Kaleidoscope Candy

Cheery sprinkled nails (using Cirque’s gold glitter standard, Kaleidoscope) for this cheery Saturday morning.  Hope your weekends are kicking off most delightfully, friends! 🙂

Rainbow Blaster

Kicking off the penultimate day of the work week with this colourful assortment of holographic polishes culled from my collection of “Why don’t I wear this more often?” lacquers.  Okay, sure, fun, but why?  Well, because the end of the week is dawning overcast and grumpy and I think we could all use something to cheer us up as we head into the weekend.  Also, do I not own all of these beautiful polishes precisely so I can actually wear them?  Fat load of good they do sitting in storage, waiting for that perfect nail art inspiration – why not simply because it’s a day ending in Y?  Yes, why not indeed!  So let’s take a closer look at some of my favourite holographic polishes across the entire rainbow spectrum, shall we?

Starting off with my favourite, we have Different Dimension’s luscious red Naughty.  Most red lacquers – particularly holos, of which there are actually precious few – tend to err toward the vampy side of the beauty spectrum.  But Naughty is the most perfect shade of clear, candy apple red.  It’s polish perfection.

Next up we have KB Shimmer’s orange Rust No One.  This polish is a real chameleon, flashing between a deep, rusty peach, a warm pumpkin and a vibrant tangerine with each shift of your hand.  And apparently I might be in the mood for a a big old lunchtime fruit plate? 😉

Following orange we have Enchanted Polish’s yellow House of the Rising Sun.  I actually wouldn’t call House one of my favourite polishes; it’s here because it’s the only yellow holo I own!  I don’t care for this polish in the shade – it contains a weird silvery shimmer that tints the entire bottle a sickly shade of yellow-green urine.  Yeah, I know, super attractive!  But under direct light, it’s a lot closer to its namesake – like the first warm rays of light to burn across the sky on a hot summer day.  I’d even call it beautiful.  But heaven help you if the sun goes behind a cloud, it’s just Pee City.

Next up we have another favourite of the favourites, Enchanted Polish’s grass green Lost Boy.  This lacquer is so, so beautiful – look at that bonkers holo effect! – but oof, she STAINS.  Vibrant, dark green polishes nearly always do, and Lost Boy is no exception.  Always brush on a layer or two of a high quality base coat when painting your nails with a green polish, lest you spend the next four months running around with talons tinted the exact same shade as that aforementioned urine. 😦

This polish, A England’s turquoise Whispering Waves, feels like an addition I made to the already well-established rainbow structure, but I just couldn’t leave it out.  It may be caught somewhere between blue and green (and a little bit of purple as well, I see) but there’s space enough for it between the two.  This polish is such a stunner and, again, with its blue-green hue, quite the stainer.  Base coat ‘er up.

Next we have my splashiest, most rainbow-throwin’ polish, Color Club’s blue Crystal Baller.  I always want to call this polish Blue Baller, but that’s just me – kind of perverted that way.

In the second-to-last spot we have Enchanted Polish’s purple mystery lacquer from April 2017.  Holos often don’t present very well as against a pastel base, but April 2017 is the sweet exception – I think it looks like sparkly clouds of cotton candy.

And finally, we have Cirque’s popsicle-hued, freesia-scented pink, Powwow.  I had actually forgotten that this polish (all of Cirque’s polishes, actually) smells like freesia.  Fresh freesias are one of my favourite flowers – I just want to devour that scent, it’s so friggin’ intoxicating!  But huffing your nails all day long is just plain weird, so I’ll content myself with staring at them instead.  Like its scent, I forgot how pretty Powwow is.  It reminds me of a melty cherry popsicle (what thing doesn’t remind me of food in some way?!)

And so there we have it, a pleasant passel of polishes to perk up your precipitation-filled, uh, day (sorry, no P words to denote the concept of a day, my linguistics bad.) 🙂

Cheerful

Here’s a simple and sunny French manicure in a rainbow’s worth of holographic lacquers, Enchanted Polish’s red February 2015, orange Desert Sunset and a smidge of sky blue September 2015, Cirque’s golden yellow Chyrsopoeia and Colors by Llarowe’s emerald green Gemini Rising (a polish I am somewhat scared of using, as the last time I wore it, it stained my nails pea green for the next four months.)  Cheery!

Update: Gemini Rising strikes again!  Here’s the staining that resulted from just 12 hours of wear over top of TWO thick layers of base coat.  I won’t be using this polish again (not that I could from its current position at the bottom of my garbage can.)  Terrifically unimpressed with Llarowe – their house brand polishes are not inexpensive, and Gemini Rising has destroyed my nails now twice, despite my better preventative efforts.

Powwow in Pink

Bah, another gloomy, overcast start to the week.  Looks like this is a job for a cheery – and cherry – pink holo, kind of like this holo, Cirque’s perfectly pink Powwow.

I’ve actually never featured Powwow on this blog before, and I don’t quite know why – how did I manage to overlook this beauty?  It’s such a gorgeous colour, a true cerise pink, and the linear holo effect is just stunning. Like all of Cirque’s holos, this one went on a touch thick, but in a way that made application smooth and precise as opposed to gloppy and lumpy.  And the smell?  Divine, and that’s saying so much given that we are still talking about nail polish here.  Cirque’s holos are all scented like fresh freesia, a fragrance I find particularly intoxicating (especially the white ones that smell like black pepper.)  When I wear these polishes, I really have to sort of work at keeping my fingers away from my nose, lest I fall into severe Mary Katherine Gallagher territory (I mean, I’ll walk into walls because I’m so busy staring down at my pretty, pretty nails, but I draw the line at surreptitiously huffing my nail polish!)

