Update on Orly Emberstone

Hm. I finally threw in the towel on this beauty. Wear just wasn't what I expected from an Orly. Orly is generally the BMWWU's favorite polish brand. This didn't live up to that, unfortunately. It was weird, though. You'll see that here. I'll point it out because...it's just odd.

See the thumb? Now see everything else? Not really any tip wear...so weird. It either came off in a piece or it didn't come off.

See? There's a little tipwear on the pinky and middle fingers, the ring finger has none and the index...well, that's a deal breaker in my world. Off it came.

This isn't horrific or anything...but it's disappointing. I guess I just expected more.

Beautiful color, though...Hm. I'll wear it again, but not if I'm planning to wear it for long.

Happy Talons!

OMG, why won't these swatches upload???

OK, guys. I'm still fighting with the Orly swatches. I do not know what the freak is the problem. I get very vague messages like...network error. OK. I am getting some up, though, so hang in there...I may only be able to do a color at a time, which is not what I wanted. I feel like I cheat you guys when I do that. I wanted to post this whole collection. Maybe this is the fates telling me...nahhhhh!

OK, so let's talk about Emberstone because I'm wearing it, and all the swatches I took of it actually did load.

This is a gorgeous shimmery coral. It has quite a lot of red in it and a lot of sparkle, of course, that's the hallmark of the mineral polishes. It dries smooth, so no worries there. This is actually a fair representation of it...please don't mind the over-spray. I wasn't apparently feeling very careful when I did these swatches! OOPS!

Here you can see where the orange comes in, which is partly what makes this so complex. It looks good on me, too, which is cool. I'm still wearing this, I wish I could say it's wearing well...given the amount of swatch trouble I've been having with this collection, I don't have a wear swatch up yet, but I will try to get that done for you before I take it off. I also have a split I need to deal with so this may as well change at that time as it's chipping.

It's so pretty, though!! See the hot pink flash? Yeah...I'm not sure you're going to notice that...let me see...

THERE you go! Now it's pointed out! And look what I learned, I can do cute rounded edges as well! Likey! Here too, you can see the gold, which..honestly, I kind of expect to see in this color family. Silver would just look...dirty, I think. It does lend it some fire, I have to say.

OK, so...the pink flash. That shows up on the nail. It's not a bottlephenom. 

I know I got a swatch of it somewhere...

Not really, but you can see kind of what it does here. It softens things up, gives it a je ne sais quoi sort of quel'que chose...

Here you can kind of see it on the index and ring fingers particularly. See that hot pink in there, in the sparkly? Yeah. Pretty sweet. It adds a shot of unexpected and takes a sparkly coral and makes it slightly mysterious and fascinating. This swatch also does a good job of showing the glass fleck sort of arrangement they have happening here. SO pretty. See the hint of purple as well? Cooooollll.

This color is so wearable, as well. A coral...that's pretty standard stuff. It was the go-to polish after they figured out women would wear something besides red. There are a lot of really pretty ones out there, don't get me wrong, and I do wear corals quite a lot. It's BMWWU's favorite. I am always on the lookout for a hot new coral just for her if not for any other reason.

In some lighting though...as you can see, this looks really pretty red. It looks red right here in this last swatch...It's red, it's orange, it has pink flash, purple flash (you can see that in this swatch, too. Maybe all my swatches should be vaguely fuzzy...don't think so!), gold sparkly...it does it all.

Emberstone, indeed! I like. I just wish it were wearing better, which I will try to show you tomorrow night.

Kinda depressed about it really, because typically a sparkly lot of goodness like this will wear and wear. This hasn't. Sad. But I guess it's just an excuse to go ahead and wear a different one, huh?

Pssstttt....yeah you! Come here! **whispers** That's why we're polish hounds. Chips are just an excuse to wear a different color!

I hope you like as much as I do!

Happy Talons!

BB Couture Ode to a Ladybug

BB Couture Ode to a Lady Bug is a gorgeous sparkly coral. It's a great Spring color. I received many a compliment on it. It was sort of mesmerizing. I find that BB Couture does sparkle really really well. This manicure took a severe beating and I will be using pics of this to show you how I repair chips.

