A girl and her love of nail polish

Posts tagged ‘Glitter’

KBShimmer Band Geek

I recently went away on vacation, and when I came back, I had two awesome pieces of nail mail waiting for me (best way to end a vacation!). One was a quartet of A England polishes I nabbed during their recent sale, and the other was this dark beauty, KBShimmer Band Geek.

KBShimmer Band Geek indie nail polish

Full disclosure: yes, I was in band, so of course had to get this one based on name alone. But also my old high school colors were black and gold (Go Hornets!) so it also hit fairly close to home in that regard as well. Will pause here to say that I also was a varsity cheerleader, so a bit of a weird mash-up, I know.

But back to KBShimmer Band Geek: I love, love, love it!

KBShimmer Band Geek indie nail polish

It’s a very complex, layered, deep polish with a black jelly base and gold, silver and bronze glitter. You can actually stare into it and see all of the different glitters at different levels on your nails. It’s crazy.

KBShimmer Band Geek indie nail polish

I found this very easy to apply, and it had great coverage. I’ve been trying a lot of different indies recently and have had some trouble with the formulas and glitter placement, but not with Band Geek: little to no glitter dabbing/placement needed.

KBShimmer Band Geek indie nail polish

This is two coats of KBShimmer Band Geek, one coat of Gelous and one coat of Poshe.

KBShimmer is sold on Etsy and Harlow, plus KBShimmer has a new fall collection coming out on September 1 so set some of that polish budget aside.

Sinful Colors Swatch Spam

Like a lot of polish groupies out there, I took advantage of last week’s Walgreens sale to stock up on Sinful Colors. The company recently made headlines for all the wrong reasons in the Blogosphere after stealing bloggers’ photos for its advertising materials. Shame on them (parent company Revlon has since issued what seems to be a sincere apology on Facebook). Despite the drama and calls from some bloggers for a Sinful Colors boycott, I was still curious to try out their polishes since their colors are pretty rich and their prices are extremely low. They were only $0.99 during the sale, but even at full price they’re only $2, so I felt like it was a good chance to try some colors out that I might not have spent more on (I actually had a yellow shade in my cart for awhile but couldn’t commit to it in the end!) These are a few of the bottles I picked up, and I really liked each of them. The formula on all of them seemed pretty consistent, which is to say they went on pretty easily. I apologize in advance for the increasingly sloppy manicures; a storm came on very quickly and I was losing my light for outdoor photos. Here’s a look at what I got:

Social Ladder is a sheer-ish pink polish with a subtle iridescent shimmer. This is three coats, no top coat.

Sinful Colors Social Ladder

Sinful Colors Social Ladder

Sinful Colors Social Ladder

Next up is Frenzy, which sports purple and teal micro-glitter in a clear base. Here’s one coat over Social Ladder, no top coat. It was pretty hard to clean up. You can see remnants of it around the edges after I switched to the other colors. But it’s very eye-catching.

Sinful Colors Frenzy over Social LadderSinful Colors Frenzy over Social LadderSinful Colors Frenzy over Social Ladder

This one is my favorite of the group, Cinderella. It’s a really nice, elegant pale blue with a very subtle pink shimmer. This is two coats, no top coat.

Sinful Colors CinderellaSinful Colors CinderellaSinful Colors Cinderella

Moving on to Slate, a medium gray with frosty silver shimmer. I think this would be a great color underneath a lot of the popular glitter layering polishes. This is two coats, no top coat.

Sinful Colors SlateSinful Colors SlateSinful Colors Slate

Last of this bunch is Amethyst, a grape purple cream. After taking these photos I added a coat of Poshe and wore this one for a week with only minimal tip wear, so very pleased with its longevity.

Sinful Colors AmethystSinful Colors AmethystSinful Colors Amethyst

That’s it for now. What Sinful Colors did you pick up in last week’s sale?

Rainbow Honey Mare Of The Moon

It’s not lost on me that this is my 13th post, as this was one unlucky manicure.

It features Rainbow Honey’s Mare Of The Moon, which is a beautiful purplish-blue color shifter that has shimmer plus silver crescent moon glitter. I have been lusting after a blue polish with moon glitter ever since I first saw Windestine’s Spica featured on a blog two months ago (it’s on my lemmings list).

So when I saw Mare Of The Moon, part of Rainbow Honey’s Equestria collection, I had to have it. Let me just say off the top that I love the color of this polish. It really is a beauty. And despite what’s to follow, I really enjoyed wearing this polish. Can’t take my eyes off of it.

Rainbow Honey Mare of the Moon

But here’s where we get into the “unlucky” part of this manicure. I had a terrible time with the application. Part of my problem was definitely that this was a mini (7ml) bottle, and I found the short brush challenging to work with and the large top a bit awkward to hold. With my painting hand being so close to my “being painted” hand, it was difficult for me to maneuver the brush the way I wanted, and to see what was going on. Maybe this is just the danger of the mini bottle. I admit, I haven’t purchased that many. Will definitely pause next time I’m tempted to buy one. That said, I applied undies on this which was also a mini bottle, and I didn’t have nearly the trouble applying that one. More on the undies later.

