Legacy

Okay, so we had to come to one of these Polish Me Silly multi-chromes that I’m not completely spun for eventually.  Might as well be the one the colour of Clark Griswold’s station wagon – the non-wood paneled parts, that is – a shade identified as either Electric Pea or Electric Pee.  And as it turns out, both are pretty apt descriptors for this polish!

Legacy is one of those polishes that regrettably presents as completely different in photography than in real life, a difference that spills over into the slightly misleading photos of Legacy on Polish Me Silly’s website, which show a cool-toned yellow foil that shifts across lush shades of grass green and sea blue.  Legacy’s reality is actually a brassy, greenish-gold frost that reminds me of the colour my 13-year-old brunette locks turned the summer I discovered Sun-In (to paraphrase a line from Buffy, in every generation there is one…who will so ignorantly and horribly damage her hair with bleach, it’s lucky she didn’t burn every follicle straight off her scalp.)  Its colour-shifting effect is also nearly totally non-existent, and displays nowhere near the sparkling yellow-to-sky blue range as shown in its photos.

But no mind (or little mind), Legacy is exactly the kind of polish that I will find endless uses for.  That’s the way it always works with me.  Hand me something gorgeous and I’ll use it a couple of times a year, but hand me a polish the colour of baby poo and I’ll find a way to work it into every manicure I do for the next year and a half.

But aside from my ability to turn lemons into lemonade here, Legacy is just not on par with that of its Mega Multichrome collection mates.  Legacy applies nicely, with that same phenomenal liquid satin-type feel as its sister polishes, but it dries down to a too-streaky frost finish that highlights every single imperfection in and about your nails, including ones you didn’t even know you had. That combined with the colour mis-fire makes this one Legacy I’m not terribly keen on continuing.

Tangled: A Then and Now Post

I did an identical design to this lit-up and tangled-up manicure last year and liked it so much, I thought I’d try it again this year now that I’m older (absolutely) and wiser (debatable.) I prefer the base polish I used this year, Orly’s Mirrorball, although I think the hopelessly knotted tangle of lights is pretty great in both. You can see last year’s effort down below after the story of The Year Sandra Lost Her Mind Over the Tree.

The first Christmas after my husband and I bought our condo, I went all out on the decorating – lights in every window, running along both of our balconies and woven throughout the headboard of the second bedroom daybed. There were stockings dangling from every handle, wreaths hung on nearly every window and, as the centerpiece to it all, our glorious Christmas tree, a perfectly proportioned artificial work of art that has graced our livingroom for the past 11 years.

That particular year I had clearly gotten it into my head that when it came to the Christmas decorating, MORE WAS MORE, and that definitely applied to the tree. And so when I found myself some 16 hours later, mired in a tangle of tiny twinkling Christmas lights, sobbing because I had decided that I’d weave the strands around every single point of every single branch, which led to me running out of lights nearly immediately, which in itself necessitated an additional FOUR trips to the store to get more lights, I had no one to blame but myself. The whole thing topped out at 2,100 individual twinkle lights, about 10 hours of actual “installation” and who knows what portion of my sanity, and I kept the tree up until March because I couldn’t bear the thought of untangling 21 strands of lights, but it really did look so beautiful. I, of course, have since learned that 700 lights plus one two-hour viewing of background Elf equals pretty much the same effect, which is equal parts infuriating and a massive relief. I call it my Clark Griswold moment, and it’s pretty legendary around these parts: The Year Sandra Lost Her Mind Over the Tree.

Holiday Road

My favourite National Lampoon’s Vacation movie is Christmas Vacation, but I have fond memories of watching the Griswold family navigate their giant, wood-panelled station wagon across the California desert in the original movie on their way to vacation hotspot Walley World, which is, regrettably for the Griswolds – spoiler alert! – closed. Clark has a not-too-surprising breakdown and storms the gates of the theme park, taking a random maintenance worker hostage and pressing him into not-totally-unwilling action in getting the dormant rides up and running. The family is very nearly arrested (when are they not?), and there’s a fantastic scene somewhere in there where Clark and his son, Rusty, run in delirious slo-mo towards the gates of the park as Chariots of Fire plays in the background. In the end they all learn the value of love and family and return to Chicago with surprisingly few criminal convictions.

I always thought the cherry on the crap sundae was the colour of the Griswold family station wagon, which Clark describes as “Electric Pea” (“Electric Pee” would also be quite apt.) That’s the first thought I had upon swiping on a few coats of this new green Cirque polish, Panacea, which looks every bit like the detailing work on the Griswold family boat. For these nails, I attempted to capture some of the highlights of the Electric Peamobile, including its decorative wooden side panels and square, no nonsense profile. You’ve got the right nails now, so jump on in and hit that Holiday Road! Just remember to check the Walley World schedule before you leave.

The Redemption of Pea Green

It’s really easy: Just take the ugliest colour in your bag of polished beauty tricks – I can practically guarantee it’s the aforementioned pea green, or maybe even an orangey rust or dog poo brown – and cover it with one and a half coats of a fun neon glitter topper seemingly designed expressly to beautify such objectionable nail polish colours.  I mean, I don’t wish to pick on this guy, Essence’s L.O.L. (oh, I’m LOL-ing, all right) but he’s ever so ugly.  It’s a particularly unflattering shade against my pale, WASPy hide, although I can’t imagine a skin tone in this world it *would* flatter.  And yet, when it’s paired with a funfetti-ish glitter like this one, Polish Me Silly’s Over the Rainbow, it takes on a grassy, springy look, like Easter goodies nestled in a basket of fake plastic grass, as opposed to the paint on the outside of the Griswold family station wagon in the first Vacation movie, a unique shade that went by the name “Electric Pea” (or is it “Electric Pee”?  No matter, both apply.)  It also helps if you throw in an accent nail in a colour that doesn’t remind you of medical waste, here Nails Inc.’s perfect robin’s egg blue, Royal Botanical Gardens. See, not all is lost for the noble pea. 😉

The Christmas Sweater

In my favourite Christmas movie, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Ellen Griswold, family matriarch and the only thing standing between her husband Clark and certain death, wears the most amazing black cashmere sweater printed with little white snowflakes and red hearts. I loved that sweater when I was a kid and I continue to love it now; it certainly feels like something ModCloth might come through for me on!

Here I took the black and white and red theme and turned it a bit on its head, adding some wintery design details to three coats of my favourite new base, OPI’s My Vampire is Buff. I then topped the whole thing off with Essie’s Matte About You, which I regrettably applied a touch too early, resulting in a bit of smudging. Or I *meant* to do that and those are tiny pulls in the “fabric” of the “sweater”…yeah, okay, we’ll go with that. 😉