I think this is the kind of coral that most of us can wear. It is on the orange side, but it's not aggressive about it. The sparkle is also not aggressive. You can easily get away with this at work. I did. We get away with a lot in the way of nail color at my job, so use your best judgment. Compared to some of what I show you on here? It's tame. But so pretty.

Without further ado:

 See? The sparkle is subtle. This is SO pretty. Let's see if sparkle shows up on the next swatch:

 There you can see some! This is really a gorgeous color. I didn't apply it because we put it on at my regular mani, so TBMWWU will have to tell you how it behaved. Unfortunately, wear was a problem. I did abuse my nails pretty thoroughly for this mani. I did a lot of dishes, I broke a couple...it was a rough week.

And it really only got worse as we went:




 This is actually a repair pic, but you can see what's happened on the right hand. Ugh. This mani did last about a week before we got to this point. 

All the same, here is how the mani went

2 coats Fiberglass Network (Don't know about it's cruelty free status, it's what BMWWU uses, she doesn't worry about the critters)

2 coats BB Couture Ode to a Lady Bug

1 coat Poshe base coat (blue bottle)
1 coat Poshe top coat (clear bottle)

Overall, this is a great Spring/Summer happy pick-me-up kind of  a color. It's a dazzler of a polish. I recommend picking it up! I actually recommend the whole collection, I just haven't reviewed it yet. ;)

Happy Polishing!

Deborah Lippmann Daytripper. Weirdest Cream Evah!

At my regularly scheduled manicure, I took three Deborah Lippmann's. I'd been wanting some Butters again but I thought no...I need to rotate, keep the blog going, entertain myself with new colors, test out some of the other brands I know and love and post their fantastic results online for the world to see.

So I took Lippmann's. Lippmann's are a remarkable polish. Great colors, great application, and god knows, those bottles! I love their little square bottley stockiness. There's just something kind of wonderful about their shape. And they're square. As in if you're the chick getting on my case and offering unsolicited advice about not shaking the polish while I was a nervous wreck and only there to shop the sale before sprinting off to the skilled nursing facility to paint my mother's nails in a cheerful and spirit lifting new color...bite me. Roll a Lippmann bottle, beeyotch. Or for that matter...just about any really great polish bottle. Nars, Rescue Beauty Lounge, Illamasqua...Lauder! And then be glad I didn't smack that smug and barely tolerant know-it-all look off your face as you perused the Acrylic nail supplies while obviously annoyed that they allow us amateurs into your beauty supply store, proving to me that you don't know as much as you think you do while lecturing me on bubbles. Bubbles?? The only bubbles I've ever got have been from cheap top coat, babe. Put that in your acrylic pot and shake it. I have to go paint my NATURAL nails now. Or did you think that my mindless nervous shaking of the bottle while looking at other colors signified I was going to drop down on the tile and paint my nails right there in the store? Twit.
But I was an adult. And I let that go.
Though clearly I still have some repressed rage about it. And some regret that I hadn't bounced the shaken and stirred China Glaze Fairy Dust sparkliness off the back of your beret wearing head.

But I digress.

And for the record, at my manicure 3 days later, BMWWU SHOOK the polish bottle! HA. I know that some advice is to never shake it, to roll it. Honestly, dear readers...I think I've had bubbles 3 times in my whole life and they were all related to top coat issues. Not shaking the bottle issues. I'm mixing pigments here, not making James Bond a martini, for the love of all that is holy and the Velocirapture.

She really pissed me off....

So I took three Lippmann's to my manicure. After years of seeing TBMITWWU we have a routine. I bring in a bunch of weird stuff she doesn't really want to put on me, and occasionally flat refuses to do, and she picks the color from that mood influenced selection I pulled out of the drawers at 6am. This time she found them all to be lovely and sexy but we jointly decided on Daytripper. Now...a cream is a cream is a cream, right? You put it on and it looks like it looks in the bottle, with a few odd exceptions, and...that's how it looks. Ama right? Not so with the weird little Daytripper. Daytripper is a lovely light coral that couldn't be farther from pastel. It's just toned down. It has a lovely bright pinky orangey sort of thing going on. It's really very pretty and I have to say, I love it on me. Here you go:

 See the lovely creamy bright and cheerful orangey loveliness? When I looked at it outside the overhead drafting light that BMWWU works under for the more regular lighting of the salon I said ruh-roh...The Wonderful thing about Tiggers, is Tiggers is wonderful things! It. Looked. Orange. Granted, it was a very pretty orange. But orange none-the-less. We had an incident of orangeness at work last year. My Friend, you know who you are. One shade of Tigger on the fingies and what came to be known as "Circus Peanut Orange" on the toes. Oh yes. It was orange. That was a far more Crayola kind of orange combo than this. Even in it's orange stages, this Lippmann is one enviable color.

