Darling Diva Polish Battlestar Galactica Collection - Resurrection

I guess resurrection can come in many shapes and forms, but if you're a creature in Battlestar Galactica, or a polish from Darling Diva Polish, Resurrection comes in a pale pink goo.

This post will be part educational, because, frankly, does this appeal to you?

Maybe, maybe not - the point is, anyone who ever tried to photograph a polish with iridescent glitter knows it's really hard. If you put iridescent glitter over a light base color, the reflective properties will be hard to capture, and the camera will mainly translate the transparency of the glitter pieces, making them look a somewhat unappealing yellow. However, there is a way - and I found out after trying long and hard. Look below.

This is the part of your iridescent polishes you love, right? The trick is to get a raking light over the particles, and shoot in fairly low light. You need to underexpose to the level where the surroundings are pretty much unexposed, and your object is all that catches light. So turn off the evaluating light balance mode, and switch to center or spot.

I shot the photo above with my DSLR. If you use a compact camera, this will be a little more difficult if you're not on terms with the fully manual program on it. Below is a photo shot with my compact at the same time, under similar conditions and in a similar angle.

Not at all as awesome. Of course, layering over a light color does this to iridescent glitters, but the camera worsens the impact of that yellowness - and in reality, your fingers move a lot, shifting angles.

So, when discussing a polish with iridescence, we know that a lot of photos of them are crap. Resurrection is full of large hexagonal glitter and smaller square ones - all iridescent, and also different colors of iridescence. There is also fine shimmer, and the base is sheer enough to not build very much, so it will require layering (I'm wearing it over OPI Don't Touch My Tutu! in these photos). If you put it over a dark color, the risk of the yellow see-through effect is almost eliminated, but then, of course, it will less resemble the translucent resurrection goo! Just look at the wheel below.

Like before, this is three coats of Resurrection alone to the left, and to the right one coat over black.

Personally, I love me some iridescence, but trying to show it to you is like a bitch slap from your loved one. Most of my iridescent manicures don't make it onto the blog. With Resurrection, I tried very, very hard, and still, I managed only a few photos, and only one that looks nice. You'll just have to take my word for it: Resurrection is fabulous.

If you love iridescence, Resurrection is a nice investment. You can get it at the Darling Diva Polish Etsy shop for eight bucks.

Swedish word of the day:
ovillig -adjective unwilling
These glitters are, in terms of photographic collaboration.

Colorful sandwich

When I posted about my one week eperience with the gel manicure, I ended the post telling about the almost manic manicure attempt I did after the removal. Wearing the same color for a week gave me a creative itch, I just had to do coat after coat. Usually hesitant, I felt that glitter was no issue, and after wearing a somewhat dark purple for so long, I needed something crisp and colorful at the same time. This is what happened.

Yeah, the photos are no fun, because there was no sun... But you get the idea here. This is a total of four coats of OPI Care to Danse?, which is of course a light lavender sorta shade, but mostly looks white on my nails, and in between coats one and two, and again between coats three and four, there's a little glitter added. The one I ended up using is Color Club Wish Upon a Rockstar. I don't like the glitter in itself, there's just too much going on in a bad way (compared to for example the Happy Birthday-esque multi glitters), but using it in a jelly sandwich was an option I could live with. The first coat of glitter looks really nice after adding all the Care to Danse? coats, but I'm a little torn over the coat that's just beneath the surface. It's just... Clownish, somehow. But still fun. And all in all I was rather content wearing this one.

I ended up thinking of this manicure as some kind of portable flower garden. 

What do you think, is it too much for you?

Swedish word of the day:
blomsterträdgård -noun flower garden
I think most of us enjoy them. :)

Pink-a-BOO!

Wearing not very alizariney colors - will it ever end? Not yet. I saw this bottle at a friend's, and fell in love with the shimmer. Thought "This will be perfect for work!", forgetting I don't have one at the moment. Anyway, I couldn't capture the shimmer in Essie's Pink-A-Boo. In reality, it's very pretty, here it's just washed out. I wore this manicure for several days before I got tired of it. Am I getting old..?

In this last picture you can sense the greatness of the shimmer. Imagine it a million times better in reality. I used three coats. Like I've said a bunch of times before, I'm not very skilled when it comes to application of pastels and sheers and the like, so I need to build them a bit to get rid of unevenness. Also, it makes me feel a little more comfortable, since I'm used to wearing opaque colors.

