…The other’s insane~
First a short story.
When I saw twee & honey’s The Same Thing We Do Every Night, Pinky, I basically flipped my lid. It’s a gray jelly with appropriately mousy pink, white, and pale blue glitters, sparked with the odd nose-pink hex. It is amazing. I knew I needed it. I love gray, I love gray jellies, and I loved Animaniacs.
I placed an order near the end of July and waited and got distracted by vacations and a new kitten and realized a couple of weeks ago that I hadn’t seen it, and that the tracking info hadn’t been updated from “arrival at sorting center”. So I peeped, USPS determined that they had lost the package entirely, and the marvelous Cleo, proprietress and creator of the brand, sent me out a new package with a couple of extra bits and an upgrade. A happy ending, and I now get to show you how pretty twee & honey’s (noted hereafter as t&h) polishes and topcoats are.
This is a-england Iseult, a pale, shimmery petal pink, with two layers of t&h Pinky glitter (same glitter mix as The Same Thing We Do…, but with a clear base), one thin layer of Zoya Rose, a translucent pink with a green shimmer, topped with t&h This Is Matteness, which is exactly what it sounds like, a matte topcoat.
It was, unfortunately, a very yellowy morning, so I wouldn’t take most of these images as a perfect idea of what the colors involved are like. The third one is probably the closest, but I really liked the images otherwise, so please forgive me my “artistic” notions.
Iseult is, as all a-england polishes are, pretty much perfect. It’s more sheer than most, and you do get a bit of visible nail line at the tips at two coats. Three would probably take care of it, but I was in a hurry. As you can see in the bottle image below, it is quite shimmery.
Pinky was pretty easy to work with, even in a tiny bottle. I had to do a bit of glitter placement, but managed to get at least a few of each type of glitter without much fishing or glooping. I love the colors and the theme. While not hugely fond of darker pinks in a full manicure, I do apparently really enjoy them as facets of glitters. I can’t explain this with any degree of satisfaction.
Funny thing, when I reached into my box of Zoya polishes and pulled out a pale pink, I was aiming for Audrey, which is a plain sheer pink in a similar color family as Iseult. What I pulled out was Rose (no bottle image, sorry. None of those came out at all.), which is a cooler pink super-sheer polish (I’ve done -five- coats of Rose in the past and still not gotten it fully opaque) with a strong green shimmer. I didn’t realize my mistake until I’d already painted my first nail and thought it strange that it wasn’t quite sandwiching properly. Oops. It went quite well over Iseult and Pinky, though, so I went ahead and finished both hands. It seemed to make the glitter pop a bit more.
This Is Matteness is not the most matte of matte topcoats I have tried, but it does mellow out the shine and unlike some, doesn’t change the color at all, and at $5, it’s also substantially cheaper than most.
a-england polishes are available via a-england, Llarowe, Ninja Polish, Beautometry, and probably a few other places. twee & honey has a website, and occasionally sell on etsy, too. She is currently on a short hiatus, but from recent website updates (Halloween collection whaaat? Show me pics!), should be back soon. I buy my Zoya polishes from Zoya; they have frequent sales and promotions.
Tomorrow: RBL & CG — copper battle!
But this is possibly one of my favorite manis I’ve done recently. Along with Bawdy (as seen yesterday), I picked up a bottle of China Glaze Exotic Encounters. It’s a lovely deep teal creme, and I had a plan.
The Very Fine Human U. recently moved into a very lovely house and had a housewarming, and I knew I needed to have something pretty on my nails because, in my opinion, it is important to wear nice things to nice occasions. So — this.
This is one coat of Exotic Encounters, one coat of Piper Polish Co. Zebra Juice, and one coat of Zoya Frida, a dark turquoise jelly. I love the way this looks. The teal is gorgeous, the glitter adds interest, and the jelly brings it together in a lovely sandwich-y whole.
Zebra Juice is another of those fabulous black and white mixed glitter beasts. I’m not sure if it is intentional or not, as it’s not mentioned in the description, but there is also a very small amount of holo glitter mixed that gave it a very subtle but present sparkle when looked at very closely.
I did experience some really horrible bubbling, and I’m not sure whether to blame it on Zebra Juice, Frida, or the Butter London topcoat I used. Fortunately, it did blend fairly well with the glitter and was not noticeable in person.
Bonus cat picture: This is Zilla. She’s ten and cantankerous and, like most cats, loves basking in sunshine. She is also enormous. I refer to my two kitties as Great White (Nona) and Megalodon (Zilla). Nona has a fine white underbelly and lots of teeth, and Zilla is also bitey and over twice her size, plus she sharks around the house.
Here’s Frida’s bottle shot. This was the only polish that I had any trouble with. It was very thin and wanted to flood my cuticles like mad. I persevered, however. I really adore these types of colors, and they’re very popular for fall.
I found Exotic Encounters at an Ulta, and I’ve also seen the Zoya there, though I bought mine from Zoya directly during one of their sales. Zebra Juice is from Piper Polish Co. on Etsy.
Tomorrow will feature Cult Nails Princess and Spontaneous.
Because around here, April is usually gray. Hmph. So here’s another matteified jelly sandwich for you, this time using another of the OPI NYC Ballet shades — My Pointe Exactly — and a pretty glitter topcoat called Cherry Blossom from an indie company, Amy’s Nail Boutique.
My Pointe Exactly is a very sheer gray polish. I like it enormously, although it doesn’t actually look that fantastic on me, as it’s a warmer gray and I tend to do better with cooler tones. I don’t generally care that much, but this one does end up making my nails look a little dirty if I leave it shiny. The inspiration for Cherry Blossom is pretty obvious, and you can see the components pretty clearly. I’m quite sure the square on my index finger snuck in accidentally, as there are no others visible in the bottle. Bonus?
