1st manicure of the year!

I won/was gifted these polishes.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, I've had this awful cold or flu, something. I've been sick enough that I've actually only painted my nails once so far this year! Amazing how time flies but wow I can't believe I've gone so long without painting them. May have to do something tonight, just because. So, today I finally am starting to feel a little bit better so I'm going to show you my first and only manicure of the year so far.

I started with 2 coats of Sation Midnight Blue, a gorgeous dark blue shimmer. This one applied easily and was almost perfect with 1 coat, but I messed up one of my nails during clean up so I ended up applying a second coat and I'm glad I did because the color just really pops with that second coat.

Next I applied one coat of my Etos Effect Nails polish Narmai sent me. I'm not really sure which one this is..

I wasn't able to get any really good pictures, but here you get the idea. The polish is kind of a light lavender base, but it's kind of a duochrome glitter, not quite a flakie.. I can't say I've seen anything else like it. The effect is absolutely beautiful.

This polish is absolutely stunning and I'm sure I'll be making a lot of other really pretty manicures with it and I think it was the perfect pairing, using it with Midnight Blue. Except.. the weird thing is that most of my pictures turned out looking like this:

With the flash, it's just not that obvious most of the time. Oh well, I got a few pretty good shots anyway, I think! Well, I'm going to have to wrap up this blog post shortly because it's starting to exhaust me.. I can tell I'm still sick, can't work for long periods of time! I have a couple more pictures to show you first. I do want to mention that Midnight Blue did stain my fingers a bit, as I'm sure you can see from my pictures. Not horribly, though!

I used one of the stamping plates Narmai gave me, along with Chrome Girl When in Chrome to stamp my nail tips. I didn't have any issues with the stamping plate, and When in Chrome worked just fine. However, it didn't really photograph well and it just kind of ended up looking like I had a bit of a silver random mess on the tips of my nails. It looked really pretty and I was really happy with it, it just wasn't the clear cut design I was expecting it to be.

It was supposed to be kind of a star pattern, and you can see it came out looking kind of random.

I forget what brand this plate is, so hopefully Narmai can inform me. The stamping plate is Salon Express SE22.

OK, that's it from me today! I'm going to go rest up and hopefully paint my nails in a little bit.

Thanks for reading :)

Dreamy Lacquer Company: The Key and The Gunslinger

I was provided with these polishes in exchange for an honest review.

- taken with flash -

Happy New Year!

Today I have 2 more Dark Tower inspired polishes to show you from Dreamy Lacquer: The Key, and The Gunslinger.

Before I get started, I just want to draw your attention to the Key. I will mention that the photograph above was taken using my flash. This polish is EXTREMELY difficult to photograph true to color. One of the things I love about this polish is that it is such a very interesting and unique color, and the color does look quite different in different lighting. So that being said, the photograph of the bottle isn't very true to color but alas, it's what I have to work with. So because this polish looks so different in different lighting, I'm going to have a bunch of extra photos to show you what I mean. First up, here it is in the shade.

-shaded lighting-

I started off this manicure with 2 coats of The Key, which is a really odd copper color with almost an apricot hue. It also has a really gorgeous gold shimmer that almost has a holo effect in some light.  This next photo was taken with the flash, but it was taken in a room which is painted sort of a cyan color so you can see how the color shifts.

-with flash, cyan backdrop-

This next photo is in natural light, no flash. I apologize for the quality of the picture. Unfortunately, since I could not use my flash, my picture came out more blurry than normal. I do want you to see what this one looks like in more natural lighting however, because this color is more accurate.

-natural lighting-

I found this one to apply easily enough. When I first applied this polish to a nail wheel, I did notice a little bit of pigment, but it seemed to go away with application and I didn't notice any further pigment issues. I actually ended up swatching this polish twice due to my camera issues, and the second time I did have some pigment issues. There was just one tiny little pigment of a dark color which got on one nail and unfortunately it did not go away with top coat.

 -flash-

Here's what the pigment looked like, and you can also see how much more red this polish looks with the flash in a brighter room. I think the pigment issue was kind of fluke, because I did 20 nails, with 2 coats each and only had the pigment issue the one time. There was also a wee tiny bit of clumped pigment on one nail, but it really wasn't much of an issue.



SOOOO... despite all of that, I really love this polish. The application was almost perfect, and as I mentioned, the color is pretty unique. Unfortunately I couldn't get a better picture of the shimmer, which is too bad. But it is gold, and it is there!

Moving on, I applied 1 coat of the Gunslinger on top of the Key. I really love the colors of glitter used for this one.. it has a very masculine feel to it. Again, sorry for the blurry nature of this photo. This was taken in natural lighting, so no flash which means lesser quality photo unfortunately.

 -natural lighting-

Here's a brief description of the Gunslinger: "Clear glitter topcoat packed with shades of the Gunslinger–silver, yellow, faded blue, brown, and holographic gold."

I swatched this one by itself as well, simply because there are some teeny tiny glitters in this one which almost remind me of sand... and as a result, this one almost has a light yellow base. Almost. It's not quite as apparent as I thought it would be when swatched on it's own, it's much more obvious when applied over other polishes. So anyway, I just wanted to show you this one on it's own as well. I believe this was 3 coats of the Gunslinger.

In this close up, you can see the little specks a little bit better. It reminds me of the same graininess that's in Daring Digits Ectoplasm, which gives that polish such a cool effect. I don't think I've seen this stuff in any other polish, not that I can think of offhand.. regardless, it gives a really neat effect. As I mentioned, it makes me think of sand, which plays on the idea of the desert... a perfect motif for a gunslinger, I think.

Dreamy Lacquer polish is available at $8 for a full size bottle at their online store. Minis are also available at $3.25.

You can find Dreamy Lacquer on Facebook, Twitter, and be sure to check out their blog.

My thanks again to the Dreamy Lacquer Company for providing me with these samples. I for one am looking forward to seeing the rest of the Dark Tower polishes :)