Collide with Mr. Bubble

Today I have a beautiful combo of lacquers to show you! First is the base, the gorgeous neon hot pink Collide from Illamasqua. I received this as an AMAZING gift from my fantabulous friend Landa (along with so many of my htf lemmings I almost pooped my pants when I opened the package!) Collide has an unbelievable formula that applies so easily you'd forget it was a neon. And it was opaque in two coats. Awesome and THANK YOU La-La-Landa!

I had been wondering what to layer the last polish I got from Lush Lacquer (you can see the others I got from them by clicking here) over and I decided that Collide was perfect. Mr. Bubble is a glitter polish with a clear base, micro pink matte round glitter, small white and blue matte hex glitters, medium matte pink hex glitters, and large white and blue matte hex glitters. This is such a fun mani!

I don't much care for some of the glitters that look like paper printed on a machine with the ink running low, like the color is almost pixelated? Makes it look kinda cheap, but it isn't on all of them and I can live with it. (Even though I have decided against purchasing glitters that I saw look like this in photos...) Regardless, I really like how this turned out! You can get Illamasqua at their website or on Sephora for $14. Lush Lacquer is sold on their Etsy store, minis are two for $9.50 and full size are $8.75. How do you like this combo?

OPI Boo-Berry

Hi friends! I wanted to show you a close to my heart polish today, OPI Boo-Berry. This is a glow in the dark polish that was released for Halloween in 2007 (I think). This is similar to last years Zom-body to Love from OPI, a kind of grainy looking sheer. The blue color is so slammin' and I've wanted this polish forever. This is three coats. I tried to get a pic showing it glow in the dark but that mission failed.

This polish has lots of my favorite characteristics, it's vintage, it's for Halloween, it has the cutest name, and it's a gift from my favorite gingey, Ang. Thanks sweetie, I love it!

OPI Exclusive & Max Factor Fantasy Fire

Hi folks! Happy Memorial Day :) Today I wanted to show you another gorgeous polish I got from my fab friend Scandalous. OPI Extravagance (oops!) Exclusive is one of the last Designer Series polishes that I wanted that I had yet to acquire and now it's mine! This one is a fab magenta purple with awesome linear holo that jumps out like 3D. I freaking love this. Two coats.

Here is Exclusive with two coats of Max Factory Fantasy Fire, the Clarins 230 dupe! Also a present from my girl :D I freaked out when I saw this in my package from her, how generous can you be my Southern Suga? I love how it looks over this OPI, so fab and color-shifty and holo!

And just because, here are some more shots of Fantasy Fire over Nicole by OPI Di-Vine is Divine, a deep berry purple smooth metallic. Gaaaaaahhhhh, amaze-a-balls!

Hope you all had a great day and will have an even better week!

The Hungry Asian Original: Gonzo's Breeze

My friend Kae from The Hungry Asian has been making franken polishes for a long time and just recently has begun to sell some to make money to send to Japan for charity. I will show you the charity set I bought from her soon but wanted to show you the custom franken Kae so fabulously made me out of the total awesomeness of her creative heart! I requested that she use this great blue glitter she used in one of her great frankens called Sneeze Breeze so we call this franken Gonzo's Breeze. It has tons of the gorgeous blue glitter and tiny green, pink, bigger green, bigger magenta, and even some black glitter pieces in it! It's seriously a-mah-zing and I am soooo in la la love with it! It freaked out my camera and it was hard to get sharp photos of it haha, but here are my best attempts :)

Thanks a million bazillion times Kae my love!

China Glaze Yell-O-Neil

This polish is near and dear to my heart. It was a gift from my gorgeous lady friend Landa aka L-Doodle. She is one of the amazing women I have met via the polish blog-o-sphere. I crack up at her everyday on twitter and I just adore her beautiful nails and gorgeous deep skin tone. She's truly an asset to the blogging world. Thanks again L!

Yell-O-Neil is from the Surf Summer collection that came out in 2007. I really really love this collection, it's got a fab theme and we all know that China Glaze does glass-flecked jellies like nobody's business! This one is a bright sunny yellow on-the-thicker-side jelly with sunbursts of glass flecked shimmah. I used three coats for this swatch. A little difficult to manipulate but with great payoff. This may be a little hard to track down, but a good sub would be Lighthouse from the Anchors Away collection that just came out :)

 It's Friday, Friday, yesterday was Thursday, Thursday (sorry couldn't resist!) haha! Have a great one luvas!

