Embroidered Emerald (pic heavy)

I'm baaaaaaaaack! (Back again, Jana's back, tell a friend.  Guess who's back dun nun na)  I've got roughly 300 things to show you all and today I was sitting here trying to figure out where to start and eventually I just decided to go big.  Let's just put a handful of pictures up and drool for a while, shall we?

Warning: This post is wicked picture heavy.  I needed every one of these pictures to try and show the gorgeous-ness that is this polish.  (Yes, I said wicked.  I just watched the movie Fever Pitch so I feel very Boston-y right now.)  I'm not putting them under a cut either...I won't hide it from the world! 

Misa - Emboridered Emerald.  What can I say about it?  I love this polish, I love the name... everything is perfect about it. 

Holy moly.  This might be my favorite picture of it.  The colors!  The shimmer!

My hand is at a funny angle here so I could try to show you what the base color of Embroidered Emerald is. It's a raisin-y kind of purple if that makes sense. Very pretty, dark without being too dark and you know how I love me some purple.

Now with Embroidered Emerald, you get a serious multi-chrome thing happening.  There are 3 or 4 different colors of shimmer that will pop out depending on the angle of you hand and lighting.  Wearing this polish can be hazardous to any type of productivity, beware :)

 

So here you can see the subtle gold shimmer on my nails and you can see the green in the bottle

Here you can see the blue shimmer



And the green shimmer (mixed with some blue)

 There also is this green-ish gold shimmer that comes out in certain lights.

Look how even in the shade so many different colors show up on your nails.  Yum.

Have I saturated you with pictures yet?  Well, let me gush some more.  The formula on Embroidered Emerald is pretty solid.  Misa doesn't disappoint formula-wise even with the older polishes.  I have either 3 coats or 4 thin coats on in these pictures (sorry I don't remember for sure but I'd guess for 4 thin coats if I had to pick.)  This baby came out in Fall 2006 (I believe) and has become pretty tough to find by now.  I was lucky enough to get my hands on it last year which made me sooo happy since I had been lusting after it for a long time. 

Can we talk about the name for a second...Embroidered Emerald.  This is the kind of name nail polish should have; not suzi this or that or something generic like "green."  Perfect name for the color. 


How about one more picture for the road? :)

What do you think of Embroidered Emerald?

Fairy Dust Feng Shui

I've been a very bad blogger lately, not because I don't love you all haha it's just been a little crazy lately. I've steadily been taking pictures, swatching, and polishing so I have plenty of stuff to share with you :) Thanks for bearing with me during the unintended absence!

So what I have for you today is a layering combination that I la-la-love. Perfect for fingers or toes! This is 2 coats of OPI - Suzi Says Feng Shui and 1 coat of China Glaze - Fairy Dust. It's glittery but not overwhelmingly so; colorful but not in your face because of the dusty quality of Suzi Says Feng Shui. It also makes me very happy that the glitter in Fairy Dust lays flat, I hate bumpy glitter.



outside, sunlight


more sunlight outside (the pictures were too pretty to just pick one)


outside, shade

inside

There's just something about the dusty blue color and the light hitting the holographic glitter that makes me very happy. I need to wear this combo again ASAP! Do you have any colors or combinations that have that an effect like that for you?

I was interviewed!

The lovely Kimberly over at Libby's Pink Vanity, has an amazing series going called A to Z of Me. Every Sunday she highlights a different blogger and shares The A to Z's of them with us. I love love love things like this and seeing other bloggers be recognized and celebrated by our peers is awesome.

I was lucky enough to be this week's focus of her A to Z of Me series! Please go check it out here (and if you've missed any of the past ones read them as well, they're all fabulous.) Even if you don't care all that much about what I have to say, she has included a pretty phenomenal picture of some penguins at the bottom of the post. That alone is worth a click ;-)

Click here to check it out!

Thanks again Kimberly!

This Definitely is My Kind of Cool Aid

I have no idea why it's taken me so long to post this beautiful polish. I'm sure you've seen Cult Nails - My Kind Of Cool Aid before and have heard about how Maria of R3Daily started the company, so I won't go too much into it. Maria is a fellow blogger who did what I think we all dream of and started her own line of incredible nail polish! This was her very first polish to hit the market and I made sure to order as soon as it came out. I then proceeded to fall in love with it haha.

My Kind Of Cool Aid is a pretty lavender-gray shade with delicate silver, blue and pink shimmer in it. The shimmer is borderline, what I would think of as, secret; so it is subtle but still very pretty. I wish I could have gotten it to show up more in my pictures; my camera wasn't having it though haha. Next time I wear this I'll try to catch the shimmer, but in the mean time check these pictures out!

sunlight
shade

indoors with flash

indoors

indoors

I couldn't get the shimmer to come out to play much but it's beautiful, subtle, classy, and glamourous. I am not exaggerating at all either haha. What do you think of My Kind Of Cool Aid - do you already own it or plan on picking it up one day?

Also, When Cult Nails gets 5,000 likes on Facebook they are going to have a major sale where the polishes will be $5 (aka 50% off!) so please be sure to like them on Facebook so you too can get your hands on My Kind Of Cool Aid and some of the other gorgeous shades!

