Layering Fun: Deborah Lippmann Some Enchanted Evening over Rescue Beauty Lounge Dead Calm

So I've been in a pretty blue mood lately.  Not to say I'm sad or depressed, but I've been wearing only blue polishes.  I haven't worn this layering combo in forever (last I wore it was in January when I threw my hubby-to-be a surprise 30th birthday party) so I had to break it out!  I received Deborah Lippmann Some Enchanted Evening and RBL Dead Calm (as well as RBL Teal) from a blogsale over at Jessica v. Polish back at the beginning of January.  I was so excited about them I decided to wear the two together and a perfect match was made.  Something about the particular shade of pink glitter over that deep rich blue just screams match-made-in-heaven.

Putting Rescue Beauty Lounge's Dead Calm on again was so refreshing.  I think maybe I wore it once since  the first time I layered it and it's just wonderful.  It's a simple DARK navy blue creme, but it's a true one-coater and super super glossy.  This may have not been Courtney's perfect navy, but it is mine.  The thing I love the most about it is that while it is very dark, it always looks blue and never looks black.  

Deborah Lippman's Some Enchanted Evening is large hexagon pink glitter and small round pink glitter suspended in a clear base.  It is so feminine and pretty.  It's a great way to feel girly without being over top.  This is one coat below.  Please note it is a thicker coat and after the initial "painting" part I usually use a dotting motion to add more large glitter or move it around for a more distributed look.  You can also see where I've brought this to you before for my Hurricane Mani.  Some Enchanted Evening looks great over any dark creme.

Deborah Lippmann Some Enchanted Evening over Rescue Beauty Lounge Dead Calm

Deborah Lippmann Some Enchanted Evening over Rescue Beauty Lounge Dead Calm

Deborah Lippmann Some Enchanted Evening over Rescue Beauty Lounge Dead Calm

Deborah Lippmann Some Enchanted Evening over Rescue Beauty Lounge Dead Calm
One more time with the DL bottle!

Deborah Lippmann polishes are available at Nordstrom and Deborah Lippmann's site, or other online retailers like BeautyBar.com and Zappos.com. Some Enchanted Evening retails for $18 and was originally released in the All That Jazz trio for Nordstrom in 2010, but is now individually. Rescue Beauty Lounge Dead Calm is only available form the RescueBeauty.com website and it is also $18.  Man - this is one EXPENSIVE mani.  Anyway!!!!  If you are looking for a splurge, I'd get Dead Calm, cause it's perfect.  Luckily Essie just came out with a dupe of Some Enchanted Evening called A Cut Above which is only $8!  So if I were you I'd probably get the Essie over the DL.

The Black Knight Takes a Trip to Outer Space

Quick post for you guys today!  I try to come up with great layering ideas on my own, but it seems like the truly awesome ones come from others.  When I posted my photos of  The Black Knight on the nail board, a lovely lady threw out a question of what it might look like with Lynnderella Bride of Franken layered over it.  GENIUS!  The bad part?  I no haz Bride of Franken.  :-(

Improvisation to the rescue!  I grabbed the closest thing I had, Sinful Colors Hottie (dupey to OPI Last Friday Night - I guess not really that close to Bride of Franken), and slapped one coat over The Black Knight.  I couldn't have even predicted how awesome it would turn out!  Definitely click to enlarge these photos to see everything that's going on here!

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It's like The Black Knight on steroids...in space!  It's like a galaxy of multi-colored, multi-sized stars on my nails.  I never would've put this combo together on my own, but it was soooo sparkly and colorful, and I LOVED it!  If you own these two colors (or Last Friday Night), RUN - don't walk - to try this combo out!  It's amaaaaazing!

So now, maybe if we all bat our eyelashes at Jessie, she'll show us Bride of Franken over The Black Knight (when she gets it)!  Pretty pretty pleeeeease?  :-D

Another Look: Rescue Beauty Lounge Catherine H.

So I think you all know by now I have completely turned into a nail polish snob.  Don't get me wrong, I love me some OPI, but my RBL nail polish collection is getting out of hand.  I also wear them way more than my OPIs.  Probably because I spent so much on them if I don't wear them I feel like I just burned a bunch of cash.  Plus, I've been eagerly awaiting Anne's arrival from the BIB2 Pre-sale and this seemed like a good warm up.

