ADORme - Metallic Green

I've been so busy lately that I haven't done any swatching, and I've only been changing my mani every two - three days. One of those manis was an amazing dark blue glitter franken that I made, but stupid me only photographed it in VGA mode (which is what I set the camera to when taking photos of the colour morphing powder/spectraflair envelopes before I post them).  So the photos I took of that mani are just terrible and I refuse to post them here.  I will have to redo them.

After this post I officially have no spare swatch photos to post! 

This polish is one my mum picked up at the local dollar shop.  The brand is ADORme and they stink to high heaven.  But the polish is great.  It wore well and covered in two coats easily.  In fact it would probably be ok to stamp with as well.

I love foil finishes, and I didn't have one this colour in my collection, so it was a great score.  It was also under $2.

I love finding these random brands from China, the problem is that next time you visit the store it's unlikely that you will see the same brand or colours again.  So if you see something you like, grab it then.

Also, I'm looking for some recommendations for a cuticle remover.  The ones that you paint around your nails and they dissolve the dead skin off the edge of your nail near the cuticle.  If anyone has a good recommendation I'd be very grateful.

Cavalry Baseball nails #3

I said I was going to do Canberra Cavalry baseball nails for every home game, so here are the nails I wore for this weekends home series.

The team finally got white uniforms for home games this season, so because they were wearing their whites, I decided to as well (with an accent nail).  I don't do accent nails very often, but I really love them.  I think I will do them more!  

I also layered a Spectraflair top coat over the white.  It looks amazing.  Holo topcoat over white certainly curbs my lemming for Glitter Gal Light as a Feather.

The orange polish is Picture Polish Citrus.  It's the perfect bright orange creme.  A lovely summer colour.

Here is a close up of my accent nail.  This is a water decal that I had made up from a site on eBay.  The only tricky bit is that the decals are on transparent paper, so I have to create a white dot on my nail.  I did this by punching a hole in a piece of paper and then sticking that to our glass table.  I then used that paper as a konad template and put my polish in the hole, wiped it off, picked up the polish circle and stamped it on.  It worked amazingly well.  And the hole punch I had was the perfect size for the shaded baseball on the decal.

Here is a close up of the holo topcoat on the white.  Sooooooo purdy!!!

And now a quick story about the local wildlife.  

Yesterday Mr Three was playing out in the backyard and came sprinting inside.  He told me he saw a really big dinosaur outside.  I grabbed my camera and followed him out.  I asked him where it was and he walked me up to under the apple tree.  "Don't get too close mummy, you don't want it to bite you". Of course there was nothing to be seen anywhere, but we have now figured out that he saw some sort of lizard!  We've had blue tongue lizards in the backyard before, but I'm not sure what this one was.

While out there I heard another strange sound which I investigated.  Sitting on the side fence was this very cute and fluffy baby kookaburra.  The kookaburra's have been laughing their heads off here recently with all the stormy and wet weather.  It's mother and father were flying around in the gum trees too.  I snapped a picture of one of them with a MASSIVE spider in it's mouth, but forgot that the camera setting was only on VGA and not 10MP. D'oh!  But then again, I'm sure not too many of you would want to see that spider in the birds mouth.  We grow them big down here!

The other week when I was playing golf, there was a huge troop of kangaroos (and apparently 'troop' is the correct terminology for a group of them!)  I really wished I had taken my camera to show my international readers just how close the roos roam near us down here!  I want to share more pics of the local wildlife, I hope you all don't mind.

Models Own - Purple Blue

So we all know that the Models Own Beetlejuice collection is awesome, right?  And we all agree that the names are crap, right?  And we've all see lots of swatches on every one's blogs, right?  And now you wish we would all just move right along onto the next big thing?  I'm starting to feel just a little bit over this collection right now, but I must finish with my last post about Purple Blue.

Here it is in all it's glory.  The blue in this is a very interesting steel blue, with a very metallic look in brighter light.

Next up is the comparison shot.  It's almost identical to Orly Cosmic FX Galaxy Girl, except Models own Purple Blue is more purple looking.  Blue Purple is on the left, Galaxy Girl on the right.  My index finger looks like it has a strange bend in it, but it's just the shadow created by the sliding door.

That's it, I'm done with the Beetlejuice collection.  I'm really glad I got it, and I thinks it's awesome that it is a regular line.  Especially as there are so many polishes that are dupy of the amazing Orly Cosmic FX collection.

I'm starting to feel a bit ho hum about just plain polish on my nails at the moment. I think I need to spice things up with some nail art, stamping, decals etc. 

Models Own - Pinky Brown

Models Own Beetlejuice Pinky Brown.  Yep you know the deal, it's pink, it's brown, it's beautiful.

Again, the back lit acute angle really brings out the colour shift.

