A vegan nail polish blog. A celebration of colour and light, as well as of justice for nonhuman animals.

Posts tagged ‘indie’

Two Grasshoppers and some stamping

I have a very spring-appropriate mani to show you today 🙂

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Grasshoppa’ by Eat Sleep Polish, the main polish in this mani, is unfortunately no longer available. It’s a great mint green with various shapes and sizes of pink and off-white matte glitters, lots of gold fleck shimmer, and the creme base also has holo although it’s hard to tell in most lighting what with everything that’s going on in this awesome polish! But the holo was quite apparent when I was riding the elevator at work, gotta love elevator LED lighting! 😉

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I used two coats of Grasshoppa’ plus top coat.

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On my ring finger and thumb I used the second grasshopper polish, BB Couture Grasshopper.

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It’s a lighter more celery/yellow-toned green with some fine iridescent gold-green glitter in it.

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The BB Couture polish was kind of streaky and needed four coats plus top coat for complete coverage and evenness, but dry time was pretty good. I love this combo!

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I decided to add some stamping to the accent nails. I wanted to coordinate with the larger pink hex glitter in Grasshoppa’ so I used Pink Tourmaline by Lacquer Lust to stamp with. It stamped quite well using my Messy Mansion rectangular stamper.

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The design is from Bundle Monster plate BM-04. I stamped it once on each ring finger and twice on the thumbs, once on each side in opposite directions.

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I love this mani so much! 😀

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Category:

BB Couture, Bundle Monster (stamping), Eat Sleep Polish, Lacquer Lust

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Black Dahlia Lacquer Hot Pink Tulips

Hot Pink Tulips was part of the New Year multichrome flakie duo by Black Dahlia Lacquer. I also have the other polish in the duo, Lime Green Daisies, but haven’t worn that one yet!

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It’s got a lot of great stuff going on in it! Fuchsia pink multihrome flakies that shift to purple and blue, gold flakes, hot pink glass flecks, and probably more that I’m just having trouble distinguishing!

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Completely opaque in two coats, which is what’s shown here (plus top coat).

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The finish is totally smooth and gives off an overall metallic look from all the chrome flakies.

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In shade, the pink multichrome flakes really show off their blue-violet side:

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With flash:

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Under halogen light:

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Love!

Category:

Black Dahlia Lacquer

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Maya Cosmetics Reef and China Glaze Seahorsin’ Around

Another mani from last year, another Maya Cosmetics polish! This is Maya Cosmetics Reef, a great turquoise blue creme with heavy gold flakes, shown in two coats plus top coat. The texture polish is China Glaze Seahorsin’ Around, also two coats. Under Ott Lite:

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With flash:

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Category:

China Glaze, Maya Cosmetics

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Maya Cosmetics Hex and Pretty Serious Martian Sea

I have some swatches and manis from last year that I still haven’t posted; here is one of them! Shown under Ott Lite:

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The olive green is Hex from the now-defunct Maya Cosmetics, and the orangey-brown brick colour is Pretty Serious Martian Sea. Two coats each. Sunlight:

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Shade:

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They both have great colour-shifting shimmer, especially Martian Sea which shifts from gold through to blue at an extreme angle. Ott lite:

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Sunlight:

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I thought these two went together really well!

Category:

Maya Cosmetics, Pretty Serious

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Black Dahlia Lacquer Daffodil Petals

Here’s another Black Dahlia Lacquer from the first order I placed with them – Daffodil Petals. This is from their Essentials collection of basic neutral polishes.

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Daffodil Petals is a pale yellow-beige toned nude jelly polish.

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Shown in three coats, no topcoat. Nice and shiny and dry time was good! I found it easy to apply.

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I didn’t use a ridge filling basecoat here, and it kind of shows in the photos, but it wasn’t really noticeable in person.

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I really love this nude! 😀

Category:

Black Dahlia Lacquer

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Black Dahlia Lacquer Wild Bergamot and Illamasqua Mélange

Black Dahlia Lacquer Wild Bergamot is a medium blue-grey creme with dense gold flake shimmer. Here it is shown with flash.

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This was a ‘one-batch’ polish and I just checked and it looks like unfortunately it’s already sold out as it’s no longer listed in the Black Dahlia Lacquer store. 😦 BDL people, if there’s any one-batch polish that you change your mind about and add to the permanent collection, make it this one!! 😀 I love it that much! It’s a unique shade of blue-grey in my collection.

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Here it is shown in shade/overcast light:

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Wade was hanging around at one point while I was photographing it, nudging my hand and then licking my wrist, so I made a collage 🙂

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I added an accent V of Illamasqua Mélange on my ring finger using scotch tape to make the V shape. The rest of the photos are in the sunlight that appeared a little later yesterday.

