Orly Pixie Dust was released in 2009 as part of the Once Upon a Time collection. It’s a grey-blue color, opaque in two coats. This swatch is one coat of Seche Clear base coat, two coats of Pixie Dust, and one coat of Seche Vite. It applies smoothly and easily, and is one of my favorite “shimmer in cream base” type polishes. In the pictures, you can also see the cute pixie charm that came with the bottle. 
For right now, I’m posting all the older pictures I currently have – ones that were taken back in 2010, for the most part. I want to hopefully get posted all the old images I have before I start posting new swatches. Hopefully you’ll see a pretty big change once I start posting new swatches, because I know my hands (especially the cuticles!) look pretty bad in these older pictures. I’m taking better care of my hands now, and I think they look a lot better.
This polish is China Glaze TTYL, from the 2008 China Glaze OMG collection. I’ve seen this one described over and over as a warm peach holo, and I can’t think of a better color description for it. It’s not orange, it’s not nude, it’s definitely peach. This is two coats over Seche Base (a ridge-filling base coat) and no top coat. Holographic polishes (the linear holos, anyway) tend to dry extremely quickly, and the OMG polishes are no exception. Because these dry so quickly, they can come out a bit patchy, and are a little more difficult to apply evenly than your average China Glaze polish, but it’s pretty easy to adapt to once you know what’s going on.
Illamasqua Muse is one of my go-to polishes, the polishes I reach for if I need something easy and fast. Muse applies smoothly and completely hassle-free, is fully opaque in one coat, and dries quickly. This swatch is over Seche Base, topped with Seche Vite in the first picture and Essie Matte About You in the second. The first picture was taken after a full day of wear, and then I applied Essie Matte About You and wore it matte for another two days before taking it off. It wore great while I had it on. Love this one to pieces, and it’s worth every penny of the $14.00 price tag!
Merry Christmas, everyone! 
It’s almost Christmas, and I am so tired! I spent all of yesterday on my feet, most of it in the kitchen making lotions and soaps, the last of the Christmas presents that I needed to make. I’ve spent most of the last week making lotions, body wash, and bath bombs, wrapping presents, trying to get lotions delivered to people I was making them for, and more! I’ve been swapping the caps from my Orly bottles (I love the feel of rubberized caps, but hate the way the hold on to fragrance and transfer it to your hands each time you grip the cap) and that’s been a long and frustrating process. I’ve been swapping caps to empty bottles, backup bottles, and bottles of polishes that I’ll be using for a very large franken batch soon, and I still don’t have even half as many caps as I would need to swap all the rubberized caps out of my Helmers. I also (even before the great cap swapping of the day before yesterday) had 11 empty bottles that I have no caps for. I can’t quite figure out how I’ve wound up with so many capless bottles, but I had lots and now I have half a dozen more.
Today’s polish is a Bon Bon polish, and as far as I can tell, these have no names. I think this is the one identified on Walmart’s site as “solid magenta.” In any case, I was really impressed with this polish! It’s pretty, the formula was good, and the brush spreads nicely on the nail without being too stiff or too floppy. This picture is 2 coats, and it’s completely opaque. The first coat is very close to opaque, the second coat is perfect. Seeing in the bottle that this was a purple with blue pearl effect, I expected it to be pretty sheer, so I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality and opacity of this! These pictures are with Seche Clear as my base, and it’s been a while, but I think these pictures were taken with no top coat.
The long overdue conclusion to my review of the Claire’s mini flakies set! Time has passed, and more polishes have come out since the first part was posted, and I can now say that I believe I’ve seen this style of flake elsewhere, too. The flakes in these look to me to be the same sort of flakes that are in OPI I Lily Love You and Color Club Covered in Diamonds.
As with part 1, all swatches were done with a coat of Seche Clear for the base, two coats of flakey polish, and one coat of Seche Vite. Each color has four pictures: an in-focus nail pic, a slightly out of focus nail pic to show the way the flakies reflect light, an in-focus bottle pic, and a slightly out of focus bottle pic. The blue polish has a fifth picture, one that was taken in sunlight and very distinctly shows the flakes on the nail. Like all my images, these will be clickable if you want to see the full size image. This post shows the three cool colors: green, blue, and purple.
Claire’s green flakey:
Claire’s blue flakey:
Claire’s purple flakey:
I want to share some things I’ve been working on lately. Some are polish-related, some aren’t, but they’re some of the things I’ve been devoting myself to recently!
