Orly Le Chateau and Shining Star

This is probably not my favorite layering combination - it looks really pretty, but I think I could put Orly's Shining Star over something to bring it out a bit better than Le Chateau.
I recently participated in a little Twitter party that Orly had for the holiday collection, and by answering a question correctly I won a prize. Le Chateau was one of the polishes I received - pretty cool huh?
Anyway, so Le Chateau is a deep, dark teal along the lines of OPI Here Today, Aragon Tomorrow or China Glaze Near Dark. So dark you almost can't tell what the base is unless you're in direct sunlight - so I've got a photo to show you with one coat, so you get an idea of what it's supposed to be.
It's nice and shiny and fully opaque at two coats, and really is a great base for layering.
Orly Shining Star is definitely a layering polish, with a very light base filled with mostly gold sparkle. There are warm and cool gold sparkle, as well as silver and green. It's really neat and I think would be best shown off over another shade, so I'll try it again. This is pretty, though.

What do you guys think of this one?

Top Picks For 2011, Part Five

Last part, and all holiday polishes! There are so many more awesome polishes I could have put on this list, but that's okay - 25 is a good number, right? Let's jump right in!
OPI Warm & Fozzie. Whew, is this foil a looker or what? I even see duochrome in it!

Orly Au Champagne. The perfect holiday shimmery white, fully opaque at two coats and really stunning.

China Glaze Blue Year's Eve. Oh wow, this one just glows - it's a stunner! I didn't even think I would love this as much as I do.

Of course, if I'm mentioning Blue Year's Eve, I cannot skip out on the beautiful evergreen Glittering Garland, from the same collection.

And finally finishing up, Orly Ingenue. A beautiful pink absolutely packed with gold shimmer? Guh. This is too pretty, and I just loooove shades like this.

Well, that's it! I hope you enjoyed seeing my choices, were any of them yours, too?

Top Picks For 2011, Part Three

I could pick SO many more than the ones I'm showing you, but this has been fun taking a stroll down photo-memory lane!

OPI Glacier Bay Blues. The second one to make it into my top picks not released this year, but acquired this year! How can I resist adding this one in - it's a stunner.

China Glaze Skyscraper. Again, from their fall collection - I really really loved that collection, so many great colors to choose from!

Color Club Alter Ego. Yum, I just love the complexity of this!

Orly Fowl Play. Boy, did this cause a stir among the lacquerheads of the world or what! For good reason - this is a purple flakie stunner and a dupe to the much beloved and discontinued OPI Merry Midnight.

Last for today and most certainly not least, China Glaze It's Alive from the Halloween collection. Gosh, they really do the best Halloween collections. I can't wait to see next year's!

Just two more days left of great polishes from 2011!

Layering: Orly Au Champagne and China Glaze Snow Globe

So, this combination is pretty much awesome - it looks like fairy wings! I love it!
Orly Au Champagne is from this year's holiday offerings, and it's a white shimmer. It dries to a satiny matte, so if you prefer shiny, just slap a top coat on top of it! It's pretty opaque at two coats. I then put a layer of China Glaze Snow Globe over the top of this - perfection. Snow Globe is previously from the collection of 50 glitters, but was re-released in this year's holiday collection too. It's a milky sheer base with opalescent flaky glitter. It's a great layering polish!
This came out so perfectly.

This is just perfection, to me. I've seen this done and I really wanted to try it out, and I'm glad I did! That last shot really shows off the pretty colors of Snow Globe.

Orly Dazzle and NOPI Bring On The Tinsel

Bling bling for the holidays! Orly Dazzle is a gorgeous metallic silver, very pigmented. It shines like whoa in the sun! Dazzle came out with the Back To School collection. Nicole By OPI Bring On The Tinsel is from last year's holiday collection, it is a fine multicolored glitter. There's silver, green, blue, gold, and red. It's so fine you could wear it by itself, but I've chosen to layer it over Orly Dazzle for some extra bling - and it's so much fun together!
I used two coats of Orly Dazzle - probably could have gotten away with one, it's very pigmented. I had no problems with brushstrokes, either. I used two coats of Bring On The Tinsel in order to get a lot of glitter on my nails - I couldn't seem to pick up enough on the brush on the first coat.

No top coat on either of these - look at that sparkle! Mmmm. Fun!