Catherine H. is beautiful.  There is no secret shimmer here.  Just like Courtney said, its a wedgewood blue with pink, fuchsia and aqua shimmer.  Unlike Courtney, I think the shimmer just dances all the time, no matter what the light.  It's not sparkly, but that doesn't mean it's not shimmery.  Maybe it's because the sparkle is VERY pronounced in the bottle.  While it's a little subtler on the nail, there is no missing it.  Very typical of a polish from Rescue Beauty Lounge's "Real Housewives of the Tudor Dynasty" collection.  And typical to all RBL polishes, application is a breeze.  The polish flows perfectly making the need to cleanup pretty much non-existent.  I'm also a sucker for dusty polishes, blue polishes, and soft shimmers - so this puppy is everything that is right in the world.  Although if you ask me to pick between this and Catherine, I will always pick Catherine.

Rescue Beauty Lounge Catherine H.

Rescue Beauty Lounge Catherine H.

Rescue Beauty Lounge Catherine H.

Check out this sparkle/shimmer!  To die for :)!!!!!!

Close up of  Rescue Beauty Lounge Catherine H.

Catherine H. is currently sold out - but it's coming back along with the rest of the Tudors in December.  Please be warned though, that Anne just came back in stock and it's stock my not last long enough to get us through the rest of the Tudor re-release.  Courtney and I just got our Anne's, so one of us will bring her to you soon.  As always RBLs can be purchased for $18 from the RBL website.

My Thanksgiving Manicure: OPI Warm & Fozzie

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!!  I know everyone will be super busy cooking and stuffing their faces today (At least I will be!), so I'll make this short and sweet - just wanted to share my Turkey Day manicure with you guys!  I went with OPI Warm & Fozzie, a polish I actually received in a swap about a month ago, but I immediately decided it was so perfect for Thanksgiving, I had to save it.  :-)

Warm & Fozzie is kind of hard to describe.  Let's see if I can even remotely come close.  It's a brownish bronze-y foil with flashes of gold, orange, and even green.  It looks super duochrome-y in the bottle, but you lose a bit of that on the nail (seems to be the M.O. of most duochromes).  The formula is pretty good - I just tend to always fight with foils for some reason.  I used two kind of thick-ish coats here, but I'd recommend doing three if you can do thinner coats.  Ok, now I'll let the photos do the talking...

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Warm & Fozzie - what an adorable name, and completely perfect for this polish.  It really is warm and cozy and a perfect for fall.  Plus, it's also named after my second favorite Muppet (next to Kermit, of course)!  When I was a kid, I had a teddy bear of the Muppet Babies Fozzie.  I loved it so much, I could never get rid of it, even when I was a teenager.  I thought I'd save it for my child.  Well, Hurricane Katrina had other thoughts regarding that!  Even so, it's nice to have such a beautiful reminder of my childhood.  Plus, you can't go wrong with a Muppets polish on Thanksgiving!

The OPI Muppets collection is available now in retail locations.  If you're not into huge, chunky glitters, the shimmers side of the collection is really beautiful, and I heartily recommend Warm & Fozzie.  It's beautiful.  I may need to re-wear it when we go watch the Muppet movie!

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!  Eat so much it hurts!!  :-D

Butter London The Black Knight

I try not to get the Lemming Monster get to me too bad, but sometimes something so good comes out I just can't help but give in.  I really thought after my big Ulta Buy 1 Get 1 haul in September that I was pretty set on Butter Londons for a while.  Famous last words, right?  Just a couple weeks later the lovely Mary from Body and Soul posted the promo images for Butter London's Holiday collection, and I was sucked in.  Now, Butter London (as much as I adore them) have just as bad a habit as OPI of using these strange "artist rendering" images instead of real bottle photos, but even then I just knew that I had to have The Black Knight!  I feverishly stalked my local Ulta, but impatience got the best of me, so I just ordered it from the Butter London website.

