Joe Fresh Twilight

Oh man. I think I had this as a lemming - forever! I originally saw it on Liz's blog and immediately fell in love. Flakies in a black jelly base? Yes please! So, now that I have it, let's have a closer look.
Joe Fresh Twilight has rough, unevenly shaped flakies that shift strongly from green to coppery orange to gold. The base is a pretty opaque black jelly - I thought originally I might layer it over Joe Fresh Moss, but you couldn't even see Moss beneath it so I thought I would show you how it looks on its own - here I've got two layers. The shift is indeed strong but for some reason I've had a time trying to capture it on camera, and I just don't know why. You'll see mostly green in my photos and maybe just a smidge of the coppery orange/gold shift. I've tried to photograph this three times with no luck capturing the shift!
Enough moaning, here's my photos.

I really love the textured look of the uneven flakies in this. I think you can see the color shift in the bottle best, in my photos. So, are you lusting after Twilight now?

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.

Duri Cosmetics Black Diamond, Angels And Demons

Hello, everyone! I know I'm behind on replying to comments, hopefully will get caught up with that tomorrow.
Tonight I have a review of two of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo nail polishes from Duri Cosmetics.
Black Diamond is described as a black with shimmer. The shimmer is so fine, it's absolutely not noticeable on the nail unless you're in bright sunlight, but it adds a beautiful depth to the polish. This is one of the smoothest applying blacks I've dealt with - maybe because of the subtle shimmer? I'm not sure, but some black polishes that are straight cremes can be difficult and gloopy. This was easy to control. I really like the Duri bottle shape as well - it's neat that the brand name is engraved right into the glass bottles, and I've always like square bottles. The brushes, if you've never used one of these, remind me of an Essie brush, only the handle is longer - bonus! I actually tried out all four polishes from this collection and I noticed that the formula is nice across the board - all of these were two coat nail polishes.
So I do have a picture out in the sunlight of Black Diamond, and shade pictures so that you can hopefully see the pretty depth this has in low lights. I recently picked up some layering polishes, so I tried out Essie's As Gold As It Gets over Black Diamond - perfection! This is a gorgeous gold flakie, perfect for the holidays. I've been wanting a nice gold flakie, too. The flakies are smaller than say, Hidden Treasure, but you get great distribution with one coat.

So, the second polish I have to show you tonight from this collection is Angels and Demons. This is described as a dark grey with silver glitter. I adore this shade, but go figure - I always like these. This applied exceptionally well! It even settled on its own when I thought I would have strokes, because of a sloppy application. Again, two coats.

This is just gorgeous. I really liked both of these! I have two more to show you tomorrow night, and I did some more layering with those as well.

Disclaimer: Product(s) featured in this post were sent to me in return for an honest review.

The Halloween Polish Comparison!

Hey everyone!
I've been having one heck of a week. The hubby got sick after I did, so I had to cover him at work - and I've worked an insane amount of hours in the last week or so. No time for swatching, so I couldn't post much! And then, my computer, which is older, couldn't connect to the internet. We think it's the net card. Now I'm using hubby's computer and getting it set up for me to use, which is taking some time. I have all of my files to transfer, as well. I'm getting there, though. So I apologize for the lack of posting, other than my blogger feature and Wednesday's pink post.
I won't get through all of the Halloween polishes I had to show you, but I do have the promised massive comparison post.
So, I've got for you China Glaze Fortune Teller and Ick-A-Bod-Y, Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice, and thanks to a lovely reader, Wet N Wild Cougar Attack.
On the index finger is Fortune Teller, the middle is Ick-A-Bod-Y, ring is Cougar Attack, and pinkie is Pumpkin Spice. In the first photo, I've used only one layer of all of these except Pumpkin Spice - that's two layers. I wanted to be able to show off the base colors. FT is the deepest black, Ick-A-Bod-Y is a olive green jelly, Cougar Attack is a black jelly, and so is Pumpkin Spice. Of the four of these, Pumpkin Spice is the most sheer. The bases are different shades, as is the opacity and the density of glitter, but the glitter itself is identical in both Ick-A-Bod-Y and Pumpkin Spice. It's my opinion these two are the closest, although none of these is a dupe for any of the others. The glitter in Cougar Attack is more rose copper in shade, and the deep black base and hex glitter in FT stands it apart from the rest. Pumpkin Spice is probably best suited as a layering polish - and if you have this and aren't sure what to layer it over besides black, I've seen swatches of it over orange and brown and both look great.
The second photo is fully swatched and with top coat. All of these were two coats except Pumpkin Spice, which I've shown with four.

Phew. I hope you get a good idea of these now! My apologies for the owie on my pinkie. I had a snag and it's slowly healing up. Also, right before I snapped that first photo, I cracked my middle fingernail. You might be able to see it, even. I don't know WHAT I cracked it on, but my next post will be featuring super shorties. *sigh* Luckily my nails grow pretty quickly, but they were at such a good length.
Shout out to Robyn, whose birthday is today! HAPPY BIRTHDAY HONEY. Love you loads!
And that's it for this very wordy post. Your thoughts on these polishes?? Have a good evening!