Sally Hansen Night Lights

Sally Hansen gift sets are notoriously disappointing. They rarely contain worthwhile nail polishes, especially if they do not have photos of the actual polishes contained within on the packaging. However, the past few months there has been a gift set circulating the drugstore scene that contained a helluva find--a holo jelly! Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear Night Lights is a really ga ga gorgeous charcoal grey jelly swimming with holographic glitter pieces. It's a real stunner!

You may recall I did a giveaway on my facebook page for this guy (including the gift pack which includes some SH lip inflation glosses) a while back. Well I spotted it and just couldn't let it go to waste so I had to snap it up to give a fellow polish lover a thrill, because I knew my amazing friend G was planning on sending me the exact same set as a lovely present soon. It arrived a few days ago so I immediately had to get it on mah tips! This is four coats, as it is a tad sheer. But look O_O it's sooo pretty! Thanks girl!

Ozotic Pro 621

Finally! A red holographic polish! This is a big deal my friends. A true red holo is hard to come by, I'm told the pigments don't work well together. 621 is the most holographic red that I've ever seen, it's so fun! It's not a straight linear, more scattered, but it's holo particles are large which I like a LOT better than the ones with smaller particles.

I was lucky to be given this gorgeous polish as a gift from a secret friend, love you! And this is my first Ozotic Pro, an Australian brand that is famous for their awesome multi-chrome polishes. This is two coats of hotness.

P.S. Can I just tell you that I love my nails right now? This picture was taken yesterday afternoon and I've been obsessing over the shape and size of my nails lately and they're finally starting to look how I want them to haha. Watch, now I'll probably break three of them haha. KNOCK ON WOOD!

Colorama Coral Chic

I have another lacquer from Brazil to share with you today! This is Coral Chic, a STELLAR present from my girl Sarah B. from Them Pretty Colors. She honestly chose the most amazing collection of colors for our swap, I can't get over how much I love all of them! (And I'm getting some more from her soon *sqee*!) This orange blush coral jelly is a gorgeous sheer that builds to opacity nicely in three coats with spectacular gold sparkle. It just screams SUMMER!

xoxo,
kelliegonzo

Impala Crochê

I got this cream dream from my gorgeous friend Sarah over at Them Pretty Colors. It's from Brazil and is sooooo pretty. That girl knows what I like that is for sure! Crochê is a pale grey brownish color. The formula was a little watery, as I think these are non big-3 free, but totally workable. This is three coats.

I love the bottle shape of Impalas, they're like little rockets! And the label design reminds me of something, like a cigar wrapper haha. Totally cute.

I'm going to be guest blogging later this week on Them Pretty Colors, reviewing another gorgeous Brazilian lacquer, so be sure to subscribe to her feed and keep an eye out for it :)

xoxo,
kelliegonzo

milani dress maker

i have limited access to milani as a brand in stores, but knew i HAD to have their new polish dress maker. why? because it is a dupe for the immensely coveted chanel jade polish from last year. and because i'm obsessed with mint greens :) so a lovely friend on twitter offered to find it for me! so nice!!

this green is literally perfection. amazing mintyness but not too pale, not too bright, with subtle green/silvery shimmer! this is three coats because it was a tad thick.

i have since realized that i could've ordered it online really easily haha. and it so happens that i visited my hometown like two weeks after i got this bottle and was able to find the entire Haute Value collection on display in a local CVS haha. so i picked up a new bottle and just had a contest for it on my facebook page :) congrats again Christina! be sure to become a fan of my page, as there might be more FB only giveaways coming up there soon ^_^

xoxo,
kelliegonzo

i received this as a gift from a friend. please see disclosure statement for more information.

a scandalous original

my darlingly scandalous, and sometimes, shocking, friend Ange-Marie made a pretty orange holo polish just for me! she mixes up her own polishes a.k.a "frankens", as i've mentioned before, and is the queen of franken-holographic polishes! we were chatting one day on twitter and i was saying how i wanted an orange holo and she was like OK! i bought a polish from her on a blog sale and she sent this guy to me as an extra special prize, cuz she's just that awesome!

