Summer Polish!

Hola dolls! Guess where I am? The beautiful state of Colorado. :) We come here every summer on vacation and it is so lovely to escape the Houston heat. I'll put up some pictures of las montañas later on in the week.

Now for the polish part of the post. I've never been one for only wearing light colors in summer and darks in the winter, but lately I've been craving bright cheerful colors for summer. I just want things that will make me think of popsicles and happiness. :) So, here are a few of the ones that have particularly calling to me lately (that sentence sounds terribly incorrect, but I'm too lazy to fix it, sorry. ;)) Here are some warm colors.

Now this is a dreadful dreadful picture, but you can get the general idea. The purple is OPI Louvre Me, Louvre Me Not. This bright shimmery purple is a good way to go summery but not leave vampy colors totally behind. The other OPI is Cajun Shrimp (I know it looks pink in the picture, sorry), which just screams summer to me. I am aware that coral carries bad associations of old ladies with matching hand bags, but believe me, this color is completely not old lady. ;) Next is China Glaze Orange Marmalade, a glass-flecked orange that doesn't hurt the eyes. Finally we have one of my favorite pinks of all time, Essie Status Symbol, a carnation pink jelly. My normally pink-disdaining self adores this juicy color. :)

And now cool colors. As y'all know, I cannot get enough of sky blues. I want them ALL! Sally Hansen Blue Me Away is a perfect balance of bright yet not neon. Teals are very in for summer, and Essie Greenport is a great example, with it's slight dustiness keeping it from being boring (p.s. in my review of this color I complain a lot about the formula - I have worn Greenport several times since that review and have not had nearly the trouble. I think most of the blame should go to my dying topcoat). Finally, for those times when I want something easy to maintain and calming to look at, OPI Time-less Is More is a classic sheer white.

What are some of the colors y'all have been craving this summer?

Top Coat Trials: Wet n' Wild MegaLast Quick Dry Ultra Gloss Topcoat

Isn't that name ridiculous? Companies really should give their products shorter names. Here I am with another topcoat review in my long search for a wonderful topcoat. For some reason I'm feeling too lazy today to give a real review to Megalast, so here are the pros and cons of this topcoat.

Pros

- very quick drying (dry to the touch within 5 minutes)

- quite shiny

- extremely cheap! (about $2) :)

Cons

- it did really weird things to one of my friends; it actually dulled her polish rather than enhance it. I didn't get that, but I thought I would just throw it in there.

- didn't protect the nail well enough. My polish would chip very quickly.

- *sigh* the usual con. Extreme thickening in the last half of the bottle!

So, overall we have 3 pluses and 3 minuses. But I was very irritated at the end of my bottle, what with the inferior wear-and-tear of the polish, and the stupid thickening. I know that several people love this polish, but I wouldn't recommend it. I haven't found anything to replace Seche Vite yet! This is the fourth topcoat I've reviewed, and if things don't start looking up soon I'll be back bowing before Seche's altar.

Toes!

I don't think I've ever talked about feet on here before, have I? Probably because feet just aren't very beautiful. ;) Yet I feel completely naked and just plain wrong if I don't have polish on my toes - I can bear without polished nails for a few days, but plain toes? No. I don't do that.

So, I thought I would share some of my favorite polishes for toes. There are three polishes that are my fallbacks for toes; China Glaze For Audrey, Essie Buy Me a Cameo, and any red polish (although OPI Comet Loves Cupid has been a favorite recently).

I love a classic red on toes and think it looks put-together and polished. The light aqua of For Audrey (which I can't BELIEVE I've never posted on... what is wrong with me? I thought for sure that I had!) is funky enough to be different, yet still looks lady-like on the toes. And I absolutely adore Buy Me a Cameo on my toes. I hate it on my nails and get ineffably bored every time I wear it on my nails, but somehow this polish turns into a wondrous thing on toes. It is a nude metallic, so it is like wearing a nude polish on toes, except that it is metallic. If you don't see how awesome that is yet, it makes my whole foot look clean and well-cared-for, as well as keeping my toes presentable without drawing huge amount of attention to them. Just realized that I made that sound like I have really ugly feet. I don't, but I do love Buy Me a Cameo.

Of course, I don't just keep it to those 3, but those are my standards... I probably wear one of these 3 at least every other time I give myself a pedicure.

What are y'all's favorite toe polishes?

OPI Stars in My Eyes

Mm, look at what I found in my mother's bathroom? OPI Stars in My Eyes, from the 2007 Holiday in Hollywood collection. I grabbed it and ran to put it on and then put it in *my* nail polish collection. Oh, the joys of stealing from one's mother! ;)

SiME is a lovely (and work appropriate!) rather sheer silver shimmer. Except it's not an in-your-face silver shimmer... it's more refined than that. I think of this on some glamorous personage wearing black and diamonds living in restrained elegance. I used four coats to get this level of opacity, but it actually looked great at one coat, just far too sheer for me. In fact, this polish didn't get streaky or uneven during any of my 4 coats, which is wonderful.