The Black Knight is a mixture of pink, blue, and golden glitter suspended in a black base.  Butter London says that third color of glitter is silver, but I swear it looks more gold to me.  Shrugs.  The base is a little on the sheer side, so you'll definitely need two coats (which is what I'm showing you here), unless you choose to layer it over black.  The application is less than ideal, and that's sugar-coating it.  It's SO jam-packed with glitter that's it's thick as molasses and doesn't spread very well.  I thinned the crap out of it twice and still fought with it to get a smooth application.  And then of course it dries super gritty, so it took one thick coat of Gelous, followed by one thick coat of Seche Vite to smooth it out, and then a coat of my OPI Designer Series top coat the next day for good measure.  The redeeming quality?  It looks like THIS:

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Hubba HUBBA!  That is worth the struggle.  I love it!  Sparkly and mysterious all in one!  Heinous application aside, this polish is pretty darn fabulous.  And can we talk about the name?  Hubby loves it because it reminds him of this:

I love it because it reminds me of this:

I'm invincible!!

So, at $14 a pop, do you need The Black Knight?  I'd say if you're not a fan of glitter or if you've got semi-decent frankening skillz (see recipe here at Chalkboard Nails), you can pass on this one.  Otherwise, grab your bottle of polish thinner and grab this sucker while you can!  :-D

The Black Knight always triumphs!

Reswatch: Sephora by OPI Metro Chic

It's been a looooong time since I've worn a greige.  You may remember the last time I wore one I was kind of disillusioned with "edgy neutrals."  Pretty much every brand has their own version of the purpley-greigey-taupey polish, so after a while it's a bit of a "You've seen one, you've seen 'em all" kinda thing.  Having said that, sometimes you just need an old standby.  It's been over five months now, and I kind of got the itch to break out an old favorite of mine - $OPI Metro Chic.

I've shown you this one before in one of my very first posts showcasing my favorite edgy neutrals (so I'll spare you the full review), but I think my nails have come a long way since then, as well as my lighting and photo-taking skillz.  As boring as these colors may be nowadays, Metro Chic really is one of my favorite polishes ever, and I think it deserves better.  So I re-present to you the lovely Metro Chic!

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Ahhhh...nice to wear you again, old friend!  Absence makes the heart grow fonder!  Still edgy and neutral-y and cozy and perfect.  :-)

I think a lot my polishes deserve some better photos, so I'm thinking this will be the inaugural post in a new series of "Reswatch" posts.  It'll give me the chance to wear some of my old favorites again and give you guys some better photos to look at!  lol

I hope you all have a great day and a fantabulous weekend!!

Catrice Dirty Berry

So while my husband-to-be and I were in Germany I had one mission (besides go to Ocktoberfest) - haul me some Catrice.  I was specifically on the hunt for the Out of Space collection I saw posted on The Swatchaholic.  I just had to have Beam Me Scotty due to the name and color. :)  I also realized once we were in Germany I had not done any research ahead of time.  I hadn't looked at swatches or made a list of which one I really wanted.  Ironically enough, it took 3 drug stores in Garmisch to actually find Catrice.  That really surprised me because I had done research on which drug store to go to (DM) and they had just about every brand BUT Catrice.  So once we finally found the display in the 3rd shop, I was pretty excited.  Unfortunately, they didn't have any of the Out of Space collection or really anything I was dying for.  So I started scour the store and found a plastic container full of them.  The first one I pulled out was Dirty Berry.  I instantly remembered swatches or this one online and was excited to pick up 2, one for me and one for Courtney.  I did also find 1 Beam Me Scotty (squee!!!) and a few other beauties I brought home.  However, I think Dirty Berry must be the best one.

Dirty Berry is a really pretty dusty purple packed full of holographic shimmer.  Please know that this isn't a strong holographic effects, but it is there.  This is a scattered holo, which seems to be what I prefer.  It went on in two easy coats.  I was pretty happy with the formula, considering these were under 3 euro each.

Catrice Dirty Berry

Catrice Dirty Berry

Catrice Dirty Berry

Catrice Dirty Berry in the shade

Acquiring Catrice in the US is very tricky.  To my knowledge, there is no place to buy it here.  It's available in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.  According to MUA, it's also available in a few other countries in Europe.  You can find it on Ebay as well, but not that often.  Best to find an overseas friend to grab some of these for you.