HTF Blue OPI Spam: Blue Moon Lagoon, DS Sapphire, Sonic Bloom, Absolutely Alice and DS Fantasy!

I don't have, like, a faint-inducing polish collection or anything, but I've been fortunate enough to get a hold of some lovely older, harder to find colors (pretty much exclusively from dusty hunting in which I either kept the found gems or swapped for other HTFs). As I was admiring my pretties (as I like to do from time to time like a true weirdo) I noticed that most of the HTF OPI polishes that I own are blue.

Blue's always been my favorite color so I'm almost positive it's cosmic polish fate. Which is a thing.

 Blue Moon Lagoon, DS Sapphire, Sonic Bloom, Absolutely Alice, DS Fantasy

I haven't done a plain ol' spam post yet sooooo why not, right? Why the heck not. At least half of my polishes are untried, anyway.

First we have Blue Moon Lagoon, from OPI's 2003 Summer for Shore collection. It's a super sheer light turquoise-leaning blue linear holographic polish.

UHHHH. Where the heck did my pictures of this go??! Of course I would have lost all my swatch pictures when my computer died and they weren't backed up anywhere because I'm a true genius. Sad! I'll have to reswatch. Anyway...

Next is DS Sapphire which was released in 2008. It's a pale, cornflower blue linear holographic polish with a pretty pink flash. I know sapphires are blue, and this polish is blue, but it doesn't really evoke the image of sapphires for me. Maybe, liiiike, DS Hydrangea. It sure it pretty doe.

Here's Sonic Bloom which looks cray in the bottle which I was completely unable to photograph. It's from the 2006 Brights collection. It's a sheer sky blue with a strong electric green flash and sometimes, in the subtlest way, shows a bit of pink too. I've heard this one called a duochrome but I don't know that I'd call it that. The green is pretty much always there unless you're in the dark.

I almost got the pink, there. It's kind of peachy, but maybe you get the idea.

Then there's Absolutely Alice from the 2010 Alice in Wonderland collection. It's a full-coverage cobalt blue glitter peppered with gold and is the only non-black label polish in this post. This is also the only polish I used a topcoat with to smooth it out.

Finally here's DS Fantasy also released in 2008. It's a ridiculously pigmented navy blue polish with almost hidden linear holo. I think this one should have been the sapphire, if we're getting real here. Have you seen a blue sapphire? It's pretty much literally this color exactly. 

So there it is, I guess! If you were even mildly curious, I can tell you how I came about them.

BML: Dusty Hunted (found two bottles, actually! Swapped one for EP A Little Fishy Told Me like super early on in my polish days. I was soooooo pummmmmped).
DS Sapphire: Given in a Valentine's Day swap by a super rad lady.
Sonic Bloom: A polish friend saw it being auctioned in a group I wasn't part of so she bought it and then I bought it from her.
Absolutely Alice: Dusty Hunted (same place as BML... the owner apparently wisened up to the value of old polishes after a while because I went in to buy the second bottle of China Glaze DV8 she had and she was like 'nope!'. Broke my little heart).
DS Fantasy: Swapped for.

Ha ha, I can remember the stories of each one of my babies. If I didn't already have an actual human baby I think I would be seriously emotionally attached to these little bottles.

...of love

...

OPI: Peel Me a Gobi Grape Swatch

What a seriously perfect fall day in NEO. I'm pretty bummed that I have neither car nor stroller to be able to take advantage of it with the wee one. We explored the yard for a little while, but he's not so good about not running towards the street and all that. So it goes.

This'll be my first time wearing PMAGG (do people abbreviate this? It's kind of hilarious... pmagg...) since I bought it when I first started dusty hunting all those (What? Like 4?) months ago. The first bottle I had was BN but I ended up trading it and a BN bottle of China Glaze DV8 for some pretty righteous polishes. It was my first swap, as a matter of fact, and to Canada to boot! After swapping I bought the bottle the salon had on the shelf and it was still 3/4 full, so I pretty much lucked out there.

ANYWAY, here are some swatches. Of Pee-mag. In the sunlight. 2 coats. With SV.

Plum/bronze is my JAM, yo. Isn't it just delicious? And this came out in 1998 when pretty much everything was horrible.

Okay two things:
1. It took me a solid month to realize that DV8 was deviate. I kind of h8 myself.
2. The first time I went to that salon (it was the 3rd salon I had been to and the first that was willing to sell polish off the display shelves) I almost peed when I saw a big chunk of the CG OMG collection. I only bought DV8 that day. I went back like 3 days later and gathered the courage to start going through every single polish (because I was, and still pretty much am, completely ignorant when it comes to be able to spot HTF polishes) and when I picked up Peem-ahg I almost fist-pumped right there, with all the judge-y nail techs eying me. Man. I wish I didn't move an hour away from that place. There're still some polishes I want to pick up. I really need to check out the salons around here. But I get so derrrrvusssss. :(

Okay bye!

First-time Dusty Hunting Success

So, okay, I'm brand-new to the polish world. Like, I've always liked painting my nails but I had no, you know, technique. I didn't know you weren't supposed to paint all the way down to the cuticle, or what even to do WITH the cuticle. Wtf is base coat? Top coat? Plus I had bitten my nails since I can remember. Nervous habit. Soooo bad. Basically, I had chippy, streaky, nubby little rainbow bits on the ends of my fingers.

THAT BEING SAID, I still don't know for SURE what's, you know, legitimately rare and whatnot these days. I didn't even know nail polish could be frigging collectible until like two months ago. I don't claim to be any kind of nail polish aficionado, but from what I've read on various blogs (from googling things like "how to dusty hunt" and "htf nail polish" like a true champion) I done good.

Behold:

L to R: Blue Moon Lagoon, LOL, DV8, Sexagon (real subtle, CG)

The first strip mall salon I went into had two ladies working, one being the store owner. I asked if she sold polish and she showed me two displays; one containing OPI, one containing China Glaze. I immediately recognized the silver caps as being potentially awesome. I wanted polishes specifically from the OMG collection but I figured since it came out in 2008 I would likely have to do some pretty hardcore searching. Well, the first bottle I picked up was DV8. I nervously looked at the names of other silver-capped bottles and quickly, without remembering any of them, paid for a new bottle of DV8 ($7, btw) and left, giddy.

I got home and did some research. I started writing down the names of every htf nail polish I liked and then, armed with a bit more info, went back to that glorious salon and picked up the other three. That was the last bottle of Sexagon and it's a little over halfway full so she only charged me $3. LOL was also $7. BML was $8. The lighting wasn't the best so I almost didn't even look at the label on that one as it appeared to be a fairly regular baby blue shimmer, but once I did my heart did a little back flip. Prior to this mini-haul, the only holo polish I owned was Sally Hansen Nail Prisms Diamond from like a hundred years ago and the bottle's almost empty, tears.

Aaaaanyway, I saw a couple of other colors I intend on picking up (Parlez-Vous OPI being one, and likely the rest of whatever she has of the OMG and Kaleidoscope collections) but I need to stagger my purchases so everybody that knows me doesn't, like, force me into addiction therapy.

So, as a newbie-supreme, did I do all right for my first (and second, kinda) dusty hunt?