Clover/Under

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  Coming at you this evening with some very simple clover nail art atop a festive polish I don’t use nearly enough, OPI’s hunter green Live and Let Die.  Live and Let Die was released in 2012 as part of OPI’s Skyfall Collection, so a bit of an oldie here.  Also one I did not forget to pair with a base coat, on account of its fine golden shimmer, which, while beautiful on the nail and in the bottle, combines with the green base to create mega stain-y turquoise.  And we all know what turquoise does to bare nails (stains, precisely!)  So polish safe, friends, and enjoy the rest of your evenings!

Where For Art Thou, Chromeo?

Yeah, I’ve been sitting on that groaner for a while in anticipation of receiving these new chrome flakie polishes from Polish Me Silly. Flakies are all the rage in the world of indie polishes at the moment, with multichrome-packed flakies being the coolest of a pretty bitchin’ bunch. These two beauties, Polish Me Silly’s Party Hearty and Stop Flaking on Me, are just two out of a whole collection of gorgeous chromatic topcoats that are beautiful and beautifully made.

First we have Party Hearty, a clear polish stuffed with tiny flakes of purple-to-blue-to-green-leaning chrome…glitter? Except it’s not quite glitter, is it? It’s more like tiny shards of colour-shifting chromatic nail polish in a clear base. Except it’s not quite shards either. This topper behaves exactly like a regular old creme polish – it goes on smooth, dries down totally smooth and shiny (these photos show both polishes without a topcoat) and removes in a flash, no struggle, no fuss, no binding your nails in aluminum foil-wrapped acetone baths. Here I’ve shown Party Hearty over Nails Inc.’s cobalt blue Baker Street. I love how the plummy undertones of the little flakies pull out the purple notes in Baker Street, giving it a grape soda sort of hue.Here’s a nice outdoors shot of Party Hearty that shows off its textureless…ness. No pitting, no curving, no issues.

And here we have Stop Flaking on Me, a pink-to-green-to-gold-leaning chromatic flakie. A simple black creme background polish is always a wise and chic choice, but I think these polishes look best over darker polishes that pull out some of the complimentary colours in the flakes. Here I layered one coat of Stop Flaking on Me over OPI’s gold-tinged dark green, Live and Let Die.

There are so many indies out there right now doing amazing things with ultra trendy flakies, but I think these colour-shifting chromatics from Polish Me Silly lead the pack – it’s hard to top a beautiful, of-the-moment look like this one, especially when it’s executed so beautifully. All-around winners. You can find Polish Me Silly’s products on their Etsy site here.