I’m BLU

Today I have for you the first of the HD polishes I told you about here. It’s BLU (#02), a gorgeous, electric blue, unlike any of other blues I have. It truly does glow. I think the right adjective for this color would be cyan.

Application left something to be desired, though. First of all, the brush is wonky. It’s weird. I start to apply polish to my nails, and as I put some slight pressure on the brush, I expect it to fan out. It doesn’t. It got to the point that I actually tried to manhandle (womanhandle?) the brush to see if I got one where the hairs were all attached at the bottom, as this has happened to me before. But nope, they are all separate, they just don’t like to separate.

Grr – wonky brush

On top of this, the first layer comes out streaky. I mean really streaky. Some areas are nearly bald. After doing two thin layers and seeing little improvement, I added on a third, rather thick layer.

Now, I’ve worked with multi-layer polished before. OPI Breathe Life is a prime example. But this is something different entirely. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. And I still, on the third coat, had some bald spots near the edges of my nails that I just had to shove the color down. I topped it off with Poshe, and either the color itself evened out, or the Poshe helped. Either way, the end result is gorgeous!

Indoors

Close-up

I really like it. I keep looking at my nails. I’ve taken several photos, which as I think we can all agree, is a sign of a really good polish/color.

I found a couple of pictures that match the color:

Would you believe that’s a design for a guitar? From prsguitars.com

Now, I was going to go with a Smurfs video (I mean, hello, blue!), but you know what’s a better match for this glowy little gem?

Tron!

Watch out for that song – I’ve found it seriously addictive. I eventually downloaded it from iTunes, so if you ever need the info, I now know it’s called “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” by Eifel 65.

If the application doesn’t deter you (and, personally, I totally find it worth it), then you may want to make a trip down to your local Walgreens. The HD collection is two dollars off, and for my local prices, that’s about a 30% discount.

(And don’t think I didn’t see you dancing in your chair during that clip! It’s okay, though, I did, too.)

When you’re Strange . . . Beautiful

As promised, here are the last six colors from the premiere StrangeBeautiful Library of Color.

It’s amazing how polish choices can be so visceral. When I first got my haul, the dark olive color (which, for some reason, reminds me of camo), was the color I liked least. Yet when it came time to pick a color to wear, it was the first one I reached for, as I mentioned in my first post about this line.

And the last color that I finally wore? The dark teal, which by all rights should have been my itching to jump on my nails from the word “go.” But you can’t always tell which polish you will most want to wear from day to day.

Now that I’ve worn them all, I don’t think I could pick a favorite, even if forced to. There are some I like more than others, but as soon as I decide I really like one, another one falls into my field of vision, and I can’t decide. So I give – I won’t even try.

So, on with the countdown. (Wow – I’m channeling Casey Kasem now.)

This first color is described as a “midcentury modern orange.” I’m not completely sure what that means, but I believe it’s the color (or one of the colors) whose genesis came from the Mid Century Modern Knoll Fabrics. It definitely has a “modern” feel to it, the way OPI’s The “It” Color does, with its mustard-leaning yellow. This reminds me strongly of a Sunkist orange with some black added to it.

This next color is a dark, inky blue that was, according to Jane Schub, “inspired by a fear of swimming alone in a deep dark lake at night.”

(Best of the pictures I took – sorry!)

This next one, I predict, is going to be a showstopper for many of you out there. (Scrangie, are you looking? I think I’ve got a color for you!)

This is called an “Art Nouveau teal.” It’s definitely darkened, and reminiscent of Rescue Beauty Lounge’s Stormy In fact, as Kae pointed out, the bottle designs are very similar, so I did a side-by-side shot of SB’s teal and RBL’s Stormy:

You’ll notice two things. Firstly, though the SB (on the right) appears to be larger, it is also much more narrow than the RBL. After scouring the Web (read: surfing several sites for up to ten minutes and becoming bored), I am unable to determine the size of the SB bottles. RBL is 12 milliliters, and judging from these pictures, I’ll guess that SB is about the same amount.

Secondly, this is not a dupe for Stormy. They’re in the same family, but I would consider this polish to be much more teal, and a little more “blackened,” to my eye.

(Excuse the weird marks on my nails – for the life of me I can’t see them IRL.)

Next comes this yummy chocolate brown color. Sigh. It keeps pushing to be my favorite of the group.

Here’s a lovely fuchsia. Like many in this library, it is a dark version of the color.

And last, but certainly not least, is the light pink shade of the family. In a New York Times blurb, it is said that Ms. Schub realized ‘the pink in a Warhol painting she saw at the Dia:Beacon museum [would make a wonderful nail polish]. ''It had black in it,'' Ms. Schub explained. ''It was a little off. It turned the corner from being pink to something very beautiful to look at.''’

(Try to ignore the weird state of the polish on my tips – I thought painting a swatch of white on just my nail tips was a good idea. I know. But this was awhile ago.)

So there she is, in all her glory. I don’t want to repeat my first post on these too much, so I’ll just say that they applied beautifully, and they are so pigmented that two coats has been, without exception, perfect.

Again, you can buy these from lucky scent who does have international shipping (but, whoa, is it pricey), or Bergdorf Goodman, who only ships to the US and Canada, though there is a phone number you can call and, apparently, have something shipped outside of those borders.

I’d hoped to end with The Doors’ People Are Strange, but apparently they’re not allowing that on the web. So instead here is one of my favorite scenes with Peter Sellers and Keenan Wynn from Dr. Strangelove:

Enjoy!