Rainbow Honey Mare of the Moon

The rest of my application problems I think had to do with the polish itself. It can be quite thin and watery, almost like water color if you don’t load the brush enough. I didn’t mind that as much as I did the drying time. It seemed to dry very quickly; before I had even finished painting a nail, that nail had already begun to set. Plus it has what I would call just shy of a matte finish. That was a disaster given that I had to fish out and try to place the moon glitter, which for me was the main attraction of this polish.

Rainbow Honey Mare of the Moon

As I’d try to move the glitter or even transfer it from the brush to my nail, i was disrupting the parts of the polish that had already begun setting. It made for a very uneven, bumpy and frankly not very attractive end result, though adding topcoat helped smooth things out.

Rainbow Honey Mare of the Moon

The final nail in the coffin here is that I cannot find my cleanup brush, which I desperately needed on this one. I did what I could with an orange stick dipped in acetone.

Rainbow Honey Mare of the Moon

natural light

For undies I used one coat of Mattese Elite’s Up My Platinum, available from Ricky’s NYC. I probably didn’t need it, but I didn’t want to risk it. Up My Platinum is a frosty silver that went on pretty smoothly. Formula was quite nice. Here it is on its own with a top coat.

Matesse Elite Up My Platinum

I followed that with two coats of Mare Of The Moon and a coat of Poshe.

I will definitely try this one out again when I have all my ducks in a row and am feeling at the top of my game. Now that I’m more familiar with the formula, I think I could do a better job of wrangling it.

Rainbow Honey Mare of the Moon with Matesse Elite Up My Platinum

Mare of the Moon is available from RainbowHoney.com. Currently the minis are in stock but the full size is not. Rainbow Honey’s polishes are 3-free, as are Mattese Elite’s.

NOTD: Mermaid-ish Manicure

Summer’s in full swing here, and the heat’s been rolling in. Thank goodness we have a pool! Just looking at that inviting blue water is enough to cool you down, which is what led to this water-inspired mani. This color combo of turquoise/green/blue brought mermaids to mind, especially with the sparkly aspect of the glitter.

This is two coats of Zoya Wednesday topped with a coat of Poshe. Zoya says Wednesday is best described as a “faded dirty medium turquoise with green undertone and an opaque cream finish.” Well ok then.

On the accent nails I added one coat of Color Club Fly With Me, a lime-green shimmer, and then I dabbed Revlon Radiant on the tips to about halfway down the nail. Radiant is a mix of micro and medium hex blue and turquoise glitter plus silver medium hex glitter in a clear base. Topped everything off with another coat of Poshe.

You can see from the pictures that I didn’t do the best job with the application of Fly With Me on the accent nails, but I don’t think it was as bad as depicted here. I think there was a fair amount of shrinkage near the cuticles overnight (did this at night, photographed the next morning). There’s just no way I was that off.

That aside, this was a really fun manicure to wear. I really love this color combo for summer.

What colors are you having fun wearing this summer?

NOTD: Sneeze Breeze Tips

I was dying to try out The Hungry Asian’s Sneeze Breeze and knew I wanted something simple that would really show it off and let it shine in all its glittery glory. I was inspired by this Black Ice New Year’s Eve nail art from Polish and Pearls, but in the end I chickened out and ended up with something much more basic. This is two coats of Orly Black Vinyl with two coats of Sneeze Breeze on the tips, plus one coat of Poshe.

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Welcome To My New Adventure!

Hi, and thank you for checking out Polish Groupie, my new blog. I love doing my nails and buying cool nail polish, and back in the day (i.e. grade school and high school) I used to do my fair share of nail art. But, you know, life happens and sometimes fun stuff you used to do as a kid falls by the wayside.

But my interest was recently rekindled when I learned that China Glaze was putting out a Hunger Games-themed line of nail polishes. As I started looking around on the Web for information about the line, I stumbled upon the wonderful world of nail polish blogs. There are a lot of very creative ladies out there putting in a lot of time and effort to bring product previews, honest reviews and unique nail art to the world (some of my favorites are listed on my blogroll to the right, with many more to be added soon).

From there I was introduced to the even more wonderful world of indie nail polishes, many of which are sold in limited release on Etsy.  I didn’t even know people could make their own polishes, let alone sell them. Crazy! Maybe someday I’ll get there on my own, but for now I can just live vicariously through these mavens by buying their wares (when I can get my hands on them).

I must confess that my collection is tiny at this point, but hey, you have to start somewhere. In fact I just received my first indie polish about a week ago, with a few more on the way. Here it is, Sneeze Breeze, a black/blue glitter polish with a clear base. It’s from The Hungry Asian on Etsy. Can’t wait to show it to you as part of a manicure.

The Hungry Asian: Sneeze Breeze

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