1) Christmas! There are some things I’ve bought, but this year I’m making most of the Christmas presents I’m giving. I’m working on making lotions, cute Christmas-y bars of soap, lip balms, lip scrubs, body wash, and bath bombs! I’m especially glad when I can make something really special for someone, like a lotion just for my mom, who has dry skin but hates the way lotions make her hands feel slick and, well, lotion-y. Or awesome slime soap for kids!
2) Making frankens! I love making frankens! It’s my favorite creativity outlet, and as above, I really love it when I can make something especially for someone. I also love making something that captures something that’s special to me, like a particular feeling or moment in time. Here’s a bottle pic of a franken, Christmas Tree, that I worked on for a long time and finished just recently:
3) Making bath and body products for myself and my SO. I have severe and varied allergies, with mint, tea tree, eucalyptus, and menthol being particularly potent and dangerous, and I have celiac. My SO already had to change his conditioner, but I started to have issues with the fragrance in the products he had been using earlier this year. I have the same problem with fragrance in my own shampoo and conditioner, but I was getting sick (because of the celiac) from my conditioner because of the wheat protein in it, and it’s hard to find hair products that don’t have that and don’t trigger my allergies. My SO and I both started using Alterna Caviar Anti-Aging Seasilk Moisture shampoo and conditioner, which were awesome for my hair and didn’t bother my allergies or make me sick. The products are expensive, though, and my SO didn’t care for them as much as I do because he likes products that are less gentle and more apt to have no problems getting car grease or something equally stubborn out of hair. I also used Clinique Deep Comfort Body Butter because it was the only thing I’d found that worked and (again) didn’t trigger my allergies, but (again again) it’s expensive. Since I had time on my hands and significantly less money, I started to research making my own lotion (not thinking I would be able to make my own shampoo!), and it spiraled into something a lot bigger and so much fun! It’s addictive.
This is the site I found that provided me the information I needed to make lotion, and also both the idea and the necessary information to make a lot more! Her site is full of science and recipes and advice and pure, unadulterated awesomeness!
Here is a picture of my latest batches of body wash and shampoo for me, not quite finished and ready to go into bottles:
4) Sleeping. Seriously. It feels so good to be able to sleep when I’m really tired, and to sleep more when I need more sleep.
5) Soak off gel nails! I’ve tried IBD Gelac and Red Carpet Manicure with Nail Harmony Gelish colors. The Red Carpet Manicure and Gelish work so much better than Gelac did for me, and the RCM LED light is a godsend. Soak off gels are the reason I can do my nails the way I want to (wearing lots of colors instead of doing 1 mani a week or something!). It used to feel like it took so long to remove my nail polish, clean my hands up (to get rid of staining or stray glitter), put on base coat, put on 2-3 coats of polish (making sure to give each layer time to dry enough that putting on the next coat won’t drag the first coat off), possibly layer another polish over it, put on quick-dry top coat, and wait for everything to dry. Then if I messed up or wanted to change colors, do it all over again. The soak off gel makes removing polish way faster, even for glitters, and you just apply polish. Thus far, my experience is that polish dries really fast over the top of the gel. I don’t even need to use a quick drying top coat, usually. It really has been a godsend for me, because I wasn’t able to do my nails often, and now changing my polish is a ten minute affair (removal, application, and dry time). I’ll be reviewing these in depth in later posts, but here’s a picture of the light and a bottle from each of these three brands!
6) Running a sale. I finally got pictures taken and everything written up for some beauty stuff I’ve been intending to sell for a while. I might also put it all up here, but as it stands, I have something else in mind for my blog, which I might put up this month. I’m still debating, but if I decide to do it, you’ll see another tab added to the menu at the top of the page.
7) Looking forward to my Christmas Helmers! Squee! I already know that I’ll be getting two more Helmers for Christmas – the giver and I are going to take a trip to Ikea (the first time I’ll have been to Ikea!) in January (after the wild Christmas shopping rush is over) to go get them together, and since Ikea is a pretty long drive and there will be other awesome stores nearby, we’re going to make a day of it. It’s going to be so much fun!
I’ve been away from this blog for a long time. I didn’t intend to stop posting, but once I realized I had, I wasn’t sure how to start again, or if I would be able to put out new posts with anything approaching consistency. Today, I’m doing some things here that I was afraid to do.