Have you surrendered to this prettyness yet? Will you? Is it okay that I have? asks the girl woman who used to avoid feminine shades.

Swedish word of the day:
tjejigt -adjective girly
Huh? Wait... What?

Toy With Me!

...And this was the post I mentioned, that needed an extra careful photo selection. It's going to be epic, so don't hold your breath, or you may end up lifeless! The one post where pictures won't fail you. What's all this photographic madness about, then? Is it a shimmer polish? Is it a glitter polish? Is it a duochrome? Is it a matte? Is it a topcoat? Is it even a polish?! And the answer is: it's all of the mentioned. ALL! The only thing it's not, is blue - though it appears to be in the bottle. It's Toy With Me, from Pretty & Polished. And toying with it, I have!

First, let's see it alone. This is two coats.

Dries matte.  But with topcoat...

AAALL the bling comes out! There's the violet to pink to gold to green multichrome, the little green microglitter, and if you look closely, it even has little pink bits in it as well. So subtle, yet so full of life. Yes, this polish certainly needs toying!

I brought out a nail wheel and started trying it over a gazillion different colors, from light pastels to black. One of my favourite combinations was this one:

One coat of Toy With Me over Misa Genie In This Bottle. Here you can start to sense the shift, even though it's been applied over a pastel. Genie In This Bottle is one of my favourite pastels. It makes my nails look dead, in a subtle and feminine way, which applies to my more morbid side. With this green shift and little green specks over it, the transition into blingy corpse nails is complete. Keeping it matte enhances that mode.

Next, the layering combination that killed a lemming. The other day I showed you Militar from Brazilian Colorama, and this is the same with one coat of Toy With Me on top:

You can vaguely see the shift although it's still matte here...

... but with topcoat, dude, this is the shit. You'll have to believe me though, the violet-pink flash is more vivid in reality. (You know my camera hates this particular color channel.)

What does it look like? One of those succulent plants with matte iridesence coating it so neatly? Will a $$$ brand put out a color like that soon-ish? Yes. But this is even better, because it has those little microglitter specks that makes me so weak, and it has color shift, duo- and even multichrome, when you look closely. Needless to say, I won't be buying Halcyon now that I've got this. No, it's not a dupe manicure - it's better.

You could probably tell already from the beginning of this post how giddy this polish makes me. This is a polish that'll surprise you - if you're a connaisseur and know how to see every little detail. And once in a while, one needs a really complex polishfor that bizarre, introverted enchantment. It can be worn alone for a subtle complexity, or over black if you need to make some kind of statement.

Pretty & Polished has an Etsy shop here, and a blog here. Hopefully, you'll soon be able to get your own bottle. And I might need to get another one, I've been toying too much...

Swedish word of the day:
leksak -noun toy
Oh yes, you're my toy, dear bottle...

OPI New York City Ballet

So, you know I'm not necessarily a bridal person, or likely to wear soft shades. However, I do have a few swatches of OPI's upcoming soft shades collection New York City Ballet. Let's check them out.

Barre My Soul, three coats. Warm, pink sheer pastel shade. Actually pretty flattering on me, but it's hard to tell because my camera does weird stuff to my skintone.

My Pointe Exactly, three coats. Cool, grey sheer pastel. Finally, a soft shade the more gothic among us can get behind!

I also got the glitter from the collection, Pirouette My Whistle. I made some sort of snow fall glitter gradient with it:

And I think that's pretty nice. Small silver glitter and relatively larger white hexagonal glitter. I'm still wearing this manicure, it's holding up, and I don't feel like changing it until it starts chipping.

Bridal collections are seldom interesting, but despite my usual reluctance towards those, I'm liking the shades I tried from this release. Barre My Soul may not be very unique, but I don't have colors like that, and I've already found use for it twice. I did the snow fall manicure with Barre My Soul as well, and used a sandwich method and put some glitter between coats. It was really cute, but unfortunately I got no daylight pictures. I like My Pointe Exactly even better, if I add the possibility of using a soft shade for an occation like intended it is somewhat edgy - put in context.

Pirouette My Whistle is a very nice glitter, in all its cuteness. It's not a dupe for Nubar White Polka Dots, as the small glitter is different. The hex glitter seems identical, though. I think I like the OPI one better, actually.

