Claire's Shy/Flirty

This is the last Claire's mood polish I bought. I also think I took this picture in, uh, August, so I had a hard time making the color change show up in pictures. But this polish is FABULOUS! It changes from medium blue to a deep cobalt.








And now the world's laziest nail blogger has made another post. :D

I also broke a nail today for the first time EVER, so I came home and cut my nails off super, super short.

Claire's Excited/Bored

This is one of the newer mood polishes from Claire's. It changes from peach to coral depending on the temperature. Peach is the warm color, while coral is the cool color. I had a hard time capturing this one, so pardon the indoors photographs with wet hands. :) It was so hot here in August that I would only get the warm color if I took these outside!








In all honesty, this is pretty, but applying it was a hot streaky mess. Gluggy and streaky and just.. yuck. And it chipped within a day. :(

I know I've spent most of the last few months apologizing for my lapses in posting. So I won't do it again. I haven't lost interest in nail polish, but I am trying to keep my spending at a reasonable level, and sometimes it's just a pain to crank out a post. :) But I still have a massive backlog of pictures. Oh well. This is a blog. It's a hobby, not a job (I have a job!) for me, so I'll post when I get around to it. If this blog were making me money, I'd probably be a little more diligent!

Mood polish!

FINALLY! I got my pictures uploaded and now I'm totally going to spam you with pictures of Claire's Mood Polish. This polish is pretty sensitive to temperature, and each polish had a "cold" color and a "hot" color. What happened with me was that the color on my nailbed tended to be the "hot" color, while my tips would be the "cold" color. Instant funky french manicure! I thought it was pretty cool. :)



There are five colors in this collection:
Wild/Calm - A pink/purple with lots of shimmer, and my personal favorite of the bunch
Innocent/Daring - Grey/beige-ish-mustard-ish-yellow-ish.. I don't think there is a person alive who would look good wearing that ugly ass beige/mustard yellow color.
Peaceful/Confident - Teal/Blue. Pretty enough, but the color change was extremely subtle.
Fabulous/Funky - Magenta/Neon Pink. This was wayyy more neon than I was expecting!
Happy/Earthy - Green/Neon Yellow. This one was BRIGHT. I mean, like, highlighter bright.

I took a few photos of each. Enjoy the picspam!

Wild/Calm - purple is the "cold" color and pink is the "hot" color.






Innocent/Daring. YECH.








Peaceful/Confident. I had a fairly hard time trying to photograph this one.








Fabulous/Funky. In the first pic, you can see where I dipped my pointer finger and middle finger in cold water to try to make the color difference really visible. This one was also difficult to photograph.









EDIT. I totally forgot to add the Happy/Earthy photos. OOPS! Here you go:

Claire's!

Sooo... I've been wearing Claire's mood polishes all week this week. I've been withholding pictures until I've worn them all. Post to follow, probably Saturday since I will be out doing the happy hour thing tomorrow after work. :)

BUT! When I last ventured to Claire's, there was a whole bunch of stuff on clearance AND there was scented nail polish. I had to buy! Buy! BUY! I'm such a sucker.

Here's what I got.
First up, I got two of the scented polishes, in Bubble Gum and Cotton Candy. Cotton Candy is better scented than Bubble Gum. They are both sheer glitter polishes, with small and large hexagonal glitters. I can't remember how many coats I used in my swatches -- it was either three or four. These would probably be good for layering, but who knows how that would effect the scent.

Here's Bubble Gum:


And here's Cotton Candy:


I also picked up these two polishes on clearance. They had a thing going on where all of their clearance stuff was 50% off the lowest price, so I got both of these for $1 or so.

Rockstar (which reminds me vaguely of the Orly Foil FX stuff, but less shiny):


And Hollywood, which is an AWESOME silver/white with small silver glitter and larger holographic glitter. I love this! I need to layer it over something.



Furthermore, I will be doing a blog giveaway. It is written. I think I'll go for it when I hit 75 followers. But I'm buying stuff now to be given away once I hit that mark. Maybe before. I got my package from Chromatic Misadventures today, and feel the need to pay it forward. Details to follow.

Green of the day!

Woo hoo! Today's green was Claire's Dreamcatcher. I really love this color. Unfortunately, this required four coats to be solid. It's not streaky but it is a little thin and I had issues with application. So this is four coats with two coats of Poshe topcoat (which is my go-to topcoat as of late). This DID survive a rigorous workday though, which is more than I can say of any color this week. No chipping, no tipwear, and my workday involved a lot of lifting things and using my nails as tools (a no-no, I am aware).

So... hooray!

Green of the day and a request for input!

Helloooo! Last night JJ picked out the green from the pastel set from Claire's. Ya know, I really didn't care much for this one when I swatched it, but with careful application and a good topcoat, it's definitely growing on me. Like a fungus.