unfortunately... this story has a tragic plot twist. my dear postal service decided to be royal buttheads and somehow the polish bottle ended up breaking in transit!

it was apparent the second i got within a few feet of the package that something had gone terribly wrong.  i smelled that all too familiar smell of polish and i PRAYED that what i had thought happened, hadn't.  turns out it did.  Ange remarked that it looked like they had played kick-ball with the package!  for real, that's a shatter, not just a break!  but miracuously, the polish was still wet enough to quickly paint with, so i set out at record speed to salvage a mani with this fallen soldier.  here is the result.

because of the inability to mix the polish a bit before i painted, and having to take "dips" from different sections of the pool, the color differs from one finger to the next, but OH WELL, it's still awesome!  this is an light orange holo, the likes of which i've never seen before.  very pretty and i mourn the loss.  i've named my late hero orange-a-tan, cos when i was little i thought you pronounced the word "orangutan" like orange-y-tan for some reason (i was special huh).  and orangutans are so damn cute!  case in point:

image credit

a side note, you may notice that i've stopped watermarking my photos.  i realize that my time is better spent than by adding ugly watermarks to every photo.  they look nicer w/o them anyway.  anyone who has manners knows not to steal photos, but i'll say it here just in case.  please do not steal photos, even though it happens and if it does, i'll probably live =)

xoxo,
kelliegonzo

this product was a gift from a friend. please see disclosure statement for more information.

so scandalous

in the last month, i've kind of binged a bit on polish. partially from e-tailers, brick and mortar stores, and partially from blog sales! i think blog sales are a great way to find polishes that i might be particularly interested in but probably won't find in stores or anywhere else anytime soon. also i can usually get them for pretty good bargains and in turn help out the seller/blogger in clearing out their unused/unwanted polish to make room for more and to earn extra money for themselves.

when i purchased a few polishes from the awesome miss Ange-Marie from scandalously polished, she slipped in a little extra something with my purchases. at first i was at a loss for identifying the extra bottle in the package she sent me, it was in an icing bottle with a silver china glaze handle, it was reddish pinky berry colored holo and to my knowledge i'd never seen anything like it. then i remembered that Ange is a franken queen! frankening is basically when someone takes a polish and adds other polishes, pigments, glitter, etc. to it to make a new color. so i knew that this polish had to be one of her awesome creations. she later told me on twitter it was her very first franken*strike that, her very first HOLO franken*, so i feel very special to have received it.  my bestie mickelle helped me name it, after that song by mis-teeq, so scandalous :)

flash

sunlight

lamp light

do you "franken" any polishes yourself?  i have only frankened one so far, but hopefully i will be doing more in the future.  oh i wanted to mention, some of us nail bloggers had a discussion on twitter yesterday and were thinking, who would love to see a holo polish collection co-designed by miss Ange-Marie herself?  uhhh *waves hand in the air frantically* me, me, me!!  so listen up polish companies--MAKE IT HAPPEN mmkay!

china glaze blue island iced tea

i have been lemming this gorgeous polish for a long time. and lucky me, i happened to get it as a RAOK from fellow blogger and all around sweetheart Solveig from Nailin' It blog. blue island iced tea is a beautiful shimmery pale blue foil finish glass flecked polish that was a part of the china glaze "bahama blues" collection back in 2008. it shines from a mile away! i think i'm in love :)

sunlight

flash (the sparkles freaked out my camera)

lamp light

gift from AYD

i got this bright lavender nail polish from hot topic a while ago and wasn't sure if i loved it. this swatch is two coats, it is nice and bright. it reminded me of an easter color for some reason haha. in case you're wondering, it's almost an exact dupe for color club's puccilicious, the latter is a tad more dusty and not as neon.

flash

then i decided it was lacking something so then i pulled out a lovely polish i hadn't used in a while, golden rose 14 that i received from beautiful blogger AllYouDesire. it's an awesome scale effect flakey blue and green. it really made this polish pop!

flash

indirect sunlight

here is another polish i received from beautiful AYD; alessandro is brand i have never tried, like golden rose. this color is a great vibrant blue with a slight purple duochrome at the edges.  i actually can't freaking find it right now to tell you all the name of the color haha, oops!

hope everyone's week is going well! keep cool if you're out in the heat!