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On my right hand I did two nails in Mélange. I love Mélange as well, the gold and copper-pink flecks in the green are just perfection! I’d love to have a whole collection of shades with those flecks in them…

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Category:

Black Dahlia Lacquer, Illamasqua

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Black Dahlia Lacquer Austin City Limits

The next Black Dahlia Lacquer I have to show you is Austin City Limits, a light periwinkle/cornflower leaning blue holo with added gold holo microglitters and pink-purple shimmer flecks.

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There was no sun unfortunately so these first photos are all with flash and/or Ott Lite.

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Two coats plus top coat, no issues with the formula.

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This photo is under halogen lighting:

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Shaded natural light:

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The pink-purple shimmer flecks were hard to capture in photos, but I think this photo I took at work does the best job of it (hey, fluorescent office lighting is good for something after all!):

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The second day I added stamping with my new Messy Mansion XL rectangular stamper, which I love and highly recommend! It’s squishier than the Konad stampers, plus the rectangular shape helps to get patterns on straighter.

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This is basically the first time that I’ve done a full-nail pattern on all ten nails, since I used to have so much trouble with patchy spots and getting them on straight.

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I stamped using China Glaze Gold Fusion (one of the magnetics, they’re great for stamping!) and the plate is Messy Mansion MM13. I’m excited to do lots more stamping with this new Messy Mansion stamper! 😀

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Category:

Black Dahlia Lacquer, China Glaze, Messy Mansion (stamping)

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Kunimitsu Nail Potions Classic Tabby layered over Milani Teddy-Bare

March Fo(u)rth and conquer! Today I’ve got another cat-themed Kunimitsu polish to show you – Classic Tabby!

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This is two coats of Classic Tabby, a clear-based glitter topper, over Milani Teddy-Bare. The cat stamp on my thumb is from plate HB49 and is done with Kleancolor Black.

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I used three coats of Teddy-Bare as the base, as I found the polish to be a bit thin and runny. Here it is on its own before the topper, but note that the first two photos are the most colour accurate – it’s definitely a taupe brown, not a chocolate brown as it appears in the rest of the photos. Sorry about that, the rest of them were taken in late-afternoon sunlight whereas the two above were taken the following day around midday.

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Kunimitsu Classic Tabby contains various sizes of metallic brown, metallic burgundy, and matte black hex glitter, as well as tiny matte black bars (“hairy” glitter, very appropriate for the cat theme haha).

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I didn’t have any trouble with placing the glitter, it spread quite nicely, even the tiny bars which I was worried might all line up in the same direction, but that didn’t seem to be the case!

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Now, he isn’t technically a “classic” tabby (just stripes instead of swirls/”bull’s eye” pattern, so he’s a “mackerel tabby”), but this polish and layering combo makes me think of my handsome Wilbur:

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❤

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We do have a true classic tabby in our clowder also – beautiful Seymour is a classic tabby but with white as well:

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Look at his adorable toe pads! ❤

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Category:

HB stamping plates, Kleancolor, Kunimitsu Nail Potions, Milani

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Black Dahlia Lacquer Dandelion Fields

This beauty is Black Dahlia Lacquer Dandelion Fields. I think it’s my favourite of the six BDL polishes I have so far! It’s a muted coral-leaning orange holo with pinkish-copper flecks.

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This is two coats plus top coat, shown under Ott Lite. I found the formula slightly thick but not difficult to apply.

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Under warm halogen light it looks a bit more yellow than it really is:

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With flash:

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In the shade:

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There was no sun when I swatched it, but there was the following day when I was wearing it as a mani. Here it is in the sun. The accent nail has a layer of Indigo Bananas Hay Ride, one of the new multichrome flakies (which are amazing!)

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This last photo was taken on the bus, sorry for the weird reflections! But it shows off the accent nail better than the full sun shot. 🙂

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Category:

Black Dahlia Lacquer, Indigo Bananas

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Kunimitsu Nail Potions Russian Blue

Today I have a cat-themed polish for you: Russian Blue by Kunimitsu Nail Potions on Etsy.

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It’s a shimmery greyish-blue with light blue microglitter and gold dot glitter to represent the cats’ eyes.

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Shown in three coats plus topcoat.

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I did have to work a little to get the gold dots out of the bottle and placed onto the nail, but it wasn’t too problematic.

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I really like this fun, pretty polish!

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And here is my little blue boy, Julius! Isn’t he handsome? 😀 He is also just about the friendliest little guy imaginable; he loves everyone, including a dog named Fluffy who lives in an apartment down the hall from us.

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Julius was adopted from a local shelter where he had been brought as a stray kitten. He has a chronic upper respiratory infection (I had to clean some crusts off one of his eyes to prep him for his photo shoot, in fact). He’s been on every antibiotic in the book over the years but the infection always comes back. On a serious note, it’s really lucky for him that he was adopted by people who would never return him to the shelter for sneezing globs all over their furniture and stuff year after year, because that “shelter” isn’t a no-kill and I don’t know if cats returned for that kind of issue might then be deemed “unadoptable”… 😦

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Love you, Julius! ❤

Category:

Kunimitsu Nail Potions

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