Gosh: Black Passion

I've been mia for so long!! My apologies. I have bought so many polishes during my little hiatus and I can't wait to show them all to you. I'm still trying to set up a light box so I don't have to rely on the sun... but I don't really know where to begin. So that will be coming along later and I will just do my swatching on the weekends. 

Today I want to show you an old and crappy photo session of Gosh's Black Passion. This polish is actually pretty awesome, but you can't really tell from these pics. It is black with bits of silver/gray swirled into the bottle. I'm pretty sure the swirling is unintentional and were caused by the polish separating... but I don't care - its awesome! Of course the swirls don't come out on the nail.. but the bottle is pretty cool. The color on the nail is equally cool. I got compliments on it from my mom, who usually hates dark nail polish. It has a cool graphite look. If you can get your hands on this polish I would really recommend it.

Diamond Cosmetics: Chainmail Charm

Holy crap!!! 100 posts!!! Wow. I seriously need to get a life. Because it seems like no one reads these. Maybe I am wrong though and people do appreciate all these pictures. Well, I figured I'd bring you one of my absolute favorites, Diamond Cosmetics Chainmail Charm. This is a fantastic charcoal color with tons of little holo particles. A true rainbow on the nails. So this is a picture heavy post. Sorry in advance if you're not a fan of the pics.  

A blurry one that doesn't really show off the true rainbowness. Oh well, I tried. 

See the rainbow!! Beautiful!

This one is my fav. It really represents how this polish looks in the sun. It is really hard not to stare at your hands when wearing this. 

On a side note... This is the sad state of my iphone. Tear. It has been like this for a while.. but now my phone won't stay on silent. Only 6 more months till I can get an upgrade. :( 6 longggg months. 

Yay! More rainbows!!

And Nikki. She was snoozing, but then she mysteriously opened one eye and was staring at me. hehe. 

And this is what it looks like in the shade. No rainbow. But I still really love the base color. 

And Nikki's bandana. It has little bones on it. 

Ulta: Scene Steel-er

Today I bring you Ulta's Scene Steel-er. This is a really cool metallic dark gray. I really like it. But I had forgotten how much I like it until I just saw these pictures. 

Unfortunately - massive brushstrokeyness with this polish. Not saying it is necessarily a bad thing, but just be prepared to put a little more time into this mani.

I think this polish is so pretty in the shade!

Overall - there are better dark gray metallics out there that don't leave massive brushstrokes like this one - but this is only 2 dollars at Ulta! Two dollars!! For a pretty nice sized polish that applies pretty good. Is it the best? No. Will it suffice? Definitely. Plus - these pictures were taken without a top coat, and maybe if I added one the brushstrokes wouldn't be as noticeable? I'll have to try it. 

Oh, and definitely if a holo top coat were added they wouldn't be noticeable at all. I actually realllllllly want to retry this polish with my frankened top coat. I will keep you updated. 

Essie Sew Psyched Wear Test Results

Well, to be honest this polish wore pretty well. Something I frankly wasn't expecting after my last experience with Essie. This was after almost 3 days of wear. Unfortunately I just couldn't wearing the same polish any longer and had to change it up. 

You can see the tip wear on my dominant hand here. 

But on my non-dominant hand, there was not even the tiniest bit of wear. 

Overall: awesome! I love this polish set. Go get it! 

Yucky Grey Stripes

Well, I'm getting kind of backed up with pictures to post. I was afraid of bombarding my readers with too many posts. But then I realized I don't haveeee any readers. So I probably shouldn't concern myself with that. I suppose this blog will more or less just be documentation of all of my polishes and comparisons so I don't have to swatch polishes on different fingers to see what I want to wear the next day (which I do surprisingly often). 

Anyhoo, here is a mani that I wore the other day that I am reallllly not a fan of. 

Well, I'll just let the shitty pictures speak for itself.

For this mani I sponge-applied two Diamond Cosmetic grays that I recently acquired from my DC haul that I will show you in a bit. I used Concrete Jungle for the light gray and Matte Smoke for the dark gray. Then I used both my white and black nail art pens for the stripes. I absolutely adore tiger stripes. I feel that they can totally mask any accidental fuck ups that come with sponge gradations. Plus they're just cool to look at! I really encourage everyone to practice them (including you BD!) because they're awesome. 

So... the gradation in and of itself wasn't too bad, but I really felt like the polish was hard to clean up, and that it flooded my cuticles and there wasn't much I could do to stop it. So that I suppose was the primary reason why I hated it. I just felt like it looked reallllly messy the entire time I wore it, but since I put so much time into creating it (okay, not really a lot of time - just while I was watching Lone Star - which was surprisingly good! And damn! that guy is a totttttttal hottie!!!) I wore it all day instead of changing it in the morning. Overall - I probably would not use the colors I used in this mani again for this type of application. For sponge applications you really need polishes that clean up easily and don't stain. 

Ulta: Smoke-Screen

Hey, today I've got pics of one polishes that was in the Shades of Grey collection at Ulta. I love greys. grays. I'm really not quite sure how I ought to spell it. Anyhoo, this is Smoke-Screen. I love it. It is so dark and mysterious. 

This was a beautifully opaque grey cream. One coat people, one coat. And this polish dries wicked fast. Seriously I painted my nails literally 3 seconds before running out the door to go to the store and by the time I go to Walmart (which is about 2 minutes away) they were dry enough to be bumped into and not dent. Which is exactly the kind of polish that I need. I wish this was in a bigger bottle, because I forsee this bottle being empty in the next month or so. 

Pure Ice: Kiss Me Here

Okay - One of my top three Pure Ice's. Kiss Me Here is a verrrry nice and very opaque cool gray. I love it because it's so austere!! And it reminds me of concrete and stormy days. I'm not a major fan of these pictures, I took them with my non-dominant hand so they seem like weird angles, and there seems to be some shimmer left on my hands from when I removed Excuse Me, and also the polish looks verrrrrry shiny! Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I don't automatically look at the polish when it's on my fingers and think OOOh Shiny! I think the bottle shows the accurate color.

Again, this was two coats. Very opaque even though the first coat seemed really sheer. I'm telling you people - If you were concerned about purchasing this band because you were afraid of opacity or wear - toss your concerns out the window! Just because they're inexpensive doesn't mean they're bad! They are great! In fact - I have significantly better wear out of these polishes then I get from the significantly more expensive ($8) Essie.