The Great Beyond

Color Club Beyond, from the second Halo Hues collection:

Incredible holographic shimmer.  This is two coats with Essie Good To Go topcoat.  Please excuse the dry cuticles - I like to oil them AFTER using the camera rather than before!

Blue Heaven, Blue Sky

It can be a little hard to concentrate when your nails look like this:

Let me reiterate:

Ahhhhh, so beautiful!  It's Color Club Blue Heaven - hat tip to Pam for turning me on to this collection!  I think I've found my new favorite holographic polishes:  so easy to apply, and works great with regular base- and topcoat!  I do have the aqua base coat, which I use with other holos, but I find it difficult to remove except with pure acetone.  And I'm trying to avoid that.

Here it is with some yarn:

The yarn is Blue Sky Alpacas Brushed Suri in the Agave colorway.  After I discovered this yarn a couple months or so ago, I went a little nuts and bought three balls from a fellow Raveler.  I'm using them to make my second Aura shawl (Kim Hargreaves):

I've also started another Kim Hargreaves project - a sweater - but that one will get a post of its own.  This one is my "side project."  However, it's requiring a little more attention that I'd expected:  because of all the fuzz and fluff, it's very easy to drop a stitch without knowing it, so I have to really look at what I'm doing.   Note that in my lexicon, "side project" translates as "project so simple I don't have to think about it and don't have to look at it while I'm knitting (making it easier for me to watch TV)."  So I think this has become an Actual Project.

Which means I'm not working on it all that much. 

Cranberry Cosmo

Here's the other Enchanted Polish holo I got from Harlow and Co. last month:

The holographic effect isn't as "in your face" with this one as it is with Austin Powers, but it's a gorgeous polish nonetheless.  In real life it leans a little more red-violet than what you see here.

I did the same application as last time:  Aqua Base, polish, Aqua Base, polish, Seche Vite.  My bottle of Cranberry Cosmo is a little thick, which made it a bit tricky to apply.  I'll probably thin it a little before using it again. 

Sigh.  I love holographic polish . . .

Holy Holographics, Batman!

Enchanted Polish Austin Powers, along wth Nfu Oh Aqua Base. 

I resisted for a long time, but the Aqua Base really does make a big difference, both in the application of the holographic polish and in the amount of holographic effect achieved.  Totally worth the money and trouble of ordering it.

Per Pam's suggestion, I applied one coat of Aqua Base, one coat of holo polish, another coat of Aqua Base and another coat of holo polish, topped off with a coat of Seche Vite.  This was the first time I didn't have to struggle with patchiness when using a holographic polish!  Love!

Wowzers!

Layla Holographic nail polish in Retro Pink:

I don't have a water-based base coat, and when I tried one of these polishes without base coat, it stained my nails.  So this time I started with one coat of Gelous, followed by one coat of Color Club Fashion Addict - a lavender polish that is supposed to be holographic, but really isn't.  It has kind of a chalky finish, so I thought it might be good under this polish.  I was able to get away with 2 coats of this polish, but there are some mild patchy areas on my right hand.  I topped the whole thing off with a coat of Seche Vite. 

When I used one of these Layla holographics without base coat, the polish chipped on the first day - no surprise there.  I did this manicure yesterday morning, and it's still pretty intact this afternoon - just a tiny bit of tip wear.  I'm thinking I may stamp it later, because my mail lady brought me the new set of Bundle Monster stamps yesterday - yay!

Jules

Here's another draft I had sitting around and thought I would post.

If you've got Zoya Jules in your stash, then you know that in the bottle, it has lovely silver shimmer.  While wet on the nail it retains that shimmer, but as soon as it dries, the finish becomes a little flat.  I love the color of it, but I wanted more sparkle.  I decided to layer on a holographic top coat, China Glaze Fairy Dust:

Zoya Jules
China Glaze Fairy Dust

Above is two coats each, followed by China Glaze Fast Forward top coat.  Even under cloud-covered skies, this is sparkly enough for me!

Look!  Almost like bokeh nails!

Fun with Holography

Well, Areej didn't last long.  I wasn't too surprised; when I put it on, I grabbed the wrong bottle and applied a topcoat instead of a basecoat, but I was too lazy to take it off and start over!  So when I washed my hair, it started peeling off in big pieces. Oh well.

Since the sun was out again yesterday morning, I decided to try out a polish from the China Glaze OMG collection, TTYL.  I had gotten three of the holographic polishes from this collection last fall, but hadn't yet used this one.  In the bottle, it looks kind of meh.  I'd thought it would be more coral, but it is more of a clay or dark brownish peach.  Not really my thing.  And it doesn't show as a very strong holo in the bottle.  But on the nail, in full sunlight:

Whoa, Nellie!  I couldn't stop looking at it!  In low light, it does look like the clay color, but in normal light it comes across as more of a peachy rose - very pretty. And when the light hits it . . . well, let me show you again:

China Glaze TTYL

close up

It was easy to spend a lot of time looking at my nails yesterday, because I finally sewed Jewel together!  Yes, she is finished and looking lovely.  I'm hoping to take some pix later today.  I also finished Adore in the evening - turns out I was much further along than the 75% I'd estimated.  Yay!