Focus On Black: Deborah Lippmann Ruby Red Slippers

When I got this, there weren't dupes for this sexy beast. NYX hadn't come out with Dorothy and for sure, those On The Prowl polishes weren't out yet. I STILL haven't seen them here! I kept staring and drooling over swatches. Go figure I'd love this - I mentioned that I love the combination of red and black!
Obviously, this is a black jelly base, with red larger hex glitter and smaller red square glitter. I used three coats in this swatch set to achieve this level of opacity.

Ruby Red Slippers absolutely sparks fire in the sunlight - it's a stunner!
I am done inundating you with black-based polishes for this month's Focus On. I'll be posting up a poll for the next one in the next day or two! I hope you enjoyed this - now it's time to move on to Halloween polishes. YUS.

Focus On Black: Color Club With Abandon

You may remember that I compared this lovely fall polish to China Glaze's Midtown Magic. It is a tad different, and so therefore in my mind I can justify owning both. Now I'm going to feature it full on its own!
With Abandon is a black based jelly (blah blah blah) that has gold and brownish-red micro flakies that almost spark pink in the sunlight. Awesome! The third shot is in direct sunlight, and check out that macro!

This just screams fall to me - of course, it came out in a fall collection, so I guess that's what Color Club was going for eh? Haha.

Focus On Black: BB Couture Vampy Varnish

Oh, does that name sound a little familiar? It should, because Vampy Varnish is the namesake polish from the Vampy Varnish collection by BB Couture - created with Kelly of Vampy Varnish in 2009! Pretty exciting, right? Well, I'm sure you've seen this elsewhere long before now. As a matter of fact, I'm just going to link you to Kelly's own swatches of her collection. As BB Couture has some great black-based polishes, I'm glad to be able to show you at least one of them for this Focus On.
This was SO hard for me to capture on camera! I had four different sessions with this set, and I finally got something usable. Every time I would go to photograph it, the camera would blur the glitter out badly, everything was out of focus.
As you can see though, I didn't give up - the fourth session was the lucky one and I was able to bring the glitter into focus a bit more. Note on the close up that it's not lumpy, it's just super shiny! Obviously, black jelly base - with two different shades of green glitter. It's a stunner! I used three coats for opacity on this one. It's a tiny bit gritty when dried, so I added a top coat for these swatches. It dried super fast, too - bonus! Also, I can tell you that BB Couture polish wears like iron on me. I've never had one chip yet, and I've been known to wear them for up to five days. That's some kind of record for me.

Do you have any of the Vampy Varnish collection yourself? Which are your favorites? I love all of them, and the names are utterly perfect too.

Focus On Black: Milani Garnet Gems

We're still floating through this month's Focus On series! Milani Garnet Gems is basically a dead on dupe for China Glaze Lubu Heels. The only difference I can see is minute - Lubu Heels is just a bit more jelly. This just means I have to use more coats of Lubu Heels, but the glitter seems to float more in that than in Garnet Gems. If you're not picky about this, you don't need both.
So, as I've said, this is a bit more opaque than Lubu Heels - what you see here is two coats of Garnet Gems. It's still pretty jelly and you can nicely see the red glowing through the black base. I've got to tell you, this type of polish is what started my whole obsession in the first place. I think there's nothing sexier than black paired with a glowy red, and put it all in one polish? Heaven! Garnet Gems was easy to handle, also. No dripping or flooding my cuticles. *sigh of relief* Cleaning up after black polish is such a pain. Clicky click to enlarge!

GRATUITOUS BOTTLE SHOT!

Yup, sexy beast.

Focus On Black: China Glaze Haunting

Okay, continuing on with this month's Focus On series - you didn't think I was done yet, did you? - tonight I've got one of the China Glaze Halloween 2011 polishes! I've done an admirable job waiting until October to feature all of my Halloween polishes, I think.
China Glaze makes probably my favorite Halloween collections. I swear they do.
So. Let's just say it, and get it over with. Haunting is exactly what I wanted Orly Goth to be. I've held on to Orly Goth for almost three years now, and every time I wear it I feel...meh. It looks so much better in the bottle than on the nails, no matter how much I shook the damned bottle. Haunted is much, much better!
It's a black jelly (are you tired of that yet? I hope not!) jam packed with square silver glitter that just floats in the jelly. It's perfect!
I'll quit my raving. Here ya go!

Yeah. Not much else to swoon over here!

Focus On Black: NYX Girls Deep Space

Oh, this is a pretty polish! But NYX Girls Deep Space took me three sessions trying to get successful photos of the pretty little flakes. Okay, so this is a black based jelly with purple, gold, and pink small flakies. These are not like Nfu Oh flakies, they're like the size of flakies we saw in the Revlon scented jelly polishes this summer.
With application, I used three coats for this level of opacity. I waited a few minutes in between layers to prevent balding, just to be sure. Luckily, no black drips anywhere to be the bane of my existence!
All of these are taken in natural low light except for one, which is taken in bright sunlight to show you how this sparks and glows so beautifully.
For serious, click to enlarge these!!

