I wore back in the day in my home town of Montreal while dancing and drinking until the wee hours at the Thunderdome.

 Unripened & Nevermore

Unripened is black with blue shimmer throughout but in this photo, it's a little hard to catch the blue, but it's more apparent with the naked eye.  Nevermore is a deep purple shimmer but it ends up looking like it's blue in this photo.  Nevermore reminds me of OPI Ink from the Night Brights Collection.

Sanguine & Obscurity

Sanguine is a nice wine coloured shimmer that runs a little deep, without the gold and/or highlights that many polishes of this type often have.  Obscurity is a matte black and there just isn't much more one can add to that.

All of the polishes applied well despite the smaller brushes that come with tiny bottles.  Obscurity was the one of the collection that didn't have any staying power.  It was chipped by the end of the day. That's why I prefer a matte topcoat instead of matte polish.

If you are looking for a precious snowflake of a polish, you won't find it in this collection but I still like the colours because they are just so me!  But I do have a complaint and it has nothing to do with the polish.  WTF is up with the "free gift" of a piece of fabric they call a bracelet?

 What?  Really?

My sister thought it looked like the trimming on a pantie while I just thought it was useless.  It's times like these I have to ask: "What would Siouxsie Sioux wear?" 

Answer: Not That Bracelet, Bitches!!!