Cherry Blossom has a slightly tinted base with some shimmer, which would, I think, make this lovely to wear over a brighter color. Blue would be the obvious choice in this case. The gray I picked is more representative of what it’s like in my part of the country during spring, though. We get the odd nice day, but often it’s overcast.
My Pointe had a fairly runny formula, and flooded my cuticles completely. Cleanup was not a bear, as it’s not heavily pigmented, but it was extensive. By contrast, Cherry Blossom was initially so thick that my first attempts resulted in horribly lumpy nails, so I added some thinner and that made it easier to work with. I liked the results well enough, but sometimes I just can’t be happy with shiny nails. :)
You’ll note that I have no photos of my other hand. This is because I borked one nail completely and didn’t have time to redo it before running out the door. :)
I bought this OPI at a Nordstrom’s Rack, but they are available at a wide variety of places. Amy’s Nail Boutique currently sells on Etsy.
Today’s nail categorically refused to photograph properly.
This is pretty color accurate, but mostly it photographed like this:
Another matte’d jelly sandwich! Woo! This one is Ulta Paint the Town, from the Paint the Town mini-set, with OPI Pirouette My Whistle. I wanted to use Pirouette, which is a lovely, reasonably subtle glitter topcoat, clear with tiny silver glitter and soft silver hexes (they almost appear white, they’re so satiny), but I didn’t want to pair it with a pastel or black. I wanted to do something BRIGHT. Hence, Paint the Town, which is a pretty gorgeous dark, almost blood-red jelly.
This mani involved a ridiculous amount of cleanup, as Paint the Town was really in love with flooding, and, given that it is a tiny bottle, not the easiest brush to manipulate. But it was worth it. In sunlight it was a bit hypnotic.
I am not hugely prone to wearing red polish, but this made it a lot of fun. I really enjoy these translucent manicures. I’m finding myself wanting a blue jelly that I can use to make ocean-inspired manicures with Pirouette.
Bottle shot! Aren’t they cute? I think I’m going to need a bigger bottle of Pirouette My Whistle, though. As a person who is not a huge fan of glitter, finding one that I really like means that you’ll all get very bored with seeing it used in my sandwiches from now on. ;D
Ulta polishes purchased at Ulta. Pirouette My Whistle was part of the NYC Ballet Soft Shades mini-set that I’ve also seen at Ulta and other places where OPI is carried, but I got it in a blog sale.
So one of my friends is moving and decided she had a dreaded case of Too Much Nail Polish. Being awesome, she decided to share it with her peeps. My polish collection increased by two-thirds. This is awesome, but provides me with the hilarious problem of choosing what to wear next.
OH MY GOD. WHAT TO WEAR?! I could go for some vintage China Glaze, or some ridiculously amazing duochromes from Hits. Maybe a nice OPI or something from an entirely new-to-me company, like Nubar or Barielle! Too many choices! How awesome is that?
Wrelp, I picked none of those. Instead I re-attempted a manicure I’ve been trying since March with varying degrees of success. This time I got both vaguely closer to my goal and much, much further away. It’s pretty much just a hot mess, but I’m sharing anyway. Feeling penitent, perhaps?
In March, Zoya released the Peter Som New York Fashion Week collection — three colors, two sheer, one creme. The two sheers I have attempted several times to layer into a sakura-inspired sort of jelly sandwich gradient manicure with varying (mostly failures) degrees of success. Well, tonight I tried it again. This chappie was about eight layers of polish, I think? Towards the end I was just stacking things on there for the hell of it.
I did use two polishes that I didn’t have the last time I tried this: Tart With A Heart and Give Me The Chills. The latter was from my friend’s stash. Her full ‘keepers’ stash is epic and gorgeous and I am not-so-secretly hoping I can convince her to guest post someday — when she is not moving, of course!
Butter London Nail Foundation Base > Zoya Audrey (sheer petal pink) > Butter London Tart With A Heart (sparrrrkly holo-tastic glitter with a mildly pink base) > Zoya Katharine (sheer mauve-y purple) > T w/a ♥ > Audrey > T w/a ♥ > Maybelline Colorama Top Coat in ‘give me the chills’ (hilarious peachy iridescent thread top coat > nails inc. westminister bridge matte topcoat (which is not particularly matte, as you can probably see. It’s more satiny than anything else.)
Okay, nine, including base and top. It’s excessive. The color payoff is minimal. I have to take pictures of it now because it is never going to dry and I will destroy it in the night. Also, so you can have a good snicker at my attempt. On the plus side, holo sparkles!
Observe the tiny, weird, shiny hairs on my nails. As my friend said when I picked up the bottle and eyed it skeptically, it’s pretty easy to tell why this finish didn’t exactly take off. In person it ends up looking a bit like your polish has tiny, shiny fault lines, or as if sheet marks had developed a glossy sheen.
AH GAAAD. Yeah, I actually wiped this right off after taking pics. I didn’t even let it dry completely because of the glitter nightmare/heaven that is Tart With A Heart. I love it, it’s beautiful, but hurrrgh that many layers of it fully dry would take forever to remove.
The two Zoya polishes were from a limited edition box set from their site. The Butter London I got at a Nordstrom, but you can get them various places, notably at their site. I don’t really recommend the Nails Inc. matte topcoat, but I bought mine at Sephora. The Maybelline hairy topcoat was a gift, and if you want it, um. Check ebay, maybe? I haven’t seen anything like this anywhere else. Bar glitter, sure, but hair glitter? Uhhh.
Please note that I will be attempting to use it again someday. Maybe then I’ll succeed in making it look good; I definitely didn’t this time.
All polishes were either purchased by me or gifts from friends. Nobody ever wants to see me do this one again, not even me.
Vanitas Rex 