Formula wise, these aren't the type of shades I'm used to working with, and they gave me a bit of trouble. You really have to watch your strokes as previous coats easily rubs off if you over-work it. Barre My Soul was a tad streaky until the third coat, but using generous layers made it all a little easier, while the streaks were less obvious with My Pointe Exactly, which on the other hand was a whole lot more prone to bubbling and wouldn't allow me the generous coats Barre My Soul did. Pirouette My Whistle is of standard OPI glitter formula, a bit jellyish and thick. Using it the way I did gave me no trouble, but because of its thickness, nails may look a bit bumpy until fully dried. The surface ends up smooth, though.

For a soft shade collection, and the parts of it I've tried, hats off to OPI for trying something a little new. It may not be what I usually rush out to get, but I will find use for these in my working environment and the like. I also like that OPI has released a sparkle shade with the pastels these last couple of years - last year's I Juggle... Men was a nice one too, and allows for some creativity to loosen up the conservative pastel colors.

These will be out in Swedish stores by the end of March, so I'm guessing about a week or two earlier in the US.

Swedish word of the day:
snöfall -noun snow fall
We've had plenty of it here in Stockholm over the last week.

SFW! Butterflies

A nasty little post today, as my nails are nowhere pretty like this, but I still want to show them off - I am a sick person. A while back as I headed towards a longer series of work shifts, I did another one of my safe for work manicures. For that, I like the idea of stamping, because it just makes everything less boring. This time, I did little butterflies in two colors.



Yep, the butterfly on my index nail is kind of ...pale. The danger of being a sloppy stamper. Anyway, I used two H&M polishes that were pigmented enough, pretty average purple and fuchsia colors, then finished off with CND Crimson Sparkle. Actually the sparkle doesn't look very good at all on my stained, bare nails, but this is what it looked like so it's what you're getting. Rather cute shit, not very me at all, but fine for work.

I'd also like to point you to Just Nice Things today, as I'm featured for the 20 questions they do regularly every week. In case you get off on that sort of thing. Read it here!

Swedish word of the day:
fjäril -noun butterfly
I like them.

Ponce de Amaranth

While Sweden is rather dreary, let me present another old OPI, along with a franken I made last week. The long gone shade is a sheer, violet purple shade named Ponce de Lilac, and is from the Caribbean collection of 1996.



I wish I had better pics, but I don't, so this is what you get. At three coats it's still sheer. The slightly colored base makes my tips look horrible. But the shimmer is very, very pretty.

What does one do with such a polish? Although perhaps a sin ...I used it to franken with. But don't worry, I saved half of the original product. Not gonna waste all of it!

I had been playing around with it in my mind for a while. Girls who like purple, but also green, would of course need a nice green with purple shimmer. I tried to figure out the best green base for it, and maybe my choice wasn't optimal, but I took out that trusted bottle of New York Summer Amaranth.




Shots by different cameras - by now you know how my compact hates purple hues, and my DSLR hates focus. Honestly, my compact also hates certain greens, which is obvious in the first and the last photo here. And, well, I poured a sheer into a jelly, so... ...this is four coats. It's hardly opaque.

But used for layering, it turns out like this:


Mmm... On top of BB Couture Poison Ivy. And all shitty flash photos. I was working late.

I know, I can't write passionately about this. But again, I'm working late. And my mind is elsewhere. I poured my brains into the other blog earlier today, and now my head is an empty bubble. But you get my not very well executed idea, right? I'm so empty I haven't even managed to invent a name for this creation yet.

Why not just use the original purple shimmer for layering, you ask? Because, with time I have come to realise how I hate particles that stays on top of my manicures. I don't like the flat impression that sometimes makes. I want the particles within the polish. Like a glow.

And now I must put my head to rest on my fluffy white pillow, as I'll be working a frightingly long shift tomorrow. I will dream of colors.

Swedish word of the day:
mjuk -noun soft
I need soft.

Going Gaga

Gagalectric, where have you been all my life?!


Three coats of this half-sheer, magnificent, violet blue duochrome from Essence's Holografics line. To fully comprehend its beauty, let my DSLR guide you:


Do you see that?! Okay, maybe not everyone loves it like I do, but I do. It's glowing.

This is the perfect me replacement for China Glaze Afterglow, which was too sheer and too peachy to justify my ownership - I gave it away. Gagalectric will stay.

Swedish word of the day:
elektrisk -adjective electric
Maybe?