Funky Fingers - All The Rave, Drop The Bass and Glowstick Swatches & Reviews

Okay! No more blog hiatus (holy sh what an awful word combo).

Today I have three neon shimmers from !!! Five Below again. I knoooooooooooow. They're just so cheap. How could I not? Three for five bones, if you didn't somehow know. And these, especially, are AWESOME. Cheap polish, as a generalization, is a gamble when it comes to quality.  However, I am absolutely in LOVE with these. What sets these guys apart from your standard highlighter brights is that they have shimmer. Oooo. Aaahh.

Little Bottles of Love [Actually!]

So I don't have to say the same dang thing over and over again, the formula on these three are all the same, and are all great: opaque in 2 easy coats. They dried with a touch of matte so I used topcoat. They're also swatched over Funky Fingers - Gesso (pronounced jess-oh... thanks art school) which is a decent opaque white. Oh my godddd these were somucheasiertoswatchthantheeffingessiesuuuuggggg.

Also they're all taken under OttLite cuz direct sunlight gave my camera seizures. :(

...

First up is All the Rave (are raves still a thing? God, I'm so sheltered. I used to wear about a million chunky neon plastic bracelets when I was 15 and that was the extent of my rave phase, ha ha. I was really into band is the kind of girl I was, so) which is a cool-toned neon pink with yellow shimmer. My camera tried to make this one like, some kind of weird coral shade so I had to color correct it some, though it's still kind of sucktastic. Imagine the nails being more what's-in-the-bottle colored with the yellow shimmer being closer and more contained to around the highlights... does that help? No?

Next is Drop The Bass which is safety vest orange also with yellow shimmer. This is the first neon orange that I've ever actually really liked. Also color corrected but the color is way more accurate than pink-guy up there. I'm gonna go ahead and tell you to enlarge the photos for your viewing pleasure. The shimmer is more apparent when they're big.

And finally we have Glowstick which is the very color of a lightning bug's hindquarters. This is my favorite of the three. It's literally yellow highlighter with (shock! awe!) yellow shimmer. I know you're not going to believe it but I color correct this MFer too. But this is freaking what it looks like. uLtImAtE sWoOn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Again, these bishes are tree for fie doll hairs at your local Five Below. Bargain of the dang century, if you were to ask for my thoughts on the subject. You need Glowstick in your life, I'm telling you right now. Take my word for it. Please, take it. You're welcome. I love you.

Oh, hey, tomorrow I'll have three more of these bad boys for you (although one of them doesn't have shimmer, and there were actually quite a lot of other neons at 5 B-lo that I didn't pick up which didn't have shimmer but still intrigue me and also one of the ones I'm showing you tomorrow isn't really a neon but it has a rave name so Iunno). Get pumped, y'all!

OPI: Man of La Mancha Swatches

I can't get enough of this multichrome OPI gloriousness (spell check seriously thinks I'm illiterate for the record). I'm a total OPI fangirl and I'm not ashamed to admit it. So, about this polish: Man of La Mancha is also from the Holiday on Broadway Collection. I looked at a thousand swatches of La Boheme (a lemming for me for a while) but after swatching this and Movin' Out I don't think I even need it anymore is how righteous this polish is.

The swatches are 2 coats of Man of La Mancha over German-icure by OPI (which is freaking awesome also), topped with SV.

Overcast Sunlight

One coat made for a nice, sheer, sparkling red-orange topper to the rich shimmery burgundy of German-icure. And I know chromes over black make for the best, you know, color shifts, but I wanted to mess around with the deep red tones of La Mancha. I'll have to try it over black too, as I don't know if it made a difference or not (but I dig the contrast on the accent nails and I much prefer German-icure to straight black). I also wanted the full impact of La Mancha, so I went for the second coat. Instant nail polish obsession time.

Man of La Mancha shifts between ruby to coral to orange to yellow and even to lime green in very certain lights. Example A:

Facing away from Overcast Sunlight

Example B:

Artificial Light

This one has red/orange scatterd microglitter in it too, cuz it's not already amazing. Application was great, or whatever, and I just realized that I didn't lay down a base coat. Bummer. I'll be chipping the crap out of this in no time!

OPI: Movin' Out Swatches

So a tip from a new friend-in-nails (get it kind of?) (HEY visit her blog: lacquerheaded) lead me to purchasing two of my very first lemmings: OPI - Movin' Out and Man of La Mancha. Today I have for you a few swatches of the most excellent Movin' Out, from the 2003 Holiday on Broadway collection.

Yellow Wall, courtesy of 1994

Movin' Out is one of the rainbowest in-the-bottle polishes I've seen. It looks like liquified dreams. I'm holding it right now and in my living room light, it looks like it's got this ectoplasm-green shimmer. I tried taking a picture of it and failed, so you just get to imagine how awesome that looks.

While the spectrum of colors don't translate onto the nail entirely, there's still a huge and delightful range o' colors. I will show them to you now (I used 3 coats of Movin' Out over 2 coats of Orly - Velvet Rope with 1 coat of SV for all photos below.. kind of labor-intensive but wooooorth itttttt).