Layering with... Orly- Fowl Play (picture heavy!)

So Orly- Fowl Play is one of the star polishes of the fall collections and has been hotly anticipated ever since the lovely Carina over at Gilded Nails put promos and swatches of it up. It started trickling into stores recently and I'm sure you've all seen swatches of it by now, be it on other blogs, the nail board, etc. It has kind of a squishy, jelly-like finish, which made me curious about how it would look layered over some other colors. I wanted to try and lighten up the dark purple base color of Fowl Play too. I rummaged through my stash and asked on twitter if there were any colors you wanted to see it over and came up with a nail wheel full of choices :)

Enough with the words, on to the pictures right? haha. So here is a picture of the nail wheel before I put Fowl Play over everything...

(remember you can click to enlarge all of the pictures!)

1. Orly - Fowl Play (3 coats)
2. Orly - Royal Velvet (3 coats)
3. Diamond Cosmetics - Crushed Velvet (1 coat)
4. China Glaze - Light As Air (1 Coat)
5. OPI - Done Out In Deco (1 coat)
6. China Glaze - Spontaneous (2 coats)
7. China Glaze - Grape Pop (1 coat)
8. Essie - Sexy Divide (2 coats)
9. Zoya - Demi (1 coat)
10. OPI - Manicurist of Seville (1 coat)
11. SpaRitual 0 Devil Inside (1 coat)
12. OPI - Mrs. O'Leary's BBQ (2 coats)
13. Orly - Enchanted Forest ( 2 coats)
14. China Glaze - Re-Fresh Mint (2 coats)
15. Avon - Vintage Blue (2 coats)
16. Wet n Wild - Blue Moon (2 coats)
17. Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear - White On (2 coats)
18. Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear - Black Out (1 coat)

Now let's check out how Fowl Play layered shall we? Since it's kind of a complex polish with the flakies and shimmer and all that good stuff, I'm giving you pictures in sunlight and in the shade with flash, to try and capture the differences and nuances of each combo.

1-4 in sunlight

1-4 in shade, with flash

4-7 in sunlight

5-8 in shade with flash

8-11 in sunlight

8-11 in shade with flash

12-15 in sunlight

12-15 in shade with flash

15-18 in sunlight

15-18 in shade with flash

17-2 in the shade with flash


Did you make it this far after all the pictures? :) Out of 17 possible choices on this nail wheel, which ones are your favorite? I liked a lot of these! I think China Glaze - Spontaneous (number 6) gave me the perfect purple base color I originally was looking for, but I also really loved how Orly - Royal Velvet (number 2), Essie - Sexy Divide (number 8), and Wet n Wild - Blue Moon (number 16) looked because the shimmer in the base colors added to what Fowl Play already had. The most surprising ones for me were the red shades I tried, (thank you Allibally for the suggestion!) OPI - Manicurist of Seville (number 10) and SpaRitual -Devil Inside (number 11) I looooooved how pretty and burgundy looking those turned out. I can see myself wearing these combos during the fall/winter for sure. I like the idea of those manis with sweaters and fall clothes for some reason haha.

Demure Vixen vs. Venus di Violet (comparison)

Every now and then I post spam on MUA (MakeUp Alley) of random polishes, and in one of those posts I had OPI - Venus di Violet (which I showed you earlier here) Someone asked to see how it compared to Essie- Demure Vixen. So here we go!

Three coats of each color, Venus di Violet on index and ring fingers and Demure Vixen on middle and pinky fingers.


sunlight

shade

indoors

bottle shot!

The Verdict? Obviously they aren't dupes, Demure Vixen is darker and more mauve, but they are relatives. Demure Vixen is somewhat of a darker version of Venus di Violet. The shimmer in DV is a little more "secret" and VdV is a little more obvious. Also the shimmer isn't 100% the same, although it is very similar. It feels almost identical but VdV is a little pinker, more of a purpley-pink shimmer.

If you like one you'll probably like the other polish, I hope this helps :) Are there other comparisons you'd like to see? Tell me in the comments!

Venus di Violet

So, it's been a while, eh? Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging and as much as I wish this could be my number one priority, realistically other things have to come first. But everything has settled down (or at least as much as it's going to haha) so I'm back! I never intended to go on that hiatus, so sorry for no heads up.

Today I have OPI - Venus di Violet to share with you. This is a polish I had put on my wishlist early on in my nail polish addiction and never really got around to getting until one day I found it on sale at a Trade Secret store. I was pleasantly surprised by it!


sunlight

shade

indoors (and apparently a little rough on the clean-up, sorry!)

This is a soft and sophisticated color, kind of a palette cleanser if you will. The application was good for such a pale color, sometimes they can be streaky and tough to work with but this wasn't. I used three coats in these pictures. Venus di Violet is a pale pink with pretty shimmer that is purple-leaning pink. I'm glad I ended up picking this polish up, because I ended up really liking it :) I'll do a comparison with this in my next post, so check back for that! What do you think of Venus di Violet?

Just a couple of other little notes - I will be notifying the winner of the crackle polish giveaway hopefully this weekend. I have some new reviews coming up as well as another giveaway very soon!