CHARGE! Sloane Ranger!!!

...

Only it's a bit more subdued than that.

MDAMO wanted grey. Specifically he wanted Sloane Ranger. Whenever colors would come up he would mention it. There wasn't any of our usual back and forth where I send him a million boring swatches of the million shades I have of grey. 50? Pshaw. Amateurs.

I love grey. It evokes rainy overcast days, trench coats, hot tea with cream and sugar and reading on the porch wrapped in a soft blanket; coolness, wetness, fragrant green grass...I like the rain, I like overcast days that beg you to stay quiet and lazy. Bright sunshine, while fun, makes me feel guilty when I ignore it to stay indoors.

So when MDAMO kept bringing up Sloane Ranger, slyly, mentioning it almost under breath, I knew I had to give in, wear it for him. I just KNEW BMWWU would hate it, but it was what I took and it was all I took. I wasn't negotiating. MDAMO made a request and he generally gets what he wants with little argument from me. They are my polishes, after all. It's not as though I don't like them.

I'll let you take a look and then I'll give you my observations on it. I would preface with letting you know that most, if not all, of these swatches are of a 6 day manicure. It gave up the ghost on day 6. Not bad. Really not bad at all.

OK. You can see the wear and this nail is the one that finally wrecked things. But if you look beyond that, you will see a lovely subdued pearly shade of grey that was really so incredibly wearable. It's not going to set the world on fire, but with a black outfit and pearls this would be both edgy and elegant.

Here you can see the slight shimmer in the bottle. Please ignore what appears to be black specks, that is the flaw in the glass that my camera somehow picked up. What its little lens sees is a complete mystery to me at times. This slight silvery yumminess does not translate as metallic on the nail as I thought it might. It translates as pearl. Not frost! It's not the least bit frosty, I think you can tell that from the nails. It does have an intriguing sheen, however. And you can see where I picked at that flaw and peeled that right off, damaging the top layer of my nail. Perfect example of why you should never pick at your polish!! See that white area? That is damaged nail. Don't do it.

As you can see, for 6 days of wear, this is miraculous, really. Very little tip wear, the thumb is just starting to self-destruct. Great. I love butters. I know some of the other bloggers I've seen, checking out their swatches, haven't had the best of luck with wear. Maybe butter has heard and has improved. This is one of their Summer Secret releases. You know, those three I just stumbled upon while stalking their site.  (Still bitter)

The label shot. Look at that nail, though...flawless, and you can see that pearly sheen.

If that's all the tip wear you get in 6 days? I would have repaired/repainted that nail but I was getting antsy. 6 days is a long time in a nail hound's life. So many colors to try!

Once again, don't mind the black dots, look further up the bottle towards the cap to see the lovely quality this polish has. 

Yeah, I took a ton of pictures of this and deleted about this many as well. I really wanted to be sure I captured this. This swatch does a pretty good job. I'm hiding that bad one because into each talon's life a little chippage will fall and after 6 days, can I say that enough?, I can't hold it against it. With the typing, filing, sorting, dishes, etc, and SUGAR SCRUBS! God, I forgot I've been doing sugar scrubs on my poor abused skin...that stuff isn't great on your nails. Makes your skin silky but isn't easy on polish, just the abrasion! Gads! But this is phenomenal. Good on you, butterLONDON. Look how deep this is. 

The color itself is lovely. It's a milky concrete grey, but there is a lot of green in this as well that just lends it such depth. It's fascinating.

The right hand, just to show how well this did. I didn't baby this, either. There was no touching up, no extra top coats...

Cuticles still nice and tidy, not lifting or peeling up. You can see there was a hint of wear on the ring finger inside corner there...that is where my nails are weakest. I like how each nail looks different in this picture, it shows how this polish adapts and soaks up the light.

Last one. This really shows the green in it. It's really kind of a grey green drab. BMWWU actually loved it, our resident male opinion loved it. I loved wearing it. I did get a little crave for something brighter toward the end of this but I wasn't about to remove it. If it was gonna wear I was gonna let it, and find out how long it could go. Pretty long, as it turns out!

I hope you like it!

Happy Talons!

butterLondon - Why didn't I know about these?

I was carousing around the butterLondon website a couple weeks ago and low and behold...new colors. I don't think they were advertised, I didn't get an email and yet...there they were. I felt oddly betrayed! I have loved and supported this brand since I discovered it and they can't even tell me when there is new fabulousness to be had? Plus, I've found where other bloggers already have their claws in the new collection! Not this one, the Fall one! Granted, this is a little small-time blog compared to theirs, I mean...7 whole followers and MDAMO isn't exactly a crowd of readership, but one of my posts did get over 9000 hits. That's not so small, is it? And yet...they can't even shoot me an email? BASTARDS.
So of course I ordered them straight away.
I swatched them because I didn't want you to feel likewise betrayed. I mean...we need to know about this stuff, right?