In other news, I am getting married in 62 days and I need to decide if I'm going to do my own nails or spring for a professional manicure. I'm getting hitched on the beach, barefoot, and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna spring for a professional pedicure since my toes are effing nas-tay. But if I do my own nails... whatever shall I do? What color? Konad? No Konad? Sexy? Innocent? TOO MANY OPTIONS!

Another obsession of mine is BPAL. Granted, I'm not as into BPAL as I was a year or two ago, but it's still there. WHAT PERFUME AM I GONNA WEAR?!? OMG! I hate decisions!


With these types of obsessions, how have I not ended up on Hoarders yet? I joke about that show, but for real, the boy and I are both packrats and my house cleaning skills are sadly lacking. But I watch that show and feel better. My house may not be sparkling clean, but it's picked up. I mean, we do at least shove shit into closets sometimes. Jeez. :D

Claire's Pastels

So, I finally got my pastels from Claire's swatched today, along with some other stuff.

To be honest, I was sort of disappointed with these pastels. The colors are pretty, but the formula seemed off on all but one. They were streaky, and all needed three coats. Also, they dried matte-ish, like pastel neons. In fact, the yellow and the green were more neon than pastel to me -- possibly the pink, too.

I loved the blue and the peach, though, bad formula and all. The purple was the one shimmer in the pack and it was nice, formula-wise, but the color is not for me.

Anyway, enough rambling. On to the swatches!

Pink:


Peach:


Yellow (see what I mean? NOT pastel):


Green:


Blue:


Purple:

Claire's stuff

So, I swatched all the colors I got from Claire's EXCEPT for the pastel set. I still haven't ripped into that one. I'm planning a slight shopping excursion tomorrow, so maybe I'll do the pastels on Tuesday. We'll see. ;)

Anyway, out of the other three polishes I picked up at Claire's, I found one that I absolutely LOVE! It's awesome! The other two weren't bad either, but that one...

To refresh your memory (and since I just saw this in my Flickr), here's what I got:


l-r: Matte Green, Yel, Dream Catcher

Here's matte green. It's a nice deep green. Kind of goopy on the nail. Finish is definitely satin and not really matte. This was pretty "meh" to me.


Next up is Yel. YEL IS AWESOME! It's a turquoise with a bluish purplish pinkish shimmer and holographic glitter. It dries matte like a neon, but I wouldn't consider this a neon shade at all. I couldn't get the shimmer to show up in photos, and had a hard time with the holo. These pictures are with a coat of Seche Vite on top.

Indoors, with flash:


Natural light:


Indoors, no flash:


And then we have Dream Catcher, another mint green. I like this one more than the Love Bites mint green from the other day. Dream Catcher has more shimmer in it, but it's still very subtle.
Natural light:


Indoors:

Impromptu Haul

Oh lord, I really didn't mean to come home with all this nail polish. But it was all cheap! And I got my state tax refund today! It's ok, I swear!

So my fiance is very particular about the socks he wears. He specifically wants Gold Toe "over the calf" socks. I discovered yesterday that there is a Gold Toe outlet in the outlet mall not too far from here, and that they were having a buy 3, get 1 free special. So I bought him 4 packs of socks.

Next door to the Gold Toe outlet was a Rue 21. I figured I'd stop in. I found these two polishes. The first one is a mustard yellow -- it apparently was one of those layered polishes, because I discovered the "Do Not Shake" sticker on it once I got home. I guess it was shaken, which is fine by me because I've been wanting a mustard yellow polish for awhile. I also picked up a mint green. Neither of these seem to have names.


So then I saw a Claire's and figured I'd drop in. Their cosmetics were all buy 1, get 1 50% off (I really didn't save a whole lot there, though). I'd been lemming the pastel set after seeing it swatched somewhere (too lazy to check where) earlier this week. I picked up the other three because they looked cool. Can you tell I dig blues and greens? Heh.


Here are the other three bottles up close. They are Matte Green, Yel, and Dream Catcher:


So then I figured I'd drop by Sally on my way home. I had a 15% off coupon, so I picked up these three. I got China Glaze Blue Sparrow, China Glaze Flying Dragon, and Finger Paints Icy Iris (on clearance! for $1.99!).


Next door to Sally is a Dollar Tree. So I had to stop in. They had a whole buttload of Sally Hansen that had to have just come in recently, since I go to that Dollar Tree fairly often. All of these were in 2-packs (although a lot of them just had a clear polish as the "other" polish, but still! 2 for a dollar! and I now have a buttload of clear polish!). I got a Star Opal in Red Opal, and two Fire Opals in Royal Opal and Blush Opal.


I also got two Lacquer Shines in Lustrous and Glow.


I also picked this up at Publix on clearance for $3. My nails are NASTY stained (that's what happens when you wear nail polish all the time, I guess, even though I always use a base coat). I can't wait to try it!


And now... I suppose I have my work cut out for me, huh?