Orly Androgynie

You guys have probably seen this one already, but I'm showing off my swatches of this one tonight. Androgynie is another from Orly's holiday offering this year, it's a black jelly base absolutely stuffed with gold flecks and larger hex holo glitter. It's pretty sparkly in the bottle, but the holo glitter does get swallowed by the black base, so you really don't see a lot of the sparkly rainbow on the nail. This reminds me a bit of SOPI 212. It is a beauty, if you can get past the fact that you lose something in translation. I actually really liked how this looked on my nails. I used three coats here.

You can see the gold flecks in the macro, and it looks like there are larger silver round glitters too, just smaller than the hex glitters.

Orly Ingenue

Orly Ingenue is from their holiday collection this winter, Holiday Soirée. This is a pretty purple toned pink loaded with gold shimmer - there are already dupes of this out, but since I didn't have any of those I was pleased to be able to nab this one instead. I am in love with these types of polish with the strong gold shimmer.
This went on well at two coats, and didn't have any trouble with application. You might run into a little bit of shimmer fallout with removal though, that stuff seems to migrate when you're taking it off. I just use some of my beloved sugar scrub and I'm good to go.

Yum! These are just flattering I think. I don't even ordinarily gravitate towards gold but I find these polishes so appealing. Do you have Ingenue, or one of its dupes?

Orly Rage

Orly Rage came out with the Foil FX collection. These were supposed to be Minx-like polishes, but they're pretty obviously foils, so when you look at them, although they're awesomely sparkly and shiny and reflective, they're pretty obviously particles and not sheet-like at all, like a Minx would be.
Ignoring that, these polishes are indeed awesome and shiny. Rage is the rose gold of the collection, and I hope I captured the true color of this in my photos - Luxe, the true gold, is very obviously cooler and a lot more yellow, so maybe you can see how different that is from these photos of Rage.
You have to be a bit finicky with application, not as much as you would if these were chrome polishes, but still - you want your nail beds pretty smooth. I have no idea what happened, but there's a little bump of something, probably cotton, on my middle nail. *lol* So, case in point. These dry quickly and I had no brush stroke problems. What's cool about Rage is that there is silver flecks mixed in with the rose gold flecks, as you can see in my macro.

I would say that Rage, of all of these, was the most popular and well sought polish. Rose gold foils are pretty unusual, no?  I recently found this at Sally's in a display near the registers, when they put out all of their holiday polish displays.

Focus On Purple: Orly Royal Velvet

Orly Royal Velvet is another lurker in my untrieds. I had posted most everything I had picked up from Orly's spring release, but never got around to posting Royal Velvet. Really, does it no good to be hiding away when it's as gorgeous as this.
Royal Velvet is a deep plummy purple with a strong blue shimmer. The shimmer just floats in the polish, which made capturing the base of this pretty tricky! Hence the strange angles of these photos - you can see the blue at the tip in the weird angle photos, and the purple at the base of my nails. It covered perfectly, another two coater.
The first photo is front on, in direct sunlight. You can kind of see the base, with the blue shimmer just floating on it, making it almost look blue from this angle.

The last three at odder angles, to show the purple base. I adore this, and got a lot of compliments wearing it.

Focus On Black: Orly Iron Butterfly

Well. Welcome to October! I figured I'd start this month off right, and do my Focus On right away. What better time to whip out the black nail polish than October, right? Voting will be back open for next month's Focus On after this week is over.
Of course, I'm not going to show you just plain old black nail polish. Not that there's anything wrong with that - I wore a lot of Wet N Wild black polish back in the day, and I still use it as a base for other things. But I prefer to kick it up a notch now that I can, and there are lots of alternatives out there for you.
Almost two years ago(!!!), Orly brought us a trio of metallic matte polishes in a little collection called Metal Chic. Let me tell you, they were all three awesome and I utterly adore them. If you don't have them and you're remotely interested, you should get them! So from this Metal Chic collection, I'm showing you Orly Iron Butterfly.
As I mentioned, this is a metallic matte. It's a black base loaded with silver shimmer, so much so that it almost looks charcoal grey instead of black. This is one of the more easy to apply mattes - it's much more forgiving and levels out on its own. I used two coats here, just to cover anything I might have missed, and I thought I might have some ridges. Nope, it all leveled out on its own! Another bonus is that Orly's matte formula is less chiptastic than other mattes I've used. It's not as iron clad as, say, Man Glaze, but it has much better endurance than any other salon brand I've tried. I once wore Solid Gold for three days without chipping before getting bored with it and taking it off, and Iron Butterfly has the same kind of wear.
Also, these dry quickly - if you've ever worked with matte polishes, you'll already know this.
I know, a lot of talk, but one more thing. I have the worst luck ever when I'm applying black polish, and my hands were just not steady. Cleanup is always harder with black polishes, too. My apologies for this!