These are just swatches, they aren't real manicures with base coat and all that. Just the colors themselves.

I present to you, Scouse, Swinger and Sloane Ranger.

Yes, they are this fabulous in real life, the only thing I can say is honestly different from the picture is that they are more sparkly. Except Sloane Ranger. It just has a lovely sheen to it with what appears to be on close inspection the teensiest hint of silver. 

In reverse order. Why I didn't make this easier on myself by painting the first three nails instead of the last three, I don't know. I am sometimes a dingbat.
Scouse has definite pink sparkle in it. It's really stunning. It's very sheer, though. This is three coats. It's three coats for all of them, though Sloane Ranger didn't actually need it.

Sloane Ranger showing off it's silver microshimmer. You can see a hint of this on the nail. Nice!

The shimmer again is a little visible. It adds depth but this is so neutral...it's really kind of elegant and understated. I like it. It also has a hint of kind of dirty about it, which is also nice. It keeps it edgy. It's not a clean grey and I like that about it. There are a lot of greys out there, they were really the hot color a couple years ago and they've never completely gone away, for which I'm grateful. I happen to love grey. I even love Earl Grey of the tea fame. Particularly yums with some milk and sugar. :D

This is Swinger. It's a true grass green glitter. It's a green jelly sparkle base with larger green glitter suspended in it. Its really sheer, this is three coats. So I tried it over Union Jack Black and it was nice but really less spectacular than on it's own, I felt. If you're serious about wearing this as it's own color, I would find something that works for you as a nude and layer over that. It's really verrrrry pretty.

You can see the Union Jack Black experiment here, and it does help. I still think a nude would be better unless you want to darken this down for some reason. Aside from eliminating nail line, I'm not sure this does this much for it.

Scouse. The star of the show, IMHO. Nice glare. But you can see on the nail that this is a wonderland of sparkle. What is not translating in the picture is that the sparkle in this is blue and PINK. Yes, pink. Hot pink, but still pink. And it works. It makes a really nice contrast but doesn't conjure up images of a co-ed nursery. This is a super sparkly micro-glitter in a blue jelly base and it's seriously lovely. I fell in love. It was one of those **gasp** moments when I took it out of it's bubble pack.

Very sheer, you can see the nail line clearly here. This is also three coats so you want something under this. Either a similar blue, which would lend depth, or a black, or nude...but I wouldn't be afraid to experiment. I am betting that a deep purple, a bluish one rather than red, would give this depth and bring out the pink. Pretty special, this one. Why are they hiding it? I scope out the butters at Ulta every time I go in and they didn't have it, either. I don't typically buy there, I order them online because you often get better deals and you know that some 14 year old hasn't opened it and painted her toes with it in the store or something equally nasty. I don't know about your Ulta but mine is rampant with little teeners playing in the big girl toys. That's fine and all, but I don't trust what they do with stuff. Know what I mean?

So that is the latest haul from butterLondon. With these I got a free Powder Room polish remover. I had a couple of them from a sale I hit when they first came to this Ulta and I'd never tried it. So I finally did and I am impressed. For being acetone free, it's really really good. And smells nicer than the normal stuff as well. I'd try to hit one of those specials if you're interested though. $8 for that teeny bottle is a shock. I think you don't use as much, but still. You should be warned. I thought they were sample bottles but nope.

Are you ordering these right now? I did, almost as soon as I saw them. Gorge!

Happy Talons!

A-England Ascalon

Photo heavy post, be forewarned. I took a lot of pictures and I deleted about a third of them. You can thank me any time.
I had to take a lot of pictures because this is amazingly beautiful. For once I actually managed to really capture the color, the holo the everything. And I did it well and I did it a lot. I think this is more a testament to how beautiful this polish is than it is my photography skills, which, if you haven't been noticing or you've been reading this blog in braille, is limited at best.

Ascalon is part of the latest A-England collection called "The Legend". They are mostly holos, which I love. Ascalon is described as

"Forged by magic and guided by our hero's sainted hand, the steely grey of his spire is alive with a swirling heart of lavender fire." On the A-England website here: Ascalon.

Check it out. I pretty much know you're probably adding it to your cart and buying it as soon as you see it. 

This was right after I painted my nails. I think this may not even be dry yet and you can see I hadn't cleaned up yet. This is what you're going to see in every day lighting, at your office, etc. Gorgeous, right? "Steely grey" is right, but look at the sparkle in there. It looks like silver micro-shimmer but it's not. If you look closely you will see flashes of that lavender, which is a flash in the polish. I can't even begin to start drooling on this. I don't know where to start.

