The Best of 2012 - Orange Polishes

Hi Goddesses

and welcome to our first Review of the Year post !!  There is pretty much going to be one of these a day for most of the month, covering polishes, brands and blogs.  Today, we're starting with a colour - orange!

Orange was never a polish colour I loved, but this year, we've fallen in love with a passion.  This has been helped by some truly outstanding creations, and also the realisation that orange on my paws makes me HAPPY.  It's definitely a mood-changing colour.  

These posts will not be in any particular order - I haven't tried to rank the polishes because it's just too difficult!  For each of the polishes, you can also click on the polish name to be taken to my original post and more photos.

Ok, here we go -

Enkelini - Lainey Lou

Stunning orange holo, easily rated the best orange holo in my comparison post.  Superb pigmentation and effect.

HITS Hula

Pure happiness in a bottle.  Sensational orange crelly with flakies.  It doesn't get hotter than this.

China Glaze - Riveting

I guess this is possibly the most famous orange of the year, or certainly the most talked about.  Scarily intense and positively thrumming with electricity.  This is orange turned up to 11.

Rainbow Honey - Hoof Wrassle

This is the polish that confirmed I was addicted to orange.  One of my personal favourites of the year, this is a stunning glitter bomb in a burnt orange soup base.

Color Club - Sparkle and Soar

From the Take Wing Collection, this is summer perfection.  This polish looks like fizz on the nails, with the shimmer attracting the sun like bees to a honey pot.  Dupe for a w7 polish and also for Bettina Hippie.

Picture Polish - Vegas

On the outer limits of orange, this is blood burnt orange just as it tip toes into red.  Stunning and vibrant and indecently loaded with shimmer.

Glimmer by Erica - Muy Caliente

I still remember the gasp when I first saw this on More Nail Polish.  Possibly the orange glitter of the year.

Enchanted Polish - Dizzy Mizz Lizzy

Enchanted Polish has made a huge splash this year, and this was my personal favourite (mainly cos I have another 6 polishes of hers that I haven't worn yet!).  An unbelievable orange glitter soup, this is art in a bottle.

OPI - Call Me Gwen-Ever

You could have knocked me down with a feather when I liked this, as it's pretty much everything I usually hate.  Corally peachy creaminess ?  Blah!  But somehow it works.  Summer blancmange magnificence.

If I could only keep one ???   Ah, MAYBE the Hits Hula, purely because it was the one that made me happiest, but wow, these are all stunners.

So over to you - what was your favourite orange of the year?   Any classics that I missed out ?

Enjoy xx :)

Indie Week - NerdLacquer - Regeneration

Hi Goddesses

Hope you're well, and welcome to the weekend!  Apologies for not posting this yesterday, but I'd had a hellishly busy and exciting week at work, had lots of nail mail to send to some lovely ladies and was just poopaloopa'd by 9pm, so today is a bit of a catch up day :)

So, this particular Indie Week is ending with NerdLacquer, and I want to  address her "disappearance" first of all.   Although Amanda has shut up shop (probably been closed down by Etsy for inactivity) and no one knows where she is, and some girls have unfulfilled orders, she is not yet in my "avoid" category.   Why?  Well one of my answers is possibly naive - I can't quite believe that anyone capable of creating such beauty, and who clearly took so much pleasure in it, would abscond for no good reason.  The second reason is that there were known things going on in her life.  She had moved house, needed to move again, and (I believe) her mother was seriously ill.   Can I understand how any one of those things can throw you for a loop?   I certainly can.  I can also understand how if one of the most significant people in your life is terminally ill, nail polish is not going to be high on your agenda.  Or your fans, even.  Imagine you're nursing your sick child as he / she clings to life in hospital - are you going to spare even a second to message your fans or customers ?  No, you'd say, to hell with the rest of the world, THIS is where I need to be.   Rightly or wrongly, that's what I think has happened to Amanda, and I just hope that at some point she'll be back.  Til then, I love her polishes SOOO much that I am prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt and send her my love in the hope that she gets through whatever she's going through.

So anyheyhooo let's get back to the polish.   This is Regeneration, and it's possibly been my least "wow" Nerd experience.   I think it's purely because I expected this to be Jaffa orange, and it's not.  It's caught somewhere between orange and peach, lacking the intensity and the kapowow I personally think it needs.

In these photos, it's layered over CG Riveting, so that gives you an idea of where the heat is really coming from.  When I swatched Regeneration on its own, it was more of a peach toned polish, which wasn't what I was hoping it would be.

It's the gold in this which makes it divine, small, tiny and medium flakes scattered in the traditional NerdLacquer "soup".

