200th Post: Celebrate With Some Polish Pics!

Thought I would take a break from feeling bad about myself to post some polish photos.  Seems like to took me a while to get up to 200 posts but somehow I got there!

Run don't walk to your local Sephora and buy the Chaotic top coat from their Sephora X polish line.  It's now my favourite top coat of all time.  Chaotic is a glitter polish except for the particles are not super shiny and that makes the top coat look like Jackson Pollock rose from the grave just to splatter paint all over your nails.  It's layered over Hampstead Gardens by Nails Inc. and I love it!!!

Jamaica Me Crazy is your typical summertime pink polish but I am always found of a pink that's heavy on the blue.  I remember the formula as being a little bit more durable than Essie usually is.

It's been a while since I've set foot in a Joe Fresh and I still have a few photos from their polish line that I hadn't posted yet, so here they are:

Mallard is a dark green creme that is actually as glossy as it appears in this photo.  I'm not sure if they still make it but if they do, it's a classic fall colour and not a waste at $4.

I'm not as enthusiastic about Mist.  It's a light frosty green tone and it's nice enough but it's nothing to shout about either.  It dries quickly though, so if you are looking for something to quickly do your nails with, this one's a safe bet.

This one has me stumped.  When I found it in the store, none of the bottles had a label that indicated its name.  It's a nice Blurple but it has a few issues with streaking, which you can see in the photo.

Rusty from Gosh is definitely going to be going back on my nails this summer as it's a great bronze shimmer with good wear time.

I think I might have had Essie's Sag Harbour before I started writing this blog, so I guess it was time to post it.  Again, this is a colour that says summer and is exactly the type of colour I like to sport while swimming in the ocean!  God, I want to go back and see my family in Barbados...:(

She's Picture Perfect from Essie is a lilac colour I liked much, much more in the bottle than I like on my nails.  It didn't quite go with my skin tone and you can notice some patchy bald spots that made the application less than stellar.

Anyone one who has checked out this blog knows about my goofy/sad/manic/self-deprecating obsession with actor Tom Hiddleston.  Well, this Wednesday, it got even worse!  I guess I'm going through a mid-life crisis and so while some people buy expensive sports cars or cheat on their spouses, I decided to do something else.  After waiting almost a entire year, and paying for it on installments (because it is that expensive) my Hot Toys Movie Masterpiece 1/6th LOKI finally arrived at my doorstep and man!  Is it something to be seen:

No, I Did Not Happen to Bump Into Tom Hiddleston on the Street While He Happened to be Wearing Full Loki Regalia!  This is s DOLL!!!

If you're not familiar with deluxe figure manufacturers Hot Toys, then you should know that they are arguably the very best at facial reproduction of the a film's original character.  He has wrinkles on his forehead and tiny freckles on his face and neck with what I assume is a brush made with one single hair plucked from the eyelash of an angel.  I have not even begun to take pictures of my 1/6th sized imaginary boyfriend  but would like to do a full length review because this thing is so damn awesome!!!

Amazon's Flash & As Gold As It Gets

Anyone who knows me well, know that Wonder Woman is one of my favourite things and frankly I think that DC Comics reboot of the classic character is the best that series has been since it's relaunch in the 1980's but I'm not here to talk about that...L'Oreal's Amazon's Flash is one of the dumbest polish names I've heard in a while.  When I read the name out loud, somehow it sounded like a microscopic fingernail was scraping across a chalkboard deep in  the classroom of my brain.  I wasn't wild about the polish either.  Not that I had any issues regarding application or formula:  it's a perfectly acceptable polish but it's just not really anything special.  Yeah, it's a shiny, shimmering gold that would work better as a top coat than as a stand alone polish but I think  the fact that I couldn't be bothered to try to get a better photo than the one I've posted here really demonstrates my my complete and total apathy towards it.  It's like it's the nail polish equivalent of my feelings towards the new Spiderman movie:

On Second Thought, No...This Guy's Ass is So Much More Underwhelming!

Actually, I hate that guy's ass a lot. I vomit a little bit in my mouth every time I look at this picture. I like Essie's As Gold As it Gets a lot more than Amazon's Flash, probably because it wasn't pretending to be anything else but a top coat.

As Gold As It Gets Over Maybelline's Natural Beauty

I intentionally chose a warm toned neutral colour as a way to judge just how sparkly is. I felt that if I applied it over a red or a black polish it would stand out anyways, just based on the unavoidable contrast that would naturally occur and that wouldn't be the best way to judge it.  I really like this combination quite a bit as I liked seeing a little bit of extra flash to an extremely neutral polish colour but if you want more flash, you'll have to apply a second coat.  It also dried much faster than AM so if you find yourself in a pharmacy with AM in one hand and AGAIG in the other, pick up the Essie polish.  It's just the more versatile choice.

Connaught Square by Nails Inc.

I am still trying to get myself to get on the "I Love Glitter Polish" train but I just can't seem to get on board.  Nails Inc. can call this polish a 3D glitter "special effects" but that doesn't change the fact that this is still just a glitter with the same matte finish and lack of durability that usually comes with this types of polishes.  Plus there was this problem...

What the FACK!!!

As you can see, the brush was crap! Shelling out $15 on a polish and then finding stray brush hairs sticking out doesn't do much to build brand loyalty. Even though my experience with this polish wasn't great, I do really like the blue & purple colour combination and it was one of the less difficult glitters in terms of removal.  Since I like  my nails to look more precise than how this ended up, at least this colour is going to look great on my toes in the summertime.

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!