A kinda blurry one to show off the sparkle. We're still not really seeing it, though. I was actually on IM with a male friend of mine **waves** who is the soul of patience with my girlie habits. He actually will converse with me about nail polish and encourages me sending him pictures and seems genuinely interested. If not interested then indulgent. If that isn't dedication to male/female relationships I don't know what would be. Regardless, I was taking these to send to him so he could tell me if he liked it or not. He liked it. Not as much as another one I will likely have to wear shortly, but he liked it. So there you go, a male opinion. 

Still just what you will see in ordinary lighting. That's my leg. I was at my desk trying to send pictures of what my nails were doing and not really getting it right. Not bad, you can see that lavender again here, which just adds so much depth. Holo AND flash? I think I just suffered a nail lacquer la petite mort.

If you don't know what that means, look it up. I said it en Francais for a reason.

 Oh. Holy. Jesus. 

Yes.

This is what you really get. Look at that. There are no words. Or at least I don't have any. 

I know, right? Couldn't you just die??

Be forewarned. This is what you will see while driving in the sun shine. Please be careful. Wear gloves if you have to. I would hate to think anyone wrecked because they were hypnotized by an absolute beauty like this. And yes, you will see this much brilliance in some lighting. This is just the camera catching the right angle from the ceiling fan light. Honest. The polish really is this lit from within, this holographically brilliant, this amazing. It really, really is. 

Last of the indoor lighting shots, here is a bottle one. It's not actually this dark...but it is, kinda. This doesn't show the lavender flash, which seems more prominent in the bottle than on the nail but you will see in the sunlight pics that it's really not the case. The lavender flash is definitely there. 

OK. I know. This is terrible, really. I had some kind of schmata on my lens, but I held onto this picture because of the obvious flash on the pinky nail. You can really see it here. This was outside approximately 6 days after the initial manicure, keep that in mind in the future pics. You will see what 6 days of untouched A-England wear looks like. Not a lot! It's enough that I'm planning to change this manicure tonight, but it's not bad!

Very similar picture sans schmata. Nice, right? Minor tip wear, nothing glaring. Right hand looks as good. Look at the brilliance, here. How can you not love it? (I'm looking at you, BMWWU. How can you not love holos? Well, and you too, Ruby Slippers. (Flash freaks her out a little.))

Love the Hollywood smile stars from the sun catching the shimmer particles in the polish. Couldn't have staged that.

The label. I take these as much as a reference for me as anything but I take them so you may as well see them as well. The holo is slightly more pronounced in this picture.

I happened to notice that at this angle the polish showed itself brilliantly so I took the picture that way, and let me tell ya, at 96 degrees, that blacktop is freaking HOT. However the camera didn't get it. This does serve, though. It shoes how densely packed and glowy the particles in this polish are. This is really highly pigmented and the second coat was probably more to just even it out and intensify it, and honestly habit, as anything. One thick coat of this might do you just fine. 

There's that lavender goodness.

**Wipes drool off chin**

I do heartily love this. 

That's all the wear after about 6 days? Hello. What's not to love. In my experience these wear so well. Go check out my post of Iseult if you don't believe it. I thought that would never come off. 

OK, last one. It's just so bloody fascinating. Every color in nature is in there, I swear. I just want to stare at it. 

Mechanics, because really, I don't know what else I can tell you about it. Look at those pics. That is about all you need to know!

1 coat Poshe Nail Strengthening Treatment Base Coat

1 coat Nailtiques 2 Plus

2 coats Seche Rebuild

2 coats A-England Ascalon

1 coat Poshe Top Coat (Fast drying)

Love love love love love.

Happy Talons!

BB Couture - Sinfully Polished, The Men's Collection - Jealousy

Jealousy is not green. I think for the Men's Collection she's gone with more how these emotions make you feel rather than what we tend to think of them being colored. At least that's my impression, anyways. Look and see what you think. You'll have a lot of opportunity because this post is also really swatch heavy.

Jealousy is a taupey grey with different microshimmer and some black micro in it. I think I have a swatch that will show you that. The black is rarely more than a hint. I like that. I like that it's kind of a feel more than something you clearly see. Maybe you wonder if you've seen it. It adds interest.

 With blinding flash to show you the sparkle. This is the one where you can see the black. Click this swatch and zoom it up larger and you'll see it. There are two specks I can see now on the pinky nail.

See the dull grey with a hint of kind of bland taupe? It's...this is how I feel when I get jealous. It's not a very nice feeling but it makes a really interesting and lovely nail polish!

Without flash. This is more ordinary lighting, what it will look like, but the flash does show how much shimmer there is in this, doesn't it?This shows the taupe sense better. You can still see the silver, both on the nail and in the bottle. Part of what is so great about BB Couture is that it's almost never a polish where you see something in the bottle that doesn't show on the nail. They are very WYSIWYG that way. It's a very nice quality. Ever see a bottle or a bottle shot, take it home and put it on and go WTF? Doesn't happen with BBC.

