Presented largely without comment because I’m posting in a hurry, here is Enchanted Polish I Am The Walrus, another super-lovely multichromatic holo from their Beatles collection.
It’s basically my idea of the perfect autumn color. It shifts from cranberry red to fiery orange to brilliant gold with a skip by greenish on the way. If fallen leaves were sparked with a rainbow gleam, this is what they would look like.
The holo is not the strongest, and totally disappears without bright light, but it’s beautiful when it shows.
I loved wearing this and got several compliments. This is three coats; the first was a little sheer, the second was mostly opaque, but I think the third was perfect. I used the Butter London PD Quick topcoat.
More of the red.
I’ve only got a couple of the Beatles collection, but they’re so gorgeous; I want them all. I’m glad she expanded it, and am dearly hoping that she continues to do so as she finds new and interesting pigments.
I have bought all my Enchanted Polishes from Llarowe.
Next post is a verrrry subtle holo that I just got via an amazing online deal.
Because sometimes, really, the name of the polish is the best description. This is a new(ish) topcoat from Lilacquer’s Science collection, and it is AMAZING.
The base on this is the same one I posted yesterday, a-england Lancelot with a light layer of Pretty & Polished Heist. The topcoat is what makes this worthy of its own post. Antimatter of Opinion — it’s a duochrome in two ways! Both the hexes and the shimmer shift delightfully, green to orange to a bit of blue or teal in an otherwise clear base.
LOOK AT THE PRETTY. It’s like zero-work galaxy nails!
The green-to-gold is the strongest shift, but there’s quite a bit of blue, especially in sunlight.
I have two of the Science topcoats, this and Schrödinger’s Catastrophe, which leans more in the purplish/blue/teal/green spectrum. I thought this one would be a little nicer with the warm black-red backdrop of Lancelot.
I stand by my choice.
I cannot get over how pretty these are, and I honestly can’t remember seeing anything quite like them anywhere else. Lots of glitter topcoats, and many companies use variations on the color shifting shimmer and/or add the iridescent hexes to other colors, but nothing where they’re both together and looking so, so beautiful.
I buy my Lilacquer polishes from the Etsy shop.
Tomorrow features: China Glaze, a Cult topcoat, and some dots.
So I was poking about peeping at things a little while ago and stumbled across this post on Pandora’s Nails, and was hit with a severe “lemming”, a.k.a. a desperate need to own something that you’ve seen swatches of and/or missed buying or whatever. It may translate somewhat to “WAAANT NAOOOOOOWWWW”.
Nails Inc. Covent Garden Ballet. This first photo is it entirely on its own, two coats. I did get some bubbling from my basecoat, which I had just thinned and thoughtlessly failed to wait for the bubbles to dissipate. Not the fault of the polish!
You should by now have realized that I am a gray polish fiend. Light grays slightly more than dark grays, but not by much. I just love gray. I also have a deep and abiding love of subtle shimmer. This polish hit all my buttons. The shimmer is gold or pink or both. Rose-gold? Whatever. It floats there under the surface looking magical.
I was curious and thought it would coordinate well, so on the ring fingers as an accent nail, I added a layer of Lilacquer Kitsune. It looked lovely, and I contemplated doing a full hand, but the greenish flash that Kitsune shows did distract sufficiently from the effect I wanted, so I decided to leave it at just the one nail on each hand.
You can see the contrast a little more starkly here — internal shimmer, external shimmer. Both are beautiful. It reminded me a bit of opals, and I might try this with some flakies sometime to emphasize the effect. I loved this manicure. The gray is so soft and light and easy on the eyes. It wore for two and a half days until I got something else I desperately wanted to wear. ;)
I ordered this (along with the other three polishes in the set) from the U.K., as I couldn’t find a U.S. seller that had it at what I considered a reasonable price. I paid a little less than retail at Beautybay (free international shipping!), but there are a couple of other places that I found that had it even cheaper but didn’t list it as shippable to the US. If you’re in the U.K., you might be able to pick the A Listers set up wherever Nails Inc. is usually sold, but I never saw it at a local Sephora.