Check out the frosted bottle! Love it. So, do you have Iron Butterfly or either of the other Metal Chics? What do you think? What's your favorite black polish??

Orly Fowl Play

Okay, before I get into this monster post, I want to apologize - I've been super busy this week, and haven't been feeling my best, either. I'm behind on visiting everyone's blogs, and replying to comments here on Nightly Nails. I don't like to let things get too far behind - I even didn't have a post set for last night.
Anyway, let's get to this amazing polish.
Orly Fowl Play is the hugely popular polish dupe for the much sought after LE OPI Merry Midnight. The differences are minute, really. There have been many comparisons done, and I don't have Merry Midnight anymore to show you guys, so we'll skip that.
If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know I was on the hunt for this and hugely unsuccessful! Last week I got a surprise package from none other than Jen of The PolishAholic - lo and behold, there was my preciousssss. Jen, you are always hooking me up! Thanks sweet girl.
So, this is an amazing polish. Dark purple jelly jam packed with flakies, glitter, and magic. Seriously, so much going on here. It's pretty opaque on its own - you'll see that the very tips of my nails are light in these swatches, indicative of a jelly polish - but I used three thin coats to get this level of opacity. I probably could have gone with two thicker and been done.
I was curious how this would layer, so I tried a couple of different things - the first one you'll see is my thumbnail, with no cleanup. *gulp* I know everyone hates that. Anyway, it was a quick last minute experiment - I tried layering Fowl Play over Milani Rad Purple. The effect is a lighter slightly more red base. Pretty cool!
Next, Jana and Alli suggested I try layering it over a red - I used Sinful Colors GoGo Girl, which is a bright red jelly. I need to be more careful with this, as Fowl Play can go on pretty heavily, so I tried to do a thin layer, and it wasn't even enough. However, LOVE this combo.
So, a whole pile of pictures with this. You also get a bottle shot and a macro! Last photo is the layering with GoGo Girl.

Well. This has got me slightly curious how Fowl Play would look over, say, Revlon Royal. Of course, it looks fantastic on its own! So, have you managed to hunt down this beauty?

Focus On Duochrome: Orly Space Cadet

I'm going to do something I rarely do here at Nightly Nails, and I'm going to use a cut. I have an amazing amount of photos of Orly Space Cadet, because I found it almost impossible to narrow down this beauty. My love for this has not diminished in the year since it's been released - it's a sexy beast. I think this may be the most multichrome polish I own. Let's see, green, gold, orange, purple, wine - massive color changing shimmer packed into a navy blue jelly base. Yum. If you don't have this and you are remotely in love with duochromes, you better order it.
I'm not going to blather much more about this, I will let the photos speak for themselves. I used three coats here to achieve this opacity, and these photos were taken in various lighting situations, all outdoors and without flash.

Click to see the rest of the madness!

Focus On Blue: Orly Lunar Eclipse

I do believe this is my last blue for the Focus On Blue series. Also, it was the most difficult to photograph - I couldn't seem to capture the duochrome effect at all! I took almost 200 photos of this, and I did two different sessions. My second session was much more successful, but I do ask that you click to enlarge these photos to truly see the purple/pink flash.
Okay. So Lunar Eclipse is a searing bright royal blue, when you look at it dead on. The Cosmic FX collection is jam packed with very rich shimmer, and Lunar Eclipse is no exception.
Ahh, this is a bit pic heavy. I couldn't help myself - the last shot I decided to show you guys because the bottle shot is AMAZING. *swoon*

Ahhh, isn't this gorgeous? Now, if you don't have any of the Cosmic FX, you should stalk your local Sally's Beauty Supply. I've been seeing these pop up in the clearance display!
I loved Focus On Blue week. Thank you all for participating with me, and I'll have the next Focus On vote up tonight! I hope you enjoyed this month's color choices.

Orly Goth

You know, I have had this polish ever since I first started blogging. Orly Goth is a black creme with two different sized silver glitters. I had trouble with this flooding for some reason, and I seem to remember the last time I used it I had the same problem. Not sure if it's just my bottle, because I've heard other folks say they have great luck with the formula. It's awesome though, and makes me want October to hurry up and get here. Sadly, it's only the first of August, so here in the south we're in for a good bit more heat before fall shows up.

Yep, it's that super shiny without top coat!