OK, no more acronyms!

It looks brown here. That's the taupe coming through at this angle and light.

Here it's showing it's grey side. This doesn't look smooth here, but I assure you, these dry pretty smooth. All that shimmer is so well incorporated that you don't feel it. You'll still want to top coat these, though they claim not to need it. It just helps protect your nails and polish better if you do.

There was such a lot happening here, I took a ton of shots of it. See the hint of purple on the pinky nail? That's the shimmer in there. This has a lot of character. It's hard to capture that in a picture, particularly since we've had so little sunlight here.

OK, last one. This shows the color and shimmer the best of them all, I think, though it has more color to the shimmer in real life. I really really like this. It's nice on me, as well.

Formula is great, easy to apply. See the perfect cuticles? BB Couture makes that easy to do! Good brushes, easy to handle, nice consistency. I love BB Couture.

Jealous? =D

Happy Talons!

Orly Birds of a Feather - Sea Gurl

Sea Gurl is a steely silvery grey. It has some taupe in it as well, it's a nice complex edgy color that you can easily wear at most offices, I would think.

You can see a touch of the silvery speck here, as well. It's not really a chrome...It's really pretty. I think I have other similar polishes, but each has it's own charm, I believe!

See the kinda sparkliness? It's certainly not an out and out glitter, but it's got a little shine, it likes to be noticed.

Like all Orly's, it applied nicely and is opaque with nice pigments. The tell tale sign, I have nice clean cuticles, so you know this went on beautifully.

You can see the hint of taupe here. It's a nice wearable color. It's not common or ordinary, this isn't pink! But this is pretty neutral and should compliment any outfit you wear with it.

I think it's a nice one!!

Happy Talons!

Next on Deck

I have swatched and have some wear thoughts on the new Orly Mineral FX collection, which I loves. I had to hit two separate Sallys, across town from one another mind you, to score this whole collection, but it was so worth sitting through that one light THREE times. And bonus, they were on sale.

However.

Ever notice there is always a "however"?

The uploads are being just painful. I have some great swatches...but getting them up where I can use them is proving to be challenging to say the least. I am exhausted, which doesn't help matters, does it?


So. Maybe I will start this project with the first I actually wore. I am wearing another right now. They're gorgeous, seriously. I feel like I say that about everything, but...these really are pretty amazing.

So Let's take a look at my probable favorite, which I had to get on my nails right now, RIGHTNOW!

GAH this is a terrible color to capture. This is what it looks like, only dumbed down. It is a dark grey, gunmetal sort of color. This is not a jelly. The thing is...see all that sparkle that's making it look like a ManGlaze? It's not really silver. Some of it is, I suppose, but most of it is HOLO. Yes. That's right, lads. Holo. It's gorgeous. It reflects the light and it dries smooth. Pretty cool, eh?

Yep. That looks an awful lot like Goth right there, which it is not. Not even...no. First off, it's not black. Second...those silver particles are holographic and every color under the sun. I have to be able to do better than this.

K...that's a little better. Blurry in sunlight...yeah, yeah...

Ow. That's giving me a headache. Quick! Before you look away, see the colors? See that? Now imagine that exponentially more intense. THAT would be Rock Solid. I loves it.

OK, so it wore well for the 4 days I had it on. Some tip wear but nothing you couldn't fix. It goes on pretty opaque and covers well. This is two coats. I didn't notice any drag on it, so it was pretty easy to apply and like I mentioned, it dries nice and smooth. No bumps. Coming off was a whole other matter. It was like Studio 54 at the nail salon. Oops!



I am trying out a new top coat, I'll review that separately once I've played with it more. It's really meant for a UV light, which I didn't realize and don't have. It seems to be doing OK.

What do you think? What to check out this collection?

I intend to swatch the whole collection together soon, probably for Saturday's post. I really like it! I hope you will like it as well so you'll buy it and encourage Orly to do some more of these fun polishes.

Happy Talons!

Deborah Lippmann Stormy Weather with Narcisco Rodriguez

The last of the Deborah Lippmann Fall Collection is Stormy Weather with Narcisco Rodriguez. It's a slate grey cream, like the color of wet concrete. It went on beautifully, as to be expected, and is richly pigmented.

Pretty, huh? There is a dirtiness to the color I kind of like. This has no top coat on it, that's it's natural sheen. Lovely.

Here is another shot, I took this with the flash on and then dummed down the exposure because it turned out WAY lighter than this is really. This is close:

It has quite a lot of blue in it, which gives it a  bit of something extra from a standard grey. This color is pretty complex for a straight up cream.

Also pretty close to actual, but with different lighting.

It's a striking color. I am wondering how this would compare to the darker greys in the Nubar Fortress collection...I didn't think of that before. Maybe I will have to try that comparison!

Happy Talons!