Looking at a few swatches, it does look like one of the new Essence Colour & Go polishes, Grey-t to be here, is similar in color, but the Essence looks like it has larger, flaky-type glitter instead of fine shimmer. I’ll probably pick it up if I ever see it in person (gray polish fiend!), so I’ll do a quick comparison then. It is, to be fair, much, much cheaper, so I couldn’t blame you if you prefer that one.
I wanted something equally mellow after I decided to remove the previous mani, because when worrying about one’s pets, it is good to have something very relaxing to look at. So, lilac/lavender with a sweet and coordinating topcoat.
Essence No More Drama is the lighter lilac color (here on the middle two nails), Ulta Lav-ish is the darker lavender with the coppery shimmer, and over the top of both is a single coat of Lilacquer Encantado.
Lav-ish I got in a set of mini-bottles. It’s what’s hidden in my hand here. I like it a lot, it’s very muted and, on its own a bit pinker than it looks here; the topcoat disguises the color some, as it’s not clear. The shimmer is very lovely, variously appearing as gold, pink, or coppery, depending on the light.
Encantado is a sheer lilac topcoat with a blue-to-aqua/green duochrome shimmer. It seems to be the same pigment as Selkie, which I wore a bit ago, but imparts a lovely tint to whatever you wear under it. I picked the most obvious option, really. :) I’m sure it would be lovely over quite a variety of other colors, too. Bit hard not to be, really; it’s gorgeous.
Essence No More Drama is a basic lavender creme. It has a nice formula, easy to control and fast-drying, but there is nothing particularly out of the ordinary about it, unless you count what a perfect match it is for Encantado.
Lav-ish was bought at Ulta as part of a set of minis, but is also available as a full-size bottle. The Essence I got in a blog sale, but you may be able to find it at Ulta or your local variation if you’re lucky — alternately, for a somewhat similar, though slightly cooler in tone, color, check out the current Ulta OPI exclusives for Talk About An Upgrade!, which is a re-label of Planks A Lot! from the Pirates of the Caribbean set. Encantado is part of the Lilacquer Shapeshifters topcoat collection, and can be purchased on Etsy.
…because sometimes, the name of the polish is the best description.
This chappie is wicked amazing. This is the first of two bottles that I purchased from Lilacquer‘s newest collection, which is themed around The Fifth Element — Zorg Industries. For the accent nail I used one coat of Pretty & Polished Toy With Me, which I love and seems to be frequently unavailable. I would love to get my grimy little mitts on a larger-than-mini-bottle of it, but I’m not sure they exist. It’s almost enough to make me want to start frankening in an attempt to make something like it. But I digress. Let us speak more of Zorg.
I have a kind of thing for gray polishes, and this is an exceptionally lovely polish. It is a slightly dirtied-up gray with a greenish-turquoisey-bluish-aqua duochrome effect. In certain lights it looks sea green, and in others silvery-blue. The listing describes it as a topcoat, and to be certain, you could use it as one, especially layered over a dark color, but all of these images are only two coats and are fully opaque. I actually had intentions to attempt to use it in a sandwich of some sort, as I was expecting something more translucent, but it didn’t happen. I am not displeased.
Rather, very pleased. I cannot understate how much I love colors in this family, though everything I have currently run more to the silver and most of them have pink and green shimmer. This is very different, the base is murkier and ashier. Loook at iiiiit. It is lovely.
So, Toy With Me — it’s a matte, lightly duochrome (lavender/pink-to-green) topcoat with matching glitter. You can make it opaque in around four coats, but given that I’ve only seen it in mini-bottles, it’s far more effective to find something to layer it over. I like it a lot in combination with Zorg. I keep wanting to yell it instead of just reading it. ZOOOOORGGGG.
Indoors! Green! For both Zorg and Toy With Me!
I enjoyed wearing this; it lasted for about three days before the tipwear started getting to me, but probably would have lasted longer with a topcoat.
I bought Zorg Industries from Lilacquer’s etsy shop, as always, and Toy With Me from Pretty & Polished, who is also being stocked at Llarowe.
Vanitas Rex 