Now, the interesting thing is, I would still have kept this polish, because actually, 1 layer over an amazing orange WAS good enough .... until something else came along.  Yes.  I found the perfect orange glitterbomb, but I can't tell you what it is, because at the moment one of the bottles I bought is winging its way over the Atlantic as a very special RAOK to one of my favourite ladies in the world.  You WILL however find out all about it on Wednesday 18th July, so make a date, I promise you, it's AWESOME!

Enjoy xx :)

Superheroes v Villains - ULTIMATE HERO

Hi Goddesses

Welcome to the last post in this short Superheroes and Villains series, and tonight it's the Ultimate Superhero.   Remember on Tuesday I said I almost went abstract with my villain, well, with these, I went VERY abstract indeed.

Ok, if anybody is NOT clueless at this point, you must be a mutant or a freak!  I don't think anyone can guess my hero from this mani :)   

Actually, it's not just A hero, but a whole collection of them, a collective if you will - Writers.  As I've mentioned before, I'm not so much for the comicbook characters or supervillains, and so this week especially has been hard for me, and when I stepped back and thought about who I thought were the heroes of the world, writers were one of the things that felt right in my heart (ooooh, went a bit Lynnderella-speak there!).

Why?  Well without writers there are no books or songs.   Writers give children imagination and education.  A childhood without books deprives a child just as much as a lack of love or nurtrition.  And without writers, we wouldn't know how to put what we feel into words, how to love, how to ache, how to hurl back a witty one-liner.   Writers.  Heroes.

So, what the hell hoo-hah have we got on these 'ere nails, then ?  Welllll, we have a stamp of a pen and paper on the thumb, and an echo of it on my little finger.  Both of these have a base of Nails Inc Colville Mews, and the stamping plate is SdP-P.

The 3 middle nails are where my true heroes lie - Kate, Tori and Sylvia.  Bush, Amos and Plath.   You may recognise the ring finger - it's an echo of an earlier homage I did to Sylvia Plath using BM-204 as the tulips which are on the cover of her most famous book of poems, Ariel.

The middle finger is Tori Amos, awesome flame-haired pianist, writer of epic songs with banshee harmonies.  Her hair is CG Riveting, and then I just used a white and black to represent the piano keys.

And then my index finger, which is my favourite of all, and based on this, the cover to Kate Bush's epic album, Hounds of Love.

It's a photograph that's always captured my imagination.  There's just something about her langour, the chiffon and the soft furry doggy ears that makes for an iconic image.  I used OPI Sparrow Me The Drama for my base, sponged on a little OPI Planks A Lot and then drew the hair on with Orly Instant Artist (striper) in brown.

And they are my heroes.  

I hope you've enjoyed this series.  I know I've whinged a lot, but I'm really proud of the manis that came out of it, and I've even watched 3 X-Men films now and know who Magneto is!!  (defo Gandalf, not Jean Luc).

xx :)  don't forget to check out my partners in crime -

Sammy @ Nailasaurus

Debbie @ the crumpet

Sarah @ Spellbinding Nails

Jo @ NorthernNails

Charlotte @ Charlottes Nails

Kerrie @ PishPosh and Polish

The Battle of the Red-Oranges

Hi Goddesses  

A few weeks ago, I bought a Picture Polish called Vegas, and fell in love with it.  I then realised it might have been similar to another polish I owned, so I did a comparison post - see here.

Well, fast forward a couple of weeks and I seem to have 2 MORE polishes that look similar, so I decided to a fuller comparison.

You ready ?  Here we goooooo:

* thumb - OPI Animal-istic

* index - HITS Hula

* middle - CG Riveting

* ring - Zoya Nidhi

* pinkie - Picture Polish Vegas

First thoughts - uh oh.

Closer inspections - 

* thumb - Animal-istic is super shimmery, with lots of light threaded through it.  It's a notch or 2 lighter than Nidhi and Vegas

* index - Hula, aaaaah Hula.  Love this so much.  Her flakiness sets her apart

* middle - Riveting.  Totally different to the others.  Not only lighter, but look how it HOLDS the light, like a secret.  Faintly metallic, very electric

* ring - Nidhi - glorious.  Just-red, with shimmer and tones of orange and pink.  Glorious

* pinkie - Vegas - gorgeous .... and er .... shit that looks similar to Nidhi.  MUST be a difference somewhere.  Looks closer.  Nope, can't see it.   But she's sooooo pretty.   Sisters should stay together, right ?

Actually, actually ... yes, hold on ... yes, under my Gazillion Microscope, I can see ... yes ... definitely different .... more shimmer in Nidhi.   Only by about the weight of half a gnat's fart, but it counts, right ?

Whichever of these you own, they're a joy.  There's something about this type of colour that makes me feel happy inside.  And YES, I doooooo need them all ;)

Enjoy xx :)