Bruised

I used this multichrome stunner, Polish Me Silly’s Guilty Pleasure, in a bit of nail art some weeks back, at which point I took the opportunity to snap a couple of swatch-type photos so we could all bask in its lovely shiny plumminess. I love the way it changes colour from a rich, royal blue to a deep magenta (and every shade in between) – bruise-type colours without the nasty requirement that you first ram your shin and/or other parts into something hard and painful. You can find Guilty Pleasure and its equally stunning sister chromatics at Polish Me Silly’s Etsy shop.

Duelling Duochromes (OMD2)

I’m still playing catch-up with the first week’s themes in the Oh Mon Dieu 2 nail art challenge, so of course it makes the kind of sense that doesn’t that I’m leapfrogging over the theme of dark (in my head, all I hear is douchey Batman from The Lego Movie growling that he only builds in black or very, very dark grey) and heading straight to the sixth day’s challenge prompt, duochrome. For the uninitiated, duochrome polishes are ultra shiny, mega light-reflecting polishes that flash two different colours depending on the angle of your hand. By the same token, multichromes are megawatt polishes that reflect a whole spectrum of rainbow-throwing colours.

For these nails, I layered two complimentary purple multichromes (they were the only chromes I had, duo, multi or otherwise), Polish Me Silly’s Guilty Pleasure and Holy Shift, one atop the other in a subtle gradient, topping them off with a multichromatic glitter topper, Ozotic’s 528, before dotting on what I think I had intended to be a Milky Way-type event (the astronomical kind, not the chocolate bar), but what unfortunately looks more like a wonkily-sewn zipper. There’s a lot going on here, but improbably, it’s not a gigantic mess, and my nails twinkle so prettily from so many different angles, I really can’t complain. In the photo below, taken before I added the celestial dots and topcoat, you can really see the gradient effect (one of my better ones, actually, no doubt because of the colour-softening nature of multichrome polishes.)

Purple Paisley

Either my Pun-o-Meter is completely on the fritz or I have well and truly begun running out of funny titles for my posts, because I SWEAR there are no amusing things to say about paisley. Although I know some people who have very strong and somewhat controversial opinions on the subject of paisley, so apparently it’s something worth talking about, but just not punning about? Interesting. Very interesting.

For these nails, in honour of tomorrow’s Father’s Day (because dads like lame things like ties, amirite?!) I did a gold paisley tie print over top of two ultra luxe and silky chromatic polishes, Polish Me Silly’s plum and purple-toned Guilty Pleasure and Holy Shift.  It’s a fairly tacky combination of colour and print – like sporting Vegas on your nails – and I think if my dad owned such a tie, I’d probably tell him to kill it with fire.  But pretty for nails!  And as always, we’re here for the nails, not father fashion. 🙂

Holo Hell

These nails, a stained glass design that I thought would look extra pretty done in a handful of megawatt holographic polishes, are the first nails I’ve ever done that have proven to be well nigh unphotographable. I took well over 100 photos of these nails in the sun, out of the sun, with a light source behind me, beside me, above me, indoors, outdoors and even out in the hall where I thought the bright overhead halogens would allow my camera to focus for two-tenths of a second. NO DICE.

So I regret to say that despite taking quite a while to complete and despite using some of my rarer, more expensive polishes and despite looking quite good in person, these nails, my photographic hokey pokey notwithstanding, don’t look like all that. Still, there’s something fun about a stained glass design that actually shifts colour depending on the light, so here I’ve highlighted two of the photos that actually did turn out so we can all bask in the pretty scattered holo of Enchanted Polish’s blue Across the Universe and purple Octopus’s Garden making nice with Polish Me Silly’s plummy Guilty Pleasure.

A Not So Guilty Pleasure

So I’m trying out this new thing this year. It’s called saving money? That question mark seems appropriate because financial sense and sensibility is not something that comes naturally to me. I’m what I’d call a piddler – the money goes out in little dribs and drabs that never seem to amount to much, and then at the end of the year I wonder why we haven’t been able to take a trip to Disney World AGAIN.

In the first two months of this year my husband and I have made huge strides towards changing our spending habits for the better, cutting out a lot of frivolous purchases that, through repetition alone, weren’t giving us a whole lot of joy. And that included my nail polish purchases, although it should be noted that my “stash” is rather small and I don’t buy duplicates of colours – one polish in the baby blue spectrum, say, is quite enough for me. But I bought enough polishes last year that after a while, buying myself a special treat ceased being either a treat OR special. In response, I’ve limited my spending a bit, and now I’m feeling significantly less guilty about having super fly nails at the expense of a special trip (and/or other aspirational things) for my husband and I.

So what better way to showcase my almost-guilt-free approach to fingernail finances than with a recent purchase, the appropriately named Guilty Pleasure, a wine-to-plum-to-orchid-to-violet multichrome from Polish Me Silly. This is one of only a handful of chromatic polishes I own, and certainly the first in such gorgeous, plummy colours; it’s rich and stunning and unbelievably shiny – my camera definitely had ISSUES! But gorgeous stuff, and well worth its place in my monthly allotment of nail mail. 🙂