Sunlight

That looks like a nice bright mauve shimmery delight, yes? The red/orange blurry dots on the leftmost nail give the best color accuracy of the scattered microglitter in this sweetheart.

Shade

The chrome-ality is much more apparent out of direct light (like all multi-chrome polishes, I'm finding out, likely because of ... stuff. Indirect light beams and scattered sun particles and, you know, really scientific things).

Artifical light / Shade

Aaand in indirect artificial light was where I was able to pull the most color shifting from. Plum, mauve, bronze, gold, yellow, green. And that glitter! <3

<3 <3 <3

So, there it is. The scattered glitter is apparent in Man of La Mancha, too. It reminds me of camera flashes in a stadium (OR A THEATER, BROADWAY COLLECTION...). I'm super happy I was able to get a hold of this polish. While it's not suuuuuuper htf, it's still a polish I'm quite pleased with adding to my stash-a-roo.

Fingr's: Lace Up Nail Art Review

I have a COLD. We're moving in two days and I have a cold. In August.
Here are my nails:

Sunlight, OBVIOUSLY.

I did the gradient using Essie - Meet Me at Sunset (favoriteeee) and Flower - Eye of the Tiger Lily. No sponge nonsense, just a couple layers of Sunset and a slow build up of Tiger Lily towards the tips.

Anyway, then I see these appliques at Wally World and decide to go for it.

Firstly, I know these are probably made for tweens-through-early-20s kinds of ladyfolk, but I have some long, skinny piano player fingers, and the width of the ring finger sticker was still, like, half of what I actually needed. In fact, none of the stickers were wide enough. Seriously, little kid sizes here. 

Application was all fine and well enough. I tried re-positioning the first one and once I started trying to pull the thing off it wasn't having it. Tear city, and some, I don't know, stress discoloration. So whatever. And I had to clip about half of it off since my widdle nay-ools are still-a growin'. 

Can I just tell you how much it bums me out that I don't feel well? I seriously have SO MUCH TO DO. Even writing this, I'm like, "meh". I would so rather just be watching TV and eating Hot Dog Chips (which are SO GOOD and I'm not even getting paid to say so!!!!!!) 

Anyway, so my nails have spots on them, and that picture is AWFUL and there's black sh all over the place from trying to fill in the blanks with black nail art polish and this living room smells like a diaper and I can't figure out why, because there aren't any diapers laying around. LIFE.

Got my Ipsy bag today finally. Happy with it. Will I start posting reviews about that kind of stuff? I MEAN SINCE I HAVE SOOOO MUCH ELSE TO TELL YOU ABOUT. Whatever. I want to take a nap.

Um, the appliques were all right. My nails look pretty neat when they're not all up in my face and I can notice all the insane flaws. OUT.

Funky Fingers Solar Collection: Solar Flare & Lil Miss Sunshine

Solar Flare

Solar Flare is a seriously lovely neon yellow creme with green shimmer that is supposed to turn bright brick-ish red in the sun. 

Two layers over white on ring finger, four (!!!) layers on the rest

I haven't bitten my nails since I started this blog, PS. Slowest. Growing. Nails. Ever. The middle one broke, to be fair. Also, you'll notice that my ring finger has a layer of Zoya Purity (white) under the Solar Flare since we all know that's how neons are supposed to be, you know, worn, or whatever. Formula-wise, the polish is a little on the thick side and coverage isn't great if it's not layered over white which is pretty normal as far as I know.

dat shimmer

What stands out for me about this polish is the green shimmer. That's good and bad, because what should probably be the selling point of a color-changing polish is its, um, ability to change colors. 

I mean, okay. It's definitely a more orange-toned yellow and not neon anymore. But it's definitely not anywhere near the color it said it would turn in the sunlight. I shall henceforth refer to this polish as Solar Normalcy.

Then there's this little fella:

Lil Miss Sunshine

Lil Miss Sunshine is a pearly white creme that's supposed to turn orange in the sun. You know, it doesn't specifically say "in the sun" anywhere on the bottle. It says "OUTSIDE". I didn't, however, go outside. I opened my window and stuck my hand in the sunlight. Maybe that's what the problem is... maybe you have to actually BE outside. Maybe the polish knows....

Two layers over white on ring finger (it's my right hand, PS), three on the rest

I think I might change the name of this blog to "Pictures of How Effed Up My Fingertips Look". I seriously have got to have the deepest-ridged fingerprints in this entire world. And I can't even grow my nails out too long because when I try to put in or take out my contacts I, like, scratch my corneas off. MY LIFE.

Anyway, it's pearly white. See? Aaaand now in the sunlight:

It goes a nice pastel apricot. Orange, no. Still a fruit, I guess. And it's a pretty nice color all the same, but still not the in-your-face color change I was hoping for. I declare this polish Lil Miss Peachface.

So there it is. You can pick these guys up at Five Below for $3 a pop. Other colors included a bright teal that changes (maybe) to a dusty blue-grey, a bright bubblegum pink that changes to a darker version of itself and a vivid fuchsia-purple that changes to eggplant.