Gold Dots and Gradients

I love these (holographic) polishes together, Cirque’s coppery-peach Luminous Owl and Enchanted Polish’s dark purple Dream On – it’s a dusky, sophisticated palette for fall that nicely bridges that odd little beauty gap between the start of autumn and Halloween (when, as you know, everything defaults to monsters, zombies, dripping blood, green, purple, orange, repeat.) And because I also find that these sorts of heathered-and-weathered hues give off a sort of vintage vibe, and because I can never leave well enough alone, I decided to top this gradient with burnished gold dots (L’Oreal’s Because You’re Worth It) for a buttoned up, Victorian kind of look. Simple, and something a little bit different in the midst of all these seasonally samey looks.

The Hospitality Pineapple

The (nearly) all-holo edition. Pineapples are the fruit of hospitality (which begs the question, what’s the weed of hospitality, or the fungus, or the root vegetable?) although this manicure was anything but hospitable to me during its creation. Some days your mojo just flips you off before up and departing, and I fear today was just such a day. Shame, too, since these were my very first attempt at pineapple nails. Two years of nail art, approximately 300 food-centric manis, a quarter of which deal with fruit, predominantly strawberries and watermelons, and yet no pineapples. Weird.

For these mostly holo nails, I used a handful of my favourite Cirque polishes, including grass green Panacea, golden Chyrsopoeia and cherry pink Powwow, accented by Smitten Polish’s dark brown Seasonal Lattes.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Holos

Holy macaroni, these all-holo Harry Potter nails were a pain in the patronus! This manicure inspired by Hogwarts’ house colours just didn’t want to behave for me, whether it was colours that didn’t quite match up (Slytherin’s green is a dark jade hue; makes you wonder if the kids of Slytherin might have had sunnier dispositions had they been surrounded by a cheerier colour like this one) or the bit of nail art on my thumb – lopsided enough in the final analysis – that started out as Hogwarts’ crest and two botched attempts later became that lopsided H you see before you. This is actually the first Harry Potter manicure I’ve ever done, which is amazing given that I’ve been at this blogging and nail arting thing now for nearly two years, as well as the fact that I really quite like the Harry Potter series, books and movies both. So why the hesitation? Maybe my as-yet-undiscovered wizarding skills and senses were telling me that I was going to whiff it big time, so I’d better hold back? Sounds good to me. Another one – blessedly few, thankfully – to add to the Try Again pile.

I used a mess of holographic polishes in this manicure, because I really loved that title and couldn’t leave a perfectly good pun just laying there, and also because I’ve found that holos, so long as they have good opacity, are great for base work and nail art details alike – lots of built-in shadowing that adds a little something extra to your favourite manis. Here I used two Cirque polishes, golden Chyrsopoeia and green Panacea, two Enchanted Polishes, ruby red February 2015 and dark blue May 2015, Orly’s silver Mirrorball and Lilypad Lacquer’s black Rainbows in Space.

Holo Giraffe

Terrible idea. The poor lopsided dears would just tip over. Oh, wait, we’re not talking about hollow giraffes, but holo giraffes? Okay, that makes a lot more sense now. 😉

My husband’s dearly missed grandmother had a real soft spot for giraffes. One Christmas we made a number of gifts for our friends and family – preserves, candies, soaps and other beauty products – and in her package, we included a veritable herd of vanilla scented soaps shaped like wee little giraffes. She very cutely kept them in her half bathroom long past the point where they either smelled or cleaned, but it always charmed me to see them laying there nonetheless.

These fun animal print nails are in service of a challenge I’m participating in over on Instagram where the theme is a holographic pattern. Giraffe skin counts as a pattern, right? I believe the giraffe would think so! For this manicure, I used three of my favourite holographic polishes, Cirque’s marigold yellow Chyrsopoeia and grass green Panacea, and Smitten Polish’s chocolate brown Seasonal Lattes.

Dots and Dashes

Coming at you today with a bit of abstract nail art, one of those “sit down with a pile of polishes and a detail brush and see what shakes out” kind of manicures. Here I used a clutch of holographic lacquers – Enchanted Polish’s purple January 2015, red February 2015 and blue May 2015, and Cirque’s marigold Chrysopoeia and green Panacea – in a simple and random dots-and-dashes design over a clean white base. Extra easy and extra pretty!

Thistle Have To Do

I thought I’d kick off the weekend with a porny post of an absolutely stunning polish from my very small untrieds pile, A England’s holographic Crown of Thistles. A England is one of those brands I tend to discount for no good reason whatsoever, because their polishes are always drop dead gorgeous, with flawless formulations and exquisite branding. Yet Crown of Thistles, a polish purchased in a ferocious post-holiday binge, has to date somehow remained undetected, caught up in a storm of glitterier, Springtime upstarts. So I thought I’d give this polish its due and finally let it do its beautiful thing.

And so how did it do? WOWZA. Crown of Thistles is a stunner, a beautiful, rich orchid holo stuffed with a coppery-rose shimmer that gives this polish gorgeous depth and visual interest. Holos always do their best work in direct lighting, but Crown of Thistles positively glows in the sunshine, throwing off tiny, copper-tinged rainbows. Like another favourite A England Polish, Rose Bower, Crown of Thistles is a true one-coater, and dries to a satiny, eggshell-type finish (although in the interest of full disclosure, I used two coats for these photos and one coat of Seche Vite, because I always do.) This polish will make a fantastic background for nail art, but with its one-coat formulation, vibrant, jewel-toned colour and stunning holographic effect, it’s the perfect polish for someone who just wants a perfect polish, no fuss, no muss. And while it’s not quite as pronounced as Cirque’s sweet floral scent, A England’s lacquers smell not altogether horrendous, a minor miracle in the world of nail polish. Lovely – a big recommendation on this under-the-radar beauty.