The Polish Bar - Shiny Pebbles Swatch & Review

Frans.

I've had two nail breaks in the last four days; the ring finger of my swatch hand and the middle finger of the other. I'm right-handed so my right hand's nails don't usually ever get to grow past the very tip of my finger because of how gawky-handed I am. I do believe I've mentioned this.

Also my skin is soooo dryyyy. This Ohio Winter has been rough. I'm ready for Spring and flowers and sunshine and.. allergies. The bad with the good, blah blah blah.

I hadn't heard of The Polish Bar prior to seeing Shiny Pebbles on a Pinterest ISO board. I pinned the crap out of it and went about my business as I had just enforced a no-buy. So lame, no-buys. Anyway, after a few polish sales, I kicked that no-buy in its stupid face and bought a couple polishes from my want-list and Shiny Pebbles was one of them. Glitter in a milky base will forever be my favorite polish genre, however much I hate the word "milky". Ugh.

Shiny Pebbles is a milky white base packed with orange, light orange and brown hex glitter in varying small sizes and turquoise small square and micro glitter. The result is a non-literal translation of what reminds me of river rocks and it is so great.

The formula, despite the amount of glitter, is smooth and super easy to work with and reaches opacity in two medium coats. I used three thin coats over a coat of Rejuvacote, finished off with another layer of Rejuvacote. I need more fast-dry topcoat ASAP-- my Essie G2G has turned into a gloopy disaster and I finally accept that, sigh.

So, uh, yeah. I love it. There is such an ungodly amount of awesome indie polish out there, a lot of which I'm sure I'm not even aware of yet. 

It looks like Shiny Pebbles is out of stock (and I'm not sure if it's going to be restocked anytime soon or what) but you can see and purchase other lovely polishes by The Polish Bar here.

Parlez-vous OPI? NOTD

Dear Blog,

This NOTD didn't turn out like I had wanted it to. I intended on using striping tape but when I sat down to do my nails I realized I had left the striping tape in my room which is also the room the (teething) baby was napping in at the moment, so I free-handed it.
Also, It wasn't just s'posed to be a standard triangle-tip manicure but that's what it looks like. I needed to make the second stripe further down on the nail, etc etc blah blah etc.

I USED THESE COLORS:
1. Parlez-vous OPI?
2. Layla: Softouch 11
3. OPI - Wooden Shoe Like to Know? (Tee-hee, cute named polish alert!)

I like the subtle orange sparkle/shimmer in Wooden Shoe.
Layla dries to a semi-matte finish (hence Softouch!).
Parlez-vous is kind of runny, IMO. Ee-moe.

Aaand that's what I have for you.

Love,

Your Friend Brandy

PS The last 4 blog posts I, you know, post... they show up +1'd. Like, immediately. And I'm certain that someone isn't just refreshing their browser waiting for my next post to +1 it. And I'm not trying to actively advertise every single post I make. I guess I'm just this about it: ?

Ulta: My Two Cents Swatch & Review

GUH.
My cuticles are the WORST and what's with that, like, ledge going up the sides of my nails that polish gets onto and makes my nails look all wide-middled? My nails desperately need some TLC. Will be researching the crap out of that!

In other news:
Per Ulta's $2 polish sale, I picked up a couple bottles, one being My Two Cents. Also, today's the first day of Fall. Also, this is kind of the perfect polish for such an occasion.

My Two Cents consists of small round copper and orange glitter (which is a subtle color difference but a nice touch, unless I'm just seriously losing it and the glitter is all just one color but some of it looks different because of the layering... but I'm like 98% sure it's two different colors) in a sheer brown base. It could very easily be a two-coater, but Patches McMissingspots over here suffers from Application Disaster Syndrome so I applied 3. It dries like, you know, glitters tend to, so I topped it with 2 coats of SV.

Artifical Light

Why does this picture look like some sort of weird 80s glamor shot? Also I put my watermark over the middle nail to try to hide the shredded nightmare that used to be my cuticle. Ha!

Sunlight

 Do you see what I mean about the two different shades of glitter, though? Like, one color is much more saturated. Isn't there some research I could do to actually figure this out? Man. Best Blogger of the Year award coming my way for SURE.

Shade

This polish has some nice depth to it thanks to the darker base. It was also pretty easy to work with, despite the amount of glitter all up ins. This was my first Ulta swatch and I look forward to, you know, getting more (when they're back in stock...).

Happy Fall you guys!

OPI: DS Illuminate Swatch

I'm seriously addicted to dusty hunting. I live in NE Ohio so there's a nail salon like every twenty feet. We don't have a lot going on around these parts, you know? I ran a few errands the other day and in between doing things I needed to do I would stop at every salon along the way. Lots of places don't sell their polish which can be a bummer, especially when one employee says "sure, go ahead and look" and I find something awesome and then the owner, I presume, says "only for customers!". I'm technically a customer, right? I mean, clearly nobody has gotten their nails done with that color in at least three hundred years... just sell it to meeeeee.

So that's almost what happened with DS Illuminate, here. I walked in and seriously the whole wall of this place was just filled with every brand of nail polish you can think of. Of course I was told that the polishes weren't for sale. I thanked her and started to walk out. "Well, I do have just a few polishes I could sell, since they're doubles of ones I already have". Fair enough!

DS Illuminate immediately caught my eye. I knew it wasn't from the older series because of the scattered holographic-ness, but I thought it was beautiful all the same. She had a couple other OPI and a China Glaze that I didn't love but am considering going back for now that I've looked at them swatched. Anyway, here ya'll!

Do you like my fancy nail polish display stage?

DS Illuminate is a burnt umber shade with copper-shining flecks and tiny holographic glitter and oh, also, it shimmers green. It looks likes if a bunch of sand got sunburned, took a refreshing shower in a rainbow waterfall and then, um, put on moisturizer made from the tears of mermaids.

The little triangle friends are SP Robin's Egg. I use that color a lot I guess

This is in the tiny amount of sunlight I was given before this big, stupid cloud came and made it all shady for about nine millennia. Sunny all morning. Go to swatch. Big stupid cloud. But anyway, does it not look like I dipped my fingertips in the melted skin of a bronze god?

In the shade

Note the bit of nail sticking out over my finger in the top right corner! Growth!

And the culprit. Look how stupid it is.

So that's that. I'm not even calling this a review because it's, you know, not one. Basically I'm just raving about how pretty this polish is. This is the first manicure I've done in months that I've kept for more than -a- day.