Awesome, isn't it? Between this and Robotic, I'm totally in love with the NYX Girls black based polishes. I need more!

Focus On Black: Nina Ultra Pro Glamrock

The last time I popped into Sally Beauty Supply, I had a look at the core line of Nina Ultra Pros, because I always feel like I need to nab more of these little beauties - they just don't get as much love as they should from me, and there's so many cool colors. Lo and behold, there was a new nugget of greatness hovering in the bottom row - it had one of those little circular papers around the neck that said so! And for sure, I've never seen it before. I immediately snatched it up.
Turns out, Nina Ultra Pro Glamrock is perfect for Focus On Black. It's a black jelly jam freaking packed with two sizes of silver glitter - small squares, and larger hexagons. Jeez. Your nails look positively encrusted with glitter, and it just screams rock and roll. I love this. If you like glitter and silver at all, you need it. Seriously. And it's in the core section! I used three coats, and I let each one dry a bit in between to prevent balding patches - you know, where you squish on another layer of glitter and it seems to make a bald spot on your nail? That happens when your first layer isn't dry enough and you're dealing with chunky glitter.
So. This is sexy, yes! I just adore everything about it. The black jelly base gives it the depth it needs.

As you can see, it's so shiny and sparkly it almost knocked my camera for a loop trying to get a good macro, but there you go. Click to enlarge the other two photos, seriously! Have you spied this in your Sally's yet?

Focus On Black: Revlon Facets Of Fuchsia

Okay, I know everyone will be familiar with this polish! Recently Revlon came out with a collection called Expressionist, and it had a trio of glitters as well as a nude polish. I wasn't interested in the nude at all, but those glitters? You betcha!
So, if you guys are already familiar with this polish, you'll know it's the low end version of Deborah Lippmann Bad Romance. I think they are very close, the only real difference I can see is that the base of Facets of Fuchsia is more of a jelly than Bad Romance, which seems to be thicker and more on the creme end of the spectrum. I can see the lightening at the ends of my fingernails in my swatches of this! I actually prefer it this way, so an added bonus for me.
I used two coats here, but I did use thicker coats - if I had used thin coats I might have needed three to build it to this level of opacity. For this type of glitter polish, it was very well behaved - no need to try to "place" your hexagons with your brush! You'll see in my macro that there are two sizes of hexagon glitter in this.

I included a bottle shot as well. Haha, having a Wayne's World moment - every time I get a good bottle shot that I want to place in a post, I have this urge to put a flashing gif that says "GRATUITOUS BOTTLE SHOT!!" *cough* I'm not nuts, I swear.
Moving on. The other day I was talking about low end dupes of polish on twitter, so I thought I might carry it out here. I'm just going to go ahead and state my opinion on it. Revlon can keep making low end dupes or cousins of Chanel polishes, as far as I'm concerned. Heck, if they did this good with this, I'm not opposed to another Deborah Lippmann dupe either! Look, it's just saving me money. For that matter, I don't care that Sinful Colors is duping collections either, I'd rather pay $2 for something than $8.50 any day. I'm thrifty, what can I say?

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??

NYX Girls Robotic

I'd been wanting to replace my China Glaze Blk-Bila-Bong for a while now, because I really liked it. So imagine my surprise when I got around to swatching this NYX Girls Robotic, and it looks like a dead on dupe! What a bonus. I don't have the two to compare, but I'm going to reference you to Helen's swatch of the China Glaze, so you can know what that looks like as well.
Robotic is a black jelly base loaded with teal metallic shimmer. It's an awesome vampy polish! I had to use three coats to get it to this level of opacity, but I didn't mind that - I actually anticipated it, a lot of times these types of dark jellies with shimmer require more than two coats.

Ahhh it just glows! This will probably not appeal to those of you who don't like dark polishes, but I LOVE polishes like this and I just crave them. They were my first loves, before I branched out into bright colors.

Nail Art: Blood Drippings

This is sort of a fail, but I'm going to go ahead and post this anyway! I have been wanting to try doing my own "dripping nails" nail art forever, but you guys know that I'm ... exceptionally untalented when it comes to nail art. I can't even stamp!
So I painted my nails a basic black - Sinful Colors Black On Black. I used China Glaze Hey Sailor for the drippings.
If you try this, don't be like me: wait until your nails and drippings are completely dry before you apply top coat! I didn't, and I definitely got some smearings.

I would DEFINITELY try this again. It's been requested that the next time, I do a tutorial, so I'll give it a whirl! I don't think it's horrible for a first attempt. What do you think, have you tried these and mastered them? What colors did you use? This would be cute with a pastel theme too.
And, I'm done spamming you for the night. True Blood is on in one hour here!