But lookie what happens when you change the lighting:

Now...is it just me, or is that PINK? A salmon shade of pink but still, it's the same polish as picture number one. In fact, I took these together, I just changed the lighting in the room.
Cool? Oh, I must say yes!
I would expect this kind of behaviour from say, Nubar Peacock Feathers. Any duochrome is going to do this, but a cream? With no hint of sparkle, shimmer, holo...that is just freaking cool. I loves.

As for application, it appeared to go on well. BMWWU did this paint job so she'd have to tell you fo-sho, but it went on opaque in two coats like you would expect a polish of Lippmann quality to do.
She decided to go old school on my mani so this list of application is different from what you've seen me do for myself:
1. 2 coats Orly Nail Armour (Orly is good on the cruelty free front)
2. 2 coats Lippmann Daytripper
3. 1 coat top coat...Orly top coat in a teensy bottle. I'm not sure which Orly top coat it was, to be honest.

Wear...well, the jury is still out. I have had some chips but I think that may be Nail Armour's fault. Orly Nail Armour is an amazing paint-on silk wrap sort of arrangement. It's great stuff and one benefit of it is that it goes on semi-opaque so it helps eliminate the ever irritating VNL. It's also very thick and it has actual silk protein (I think) strands in it so it goes on...well, not really smooth. Sometimes those little strands can stick off the edge of your nail. Not typically if a pro does it. If I get ahold of it with my mad drunken monkey like skills...it can be bad. I suspect we had a stray and I picked at it, as I will do, being OCD, and I caused a weakness/chip.
I did not photograph it because while I was reaching for the thinner to smooth out the chipped spaces the thought was there...STOP! Document this! I smoothed away and repaired just like my IQ was normal. So I can't show you what damage I repaired. What I can tell you is that it repaired like a dream. I have a bottle of thinner from the OPI is independent days (I'll have to find a new thinner now, with the Coty buy out) so I used that. Here's my process for repairs:

1. Drop polish thinner into your palm, wet a finger in it and smooth in one direction over the chip until it bleeds smoothly into the nail again. You'll still have a bald patch, but you won't have that cliff of lacquer there to reveal you had a boo-boo.
2. Drop a little of whatever base you used in there over the exposed nail and probably over the whole tip, just to create a cohesive front there.
3. Fill in with the color - this is why I almost always use my own polish. I will have some chippage except in exceptional circumstances. That blue Illamasqua? Exceptional.
4. Take this opportunity to fix all your tip wear. Repaint the color over the tips of all 10 nails, whether they need it or not, and blend it in to the rest of the nail. It's not necessary to do a whole new coat of paint. Just hit the tips and thin it out towards the cuticles. You want to stay off the line created when you first painted or it's going to lift off the cuticle area causing you distress. Avoid!
5. Hit all 10 as mentioned above, mainly on the tips, thinner towards the cuticles and not at the polish edge at all, with top coat.
Done!
I wish I'd snapped pics as I went now. This is a good and helpful post if you don't know how to do this in a pinch.

So I will keep you informed as to what the performance is. Again, these may benefit from their own base and top coats, which I have. I just didn't take them to the salon with me. I got a great deal on some on Apothica but I haven't tried them yet. If you don't know, Apothica is a great outfit to work with. Great selection, great service, in my experience anyways...check them out! And no, they aren't paying me to say that! They have some interesting stuff that's off the beaten path.
Hey, I live in the boonies, OK? I have to shop online because I have odd and expensive tastes. I taught the girls at my Ulta about ButterLondon. They'd never heard of it. Feel free to ask me if I've tried a site or not and I'll try to remember and help with what I know. That's partly why I'm doing this.

I'll keep you posted, pun unavoidable!, on the Lippmann sitch.

Happy Polishing!