Top 10 of 2011

Hello! Here's my promised favorites list. It was hard to pick just 10 but I stuck to polishes that really wowed me in one way or another, whether it was formula, finish, or color.  These are listed in no particular order, and you can click each picture to go to the original review. Feel free to let me know what your personal favorites are in the comments. Happy New Year!

1) Sinful Colors - Happy Ending

2) Nicole by OPI - Shell Me The Truth

3) OPI - Stranger Tides

4) Essie - Your Hut or Mine

5) Milani - Hi-Tech

6) Orly - Lemonade

7) Zoya - Zara

8) Sally Hansen - Model Behavior

9) Color Club - Ms. Socialite

10) China Glaze - Peace on Earth

Thank you all for sharing this space with me over the last year. It makes me so happy to know that my hobby is something others delight in as well. Here's to many pretty polishes in the new year.

Color Club - Nouveau Vintage

Hello there! I hope you all had wonderful holidays. It's amazing that the year is coming to a close, and that my first blog anniversary is just around the corner in February! This will likely be the last swatch of 2011 but there's always more around the corner. I'm planning on doing a favorites post as well. With that said, let's have a look at today's polish. Nouveau Vintage is a fairly new release, having come out this year. I was quite excited by it in the promo pictures and in swatches, and I finally got my hands on it via swap. It's a lovely fall-type color, a rich brown-bronze with hints of gold and green. In the bottle it looks quite green and I was hoping for more of that to show on the nail but I'm still very pleased with it. Color Club makes some great polishes and I think they deserve more attention! The formula on this was fairly good, generally even and opaque in 2 coats.

Click to enlarge.

China Glaze - Strawberry Fields

Hello everyone! I recently bought polish for the first time in a while and this is part of what I got. I've seen a lot of raves about Strawberry Fields so I had to try it for myself. It's a juicy pink packed full of gold shimmer. It reminds me a lot of China Glaze Ahoy!; the main differences are that Ahoy!'s base color is deeper and its shimmer is more of a pink-gold, whereas SF is a lighter, less berry pink and the shimmer is purely golden. The shimmer also shows up better in SF. It was an absolute pleasure to put on, fully opaque in 2 coats and smooth. I haven't been buying much polish lately because I have so many untrieds and there aren't many colors coming out that I'm very excited about, but I'm sure I'll never run out of colors to wear. :)

Click to enlarge.

OPI - Lucerne-tainly Look Marvelous

Hello everyone! Still on schedule. Let's hope this keeps going. :) This polish seems good and wintery to me. Grey always makes me think of winter. It's a very shimmery charcoal color that makes me think of wet asphalt. I was a little disappointed because in the bottle, there are cool flecks of pink and green shimmer that I just don't see on the nail. I won't complain too much, though. It's still really pretty. The formula was thinner than expected, needing 3 coats, but it applied well and wasn't a pain to clean up like some of these shimmery or flecked polishes can be. You know how sometimes you'll clean up and the shimmer will just stick? Yeah. It didn't do that, thankfully. Overall, thumbs up from me. I'm pleased that my nails are growing out slowly but surely. My final length for the near future will be just slightly longer than this. I liked having the long talons that I once did (see my posts in June for those) but they required a lot of caution and maintenance.

Click to enlarge.

Finger Paints - Ripe Peach

Hi everyone! I have a real, honest to goodness swatch for you today. I know it's been quite a while. This lovely color isn't very Christmas-y but it's sort of hard to think of tinsel and trees when it's been 80 degrees every day for the past week or so. Nevertheless, this is a great color for any time. I've always been a bit hesitant to wear peaches and corals because of the orange undertones but this one looks great. It does remind me of the blush on a nice ripe peach and even has some of the silvery appearance of a fuzzy peach thanks to the soft, subtle silver shimmer. The formula was a little fussy and sheer, needing 3 coats and leaving some thin spots here and there, but it wasn't too bad. I apologize for the massive growth gap, I've had this on for about a week. But the lack of tipwear or chips should show you how happy I am with my Color Club Vivid topcoat and Essie Feed Me basecoat! Everything wears like iron.

Click to enlarge.

Apologetic update

Hey everyone! I just wanted to write a quick note and apologize for not updating much. The past two weeks have been a whirlwind and left me with little time to do my nails, much less photograph them. I'll hopefully be back to regular posts soon. In the meantime, why not explore my archive or leave me questions in the comments? I'm willing to answer just about anything related to my nails or me. :)

Updated Collection and Favorite Products!

So it's been a good long while since I've shown you my polish and talked about my favorite products. I especially want to do the latter since I've been using a new top coat that I'm happy with. You can see my old collection here and my old favorites here.

Here's my storage as of now. I have added two more drawers, bringing the total to 6.

This is how it normally looks. I thought about tidying up but, well.. I want you to see how I keep things! I believe in personality. :)

Top left drawer: Orlys, Finger Paints, Sally Hansens, and all the miscellaneous brands.

Bottom left drawer: Essies, Color Clubs, and Zoyas. You can tell I loooove my Zoya.

Top middle drawer: Tools and other things.

Bottom middle drawer: OPI and China Glaze.

Top right drawer: Sinful Colors. This used to be a full drawer until my recent purge.

Bottom right drawer: Nicole by OPI and Sephora by OPI. Again, used to be full until recent purge.

Here we have my favorites! The buffer block and Hard as Hoof cream are still in there and always will be. Tried and true. I'd like to take the time to introduce you to Color Club Vivid topcoat on the left and Essie Feed Me base coat on the right. Let's start with Feed Me. It's got a thin consistency and applies nicely, drying fairly quickly to a somewhat tacky finish. What I love about it is that it doesn't need as much thinning as the Borghese Hydrati did and it is chock full of oils that have helped with my dry, brittle nails. My polish lasts like iron with this too. Thumbs up. Vivid is a great topcoat that I originally got in my box set of the Electro Candy colors. It's supposed to make your polish look brighter but I don't really notice it. What I do notice is the smooth texture, easy application, glassy finish, and lightning quick dry time. It does need thinning like many other quick dry top coats but the nice thing is that it doesn't take a special thinner like Seche Vite does! You can use regular thinner and do just fine. 

So that's the news for now. I'm pretty happy with my routine now but if anything changes in the future I'll be sure to let you know. :)