Funky Fingers Snakeskin

I'm back! After a much-needed vacation, I'm ready and raring to go. For my first post back, here is Kara's request from my Five Below haul.

Under the fluorescent lights of Five Below, the gold shimmer in Snakeskin was mesmerizing. Once on the nail, however, it wasn't quite so awesome.

 The shimmer! The funky pewter color!

...How disappointing. I want more of that gold glitter!

It's still a pretty polish, but it just doesn't have the "glow" I was looking for. Interestingly, when I was removing this, all of the grey pigment came away first, leaving me with a base of gold glitter- almost as if the glitter sank to the bottom. This one's up for swap!

I'M SO SICK OF CRACKLE.

Crackle nail polish needs to go away. It looks so tacky. 

Anyway, sorry I haven't been posting much lately- I had a death in the family and I haven't really felt like taking pictures. Tonight I am going on vacation with the boyfriend for the week, so I won't be posting much then either. Hopefully next week I can get back into it.

All that glitters is gold!

     Back to the polish finishes, with an old standard- the glitter! A glitter polish is generally made up of lots and lots of flecks of glitter, suspended in some sort of base color. In this case, gold glitter is sitting in a gold-toned but mostly translucent base.
     Here is wet n wild's The Gold and the Beautiful:

      While this was 4 coats, it was nowhere near as troublesome as, say, the Laffy Taffy fail. Each coat dried relatively quickly, and the formula wasn't too thick, as glitters can be.

     Interestingly, I'm having trouble telling what polish this collection is from- it appears that wet n wild has two different "The Gold and the Beautiful" polishes- one from a fall 2010 Craze collection called Pixel Perfect, which is a straight metallic, and this one, which is from a Fast Dry, not a Craze collection. Damn you, wet n wild...why must you be so confusing. But for $1.99, I'll live with it. I'll have to try this as a layering mani too- one or two coats over another color to add some sparkle.

     In the above picture I have a bit of tipwear on my ring finger- but considering this was after 4 days wear, which included a barbecue and the associated dish-washing, that's pretty darn good. Both images are clickable!
     How do you like the glitter?

Eew. Blue raspberry FAIL.

I was up for something summery, so I tried the blue Laffy Taffy polish from my Five Below haul. In a word: gross.

See the streaks and bald spots? And would you believe this is after 4 coats?! Blech. I didn't even waste the topcoat on this. It definitely did not smell like blue raspberry, either- maybe a rotting cotton candy? Just not right.
On the bright side, I can donate this to next year's Zoya Earth Day polish exchange. A few words on that:
You send in your old, dried up, lumpy, streaky, and disgusting polish to be safely recycled by Zoya, and they send you an equivalent number of their polishes at half price! (Details from this year's exchange here.) At some point I can do a post on the polishes I received from them- I still haven't tried them all yet! 

Lesson of the day: don't be sucked in by packaging :(.

What are you wearing? IDK....

Here is yet another nail polish finish, the holographic, or holo polish. This finish is generally beloved by nail polish addicts, because it is SO SPARK-A-LEEE (emphasis necessary). While the name holographic brings to mind holograms, and Star Trek, and those birthday cards with the changing images, it doesn't necessarily refer to any of these things. It's more about the rainbow effect you can see when  light hits the polish.
This particular polish is China Glaze IDK, from the 2008 Spring Collection, OMG.(see the China Glaze Wiki, here, for more info). I used one coat of base coat, 3 coats of polish, and 1 coat of Poshe topcoat. 2 coats left some uneven spots on the nail, so I used three for good measure. This light, slightly greyed, purple doesn't look like all that much in low lighting, but give her some sun and bam! (Flash approximates...I wore this for 4 days before it started chipping, and we had 4 days of rain. Boo.) All images are clickable!

She was a birthday present a couple of years ago, so the total cost to me: $0. One of the best ways of getting free polish is to let your friends and family know that you are a polish fiend! The cost of China Glaze nail polish varies, since they are very widely carried by several retailers. ebay tells me IDK has been discontinued, and looks to be going for about $15 a bottle. Damn...glad I got it for free when I did.

I have two other colors from the same collection, so maybe when the sun comes back, I'll swatch those too. Yay, shiny things!

Five Below haul!

We interrupt the polish finish primer to show you the results of a shopping trip!

For those of you who haven't heard of the store Five Below, I like to call it the Target of dollar stores. Everything sells for $5 or less. Some of it is most definitely bottom-of-the-barrel stuff ( i.e. crap...) but if you sort through it you can find some great deals and fun little gifts. My favorite section is (DUH) the "nail" section, where files and pumice stones meet gift sets and Funky Fingers nail polishes. Depending on the season/current availability, some Maybelline, Wet'n'Wild, and other mystery brands I haven't heard of or tried can be there too. On a recent trip, I had a little mini 'haul', as nail polish junkies call it.

I may or may not have done a little happy dance in the store- it's Laffy Taffy! They're scented! Aaaah! ( I borrowed this image from here since mine were stupidly deleted in the blog changeover).

Colors (scents?) include strawberry, watermelon, grape, banana, cherry, and blue raspberry.

While these are small (0.25 oz compared to the average 0.5 oz bottle of OPI) , I couldn't pass up the novelty for $5.  In future posts I'll test these out and see if they really do smell like sweet sugary goodness.

Next, I picked up these four:

wet n wild The Gold and the Beautiful - $1.99
Funky Fingers Snakeskin- $2.00
Funky Fingers Dark Knight- $1.00
Mood Struck Teal to Turquoise- $3.00
Price per polish = $2.00

Even though I have 150 polishes (shh...don't tell my mom), I only have one gold and it's much cooler toned than TGatB. Snakeskin just looked cool. I'm always on the lookout for new black polishes, since they're nice to use for layering sparkly polishes on top of, so for a dollar I figured I'd try Dark Knight...and it has a Batman reference. Obviously I'd buy it. And the Mood Struck is my first mood polish! (meaning the polish changes color under different temperatures). Not a bad haul for $13 total, right?

What would you like to see first?