And the strength of this stuff! I had it on for 4 days before tip wear appeared, much less chipping. I was very impressed. When I took it off after 5 (or was it 6? I can't remember.) days it was simply because I felt like a new color, not because it was chipped all over the place. I also couldn't keep my eyes off of my hands the whole time I wore this - I kept marveling at the beautiful color, and at the wonderful way it set off my hands. It made my fingers look longer and slimmer, always a nice thing (I play piano so much that my fingers are weirdly muscular, and extra length always looks good. :)).

The verdict: 5 out of 5 stars.

Summer Reading

Lovely blog readers of mine,

How does your summer reading come along? I, as y'all know, am simply obsessed with reading. I have a love affair with reading. I can't remember not being able to read, and I can't remember a time in which I didn't adore reading. When confronted with an excess of free time, I prefer to plop down with a stack of books and make my way through them.

Some would think that college would make me read more - sadly, it makes me read less. See, I spend so much time on homework and reading for school that I have no time for reading for me. It's quite unfortunate. Now that I'm home and homework-free, I'm simply going overboard. I am, in fact, having to restrict myself to one book per day, as reading more than one book per day makes me mix up the stories in my head. Also, a lot of the time spent not reading is spent figuring out which books I want to read, or organizing my shelves on goodreads (a nifty little book reviewing website). I think I have a problem.

So far I have read:

The Gargoyle ~ Andrew Davidson

Le Petit Prince ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Wide Sargasso Sea ~ Jean Rhys

A Farewell to Arms ~ Earnest Hemingway

Into Thin Air ~ Jon Krakauer

Lord Sunday ~ Garth Nix

White Tiger ~ Aravind Adiga

My reading list at the moment is:

The Red Tent ~ Anita Diamont

The Invention of Hugo Cabret ~ Brian Selznick

Mao: The Unknown Story ~ Jung Chang

The Narnian ~ Alan Jacobs

I want to get all of these read by the end of the week, when we go to Colorado. My list for Colorado reading is:

War and Peace ~ Leo Tolstoy (my big book for the summer! :) )

Earthly Powers ~ Anthony Burgess

The Last Queen ~ C. W. Gortner

One Hundred Years of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I can't believe I haven't read this yet.)

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Todd ~ Jim Fergus

Hooray! :) Sorry if this was an infinitely boring post, but it's what's on my mind. Nail polish will resume shortly. ;)

Have y'all read any of these books? What did you think? What you reading this summer?

Ruby Pumps Re-Do

Mkay dolls, I'm giving y'all better pictures of China Glaze Ruby Pumps today. I did post about it before, but I failed miserably with the pictures, and didn't give a good representation of what the polish actually looks like.

If you're going to wear a red glitter, Ruby Pumps is the best way to go. It is a gorgeous red jelly absolutely packed with red glitter. Since it is a jelly it takes about 3 coats to get rid of VNL, and since it is a glitter it chips within 3 days. However. Ruby Pumps is unspeakably beautiful. I want to swim in it. Here's another look.

Look at the depth in that stuff! And it is pretty much the perfect shade of red too.

OPI Louvre Me, Louvre Me Not

Whoaaaa, I've been posting regularly for about a week! What's up with that? Today I'm on my way to go visit my beloved roommate, Alli, in Austin, but never fear, I have another post scheduled while I am gone. I am super excited about visiting Alli, by the way. We haven't seen each other in TWO WEEKS! We have severe separation anxiety, if you couldn't tell. She lives right by Lake Travis, so there will be plenty of swimming and kayaking, plus she turns 20 (aaaah my roommate is SO OLD!) tomorrow, so we might go clubbing. :)

Today I've got a lovely polish from the OPI French collection of 2008... I know that this is an old collection by now, but I really really loved it. When I first started obsessing over nail polish, purple was my favorite polish color, and I went gaga over this mainly purple collection. I think I'm working my way up to owning most of them, although this might be hampered by OPI's decision to stop allowing etailers to sell its products (SO sad about this). I understand where they're coming from though - apparently OPI had not authorized most of the etailers to sell OPI products in the first place.

ANYWAYS, stop rambling, Faith. Talk about the nail polish. This is Louvre Me, Louvre Me Not, a bright (but not neon at all) medium red-based purple loaded with blue and pink shimmer. The shimmer creates a bit of a blue flash in the sun, which is fun. It goes on like a true OPI polish, lovely and smooth, and covered in almost one coat. I used 3 out of habit, but could probably have stopped at two.

Eek! I apologize for my poor clean-up job and for my dreadfully thirsty cuticles... they've been neglected lately. :(

Louvre Me, Louvre Me Not fared pretty well wearage-wise. I believe it chipped after about 3 days of hard use, which I was quite pleased with, and there was scarcely any tipwear. Hooray! I do like an OPI polish.