And the comparison this time is:

• Models Own Pinky Brown on the index finger, 
• Orly Cosmic FX Space Cadet on the middle finger and 
• Rona Volcanic Sparks top coat over black on the ring finger.

All are different and oh so gorgeous.  Sorry for the boring post. 

Models Own - Gold Green

Models Own Beetlejuice collection Gold Green is a gold shimmer base with a green duochrome shift. It's not the strongest duochrome, but it's a very interesting olive golden green.  This is three coats on it's own.

This picture used the LED light on my macro setting, and it shows off the golden shimmer well.

Like the other polishes in the collection, you can see the duochrome shift the best when you view the nail on an acute angle with back lighting.  That is how I took this photo and you can see how green this polish goes.  It's really pretty.

This comparison is against Ozotic 507.  I totally forgot to compare it next to Chanel Peridot, but you can check out Kristy's comparison at the end of her Beetlejuice post.

Models Own Gold Green is on the index and ring fingers, Ozotic 507 is on the middle and pinky.  Both are three coats on their own.

The angle, back lit picture is where you can really see the difference between these two polishes.  As you can see the Ozotic 507 shift is more of a aqua blue, whereas Models Own Gold Green really shifts to more of an emerald green.

After seeing how green the MO Gold Green polish shifted, I decided I also needed to compare it to the Gold to Green colour morphing powder franken.  So to make sure I compared apples with apples, I removed everything and applied a black base.  I then put two coats of each polish over black.

MO Gold Green on the index, Gold to Green colour morphing franken on the index and Ozotic 507 on the ring finger.  This is where the colour morphing franken really shows off.  Just look at that green in the middle!

When comparing the gold colours you can see that the colour morphing franken looks much warmer, almost red, in fact I even checked the bottle again to make sure I didn't put on the red to green polish.

.

So, all similar, but no dupes.  If I have to pick one of them as my favourite Gold to green duochrome, I think I couldn't, because my bottle of Chanel Peridot wins that category hands down.

Models Own - Emerald Black

Emerald Black from the Models Own Beetlejuice collection is very black.  So black that almost every photo I took of it, it just looked plain black.  But it does have a green shimmer and also hiding beneath the depths of the black is actually a violet blue colour shift.  

Unfortunately, it's really difficult to see the blue shift very well on the nail, and even hard to capture it on camera.  But I think I managed to sneak a bit of it in, in the second photo.

At this acute angle, with lighting from behind, you can see the blue, you can also see how blue it is in the bottle at this angle too.

This shot is with artificial light, and probably shows what it looks like most of the time.

And with the LED macro light.

The only polish I have that shifts from green to blue is my colour morphing top coat.  So I put a layer over black on the index and pinky fingers to compare the difference.

As you can see, the blue shift is identical and below, the green base is identical too.  The only difference is that the Models Own polish is a very pigmented black, which means you lose most of the shimmer.

I love it idea of this polish, but for me it's just a bit too richly pigmented with black, resulting in the loss of much of the duochrome shift. 

Models Own - Aqua Violet

Oakey doakey everyone.  There are lots of gorgeous swatches of the Models Own Beetlejuice collection popping up on blogs at the moment, but unlike all those very organised ladies who swatched the entire collection for a post, your going to have to make do with one polish at a time from me.

But, I have done lots of comparison pictures to try and make up for it, and really there are just far too many photos to do more than one polish at a time.

First up, Aqua Violet which, together with the rest of this collection, takes the prize for the dullest names in the history of dull and boring names. 

Here is Aqua Violet on it's own, three coats. Very pretty aqua to violet duo-chrome shift.

Now some comparisons.  Firstly against Ozotic 505, which also shifts from aqua to purple.  From left to right:

• Index - one coat Aqua Violet over black
• Middle - one coat Ozotic 505 over black
• Ring - three coats Aqua Violet (no black base)
• Pinky - three coats Ozotic 505 (no black base)

At some angles Ozotic 505 on it's own looks similar to Aqua Violet, but in reality, Ozotic 505 is so sheer it's not really worth comparing.  Over black, the purple shift in Ozotic 505 is much stronger than Aqua Violet.

My second comparison is against two of the Custom Polishes I made with TKB Pigments (Luna Blue Moondust and Cherika Moon Star Bites)

• Index - one coat Aqua Violet over black
• Middle - one coat Luna Blue over black
• Ring - three coats Aqua Violet (no black base)
• Pinky - two coats Cherika Moon over black.

Both the custom polishes with TKB pigments were a really close colour match, although the larger glass fleck particles in Cherika Moon give it a totally different appearance.

The Luna Blue moondust was a the closest match to Aqua Violet, but it was actually much more sparkly in the sun.  I think I actually prefer the Luna Blue moondust polish over the Models Own polish.