My name (well, nickname anyway) is Issa. I have health issues which restrict what I can and can’t do, not least of which is severe narcolepsy, with limited treatment options. I stopped posting when I did because I was at a point where I had to choose between having the energy to work, and being able to do anything else. I was also unknowingly choosing between the medications that enabled me to keep working and my health. Once I realized what I would be doing to myself by continuing on one of my narcolepsy medications, I could no longer choose to keep taking it, which also meant that I was no longer able to work. I worried about posting any kind of personal information while I was working, due to the nature of my job, and because I had concerns about crossover between parts of my life that I had been keeping separate: work, family/friends, polish-related online, and health-related online. I don’t need to be concerned anymore about issues that might arise from a crossover between my work life and my online life (polish-related or health-related), and I’ve decided not to keep anything else separate anymore. I’m okay with people knowing me as the writer of this blog, and my identity on beauty-related forums, and also who I am on sites and forums I visit related to health issues. I don’t want to try to keep those separate anymore. So, hi, I’m Issa, and I have narcolepsy. I may not be able to post very often, but I will try to keep my blog going now. It won’t always be just nail polish (I have other hobbies and obsessions that I would like to occasionally share on here!) and new posts may be slow to show up because I have to devote my energy to other things, but I am glad to be back, and relieved to not keep trying to separate those aspects of my online life.
A few months ago, Claire’s came out with a set of mini flakey polishes. The set is $12.50, and it contains six .25 fl oz (7.5mL) bottles. They have no individual names, but the colors are red, pink, yellow, green, blue, and purple. All six are sheer and fairly thick, and the the flakes inside each bottle range in size from tiny pieces that look like glitter to large flakes. The flakes feel similar to (and might actually be) mylar – they’re very thin and are easy to bend and crinkle if you pull one out of the polish and play with it. The flakes are very reflective, but they are translucent, not opaque, so when light isn’t shining off them, you can see through them.
All in all, I liked these. They’re very sheer, so they are going to be much better suited to topping a more opaque color, and occasionally the ends of flakes can poke out of the polish and make you feel like you have a tiny piece of foil stuck on your nail, but I think they’re a neat departure from the types of polish that are usually found in non-beauty-supply-oriented stores, and though they’re a far cry from the magnificence of Nfu-Ohs, I applaud the brand for expanding into more unconventional polishes like these and the Mood polishes. I harbor the hope that these mini flakies may draw fledgling laquerheads into the magnificent world of non-mainstream polishes.
All these swatches were done with a coat of Seche Clear for the base, two coats of flakey polish, and one coat of Seche Vite. The dry time on these was pretty much average for two coats of polish with Seche Vite. For my posts about this set, each color will be shown in four pictures: an in-focus nail pic, a slightly out of focus nail pic to show the way the flakies reflect light, an in-focus bottle pic, and a slightly out of focus bottle pic. Like all my images, these will be clickable if you want to see the full size image. This post will include the three warm colors: red, pink, and yellow. Warning: the yellow is hideous on bare nails, so brace yourself for those pictures.
Claire’s Red Flakey:
Claire’s Pink Flakey:
Claire’s Yellow Flakey:
Stay tuned for the rest of the set!
Hey, all! I apologize for the length of time since my last post. A dead modem, internet outages almost every other evening, and two cracked nails have conspired against me. Hopefully the weather will calm down and I’ll have reliable internet access in the evenings again.
Here we have the last of the Etude House polishes that I ordered – DDBB WH004, a gorgeous black with multichromatic shimmer, whose true beauty I was unable to capture effectively.
For this swatch, I used Seche Base and Seche Vite. These pictures are two thin coats of polish, and once again, if I’d been more careful, I could have done one slightly thicker coat and gotten the same coverage. This polish, like DDBB BL009, applied like a dream. It was easy to control, not thick or too thin, and the brush is excellent. Anyone who likes the OPI Pro-Wide brushes but finds them a bit too wide will probably be very pleased with Etude House’s nail brushes.
DDBB WH004 is an opaque black base with shimmer that shifts on the nail through fuchsia, purple, blurple, blue, teal, and green. I wasn’t able to get a good picture of the color shift on the nail, and I couldn’t get a nail pic of the fuchsia at all that day. Instead, I have lots of nail pictures and bottle pictures that capture aspects of WH004′s gorgeousness.
Here is a picture of the blue, green, and teal aspects of the shimmer:
Here, you can see more of the blue and the blurple:
Purple and blurple:
This picture actually managed to capture a little of the fuchsia, and more blue, green, and teal:
And here are the bottle pics, which do a much better job than my nail pics. I haven’t seen gold or the lime green on the nail, but I’ve seen every other color in the bottle pics on my nails when I wore this polish.
That’s the last of the Etude House swatches for now, but if I can ever manage to commit myself to wearing the same polish for more than three straight days, I’ll test the wear and report my findings.
