Jessica Black Ice

Good afternoon, Dear Reader!

I finally got around to doing my nails, and though I'd show you my Nails of the Day, which is Jessica Black Ice.  Black Ice is a black jelly with fine silver glitter, and it took four coats to be totally opaque and even.  However, the dry time seems to be good, and the up side is that the glitter is very dense and shows well.  I thought this was just another black with silver glitter, which I'm always drawn to, but it's one of the nicer ones I have.

Jessica Black Ice Nail Polish, Four Coats

That's all for today, Dear Reader.  Until next time, love and nail polish to you!  

Jessica Black Ice

Good afternoon, Dear Reader!

I finally got around to doing my nails, and though I'd show you my Nails of the Day, which is Jessica Black Ice.  Black Ice is a black jelly with fine silver glitter, and it took four coats to be totally opaque and even.  However, the dry time seems to be good, and the up side is that the glitter is very dense and shows well.  I thought this was just another black with silver glitter, which I'm always drawn to, but it's one of the nicer ones I have.

Jessica Black Ice Nail Polish, Four Coats

That's all for today, Dear Reader.  Until next time, love and nail polish to you!  

Jessica Mojo Rising

Good morning, Dear Reader!

I found the polish for today's Nails of the Day, Jessica's Mojo Rising, while doing a bit of housework a little while ago.  It's a pastel blue jelly with multicolored pastel glitter in it.  I used three coats and finished it with Jessica Brilliance top coat.

Jessica Cosmetics Mojo Rising Nail Polish, Three Coats

That just about all I have to tell you.  Until next time, Dear Reader, love and nail polish to you!  

Jessica Mojo Rising

Good morning, Dear Reader!

I found the polish for today's Nails of the Day, Jessica's Mojo Rising, while doing a bit of housework a little while ago.  It's a pastel blue jelly with multicolored pastel glitter in it.  I used three coats and finished it with Jessica Brilliance top coat.

Jessica Cosmetics Mojo Rising Nail Polish, Three Coats

That just about all I have to tell you.  Until next time, Dear Reader, love and nail polish to you!  

The polish that started it all

So here it is, the polish that started it all for me.

This is Jessica's Palladium.  I bought a bottle of this years ago from Priceline, it was just a fluke acquisition, cause I had never seen Jessica polishes there before and I have never seen them there again.

It is the most sparkly champagne gold colour.  It is so pretty and it matches my jewellery perfectly.  I LOVE IT.

Eventually my bottle ran out, and I don't think I have ever run out of a polish before.  So I started trying to find a replacement.  I finally found some online, and it was this tiny 7ml bottle and it cost be about 12 pounds to buy and post to Australia.  But I'm so happy to have a little bit of it again.  I have heaps of colours similar to this, but have never found a dupe.  Has anyone seen any Jessica polishes for sale here is Australia recently?

Oh, and because of all my online searching for this polish, I found some awesome blogs showing even more awesome swatches of polishes available overseas and the rest they say is history.

Jessica Botanicals Collection & RBL 50% Off Sale!

Good evening, Dear Reader!

Tonight I have the Jessica Botanicals Collection for you, which I bought based on Scrangie's review of them, as well as the fact that Jessica's Fall Goddess Collection really wowed me. Scrangie's pictures are, as always, spot-on, and as I went through mine I was more impressed with the colors than I was swatching them. It might just be the fact that I was swatching these on the heels of wearing really glowy nail polish that made them just as have the "umph!" that I'd been anticipating all these weeks that I've waited to get them. I'll have to give them another try, because even going through my pictures I see some winners.

They applied well, and all required three coats to be opaque and even. I found that presenting them in alphabetical order starts and ends with some of teh stronger colors, so I'll go with that.

First up is Butterfly Kisses, which is a very sparkly light blue.

Next in line is Birds of Paradise, which is definitely a solid purple shimmer nail polish.

Here's where things started getting weaker. Color Me Calla Lily is the only creme in this collection, a somewhat violet pink. Huh.

We move on to Coral Reef Daisies, which, being a frosty coral pink nail polish, reminds me of the early 1980's...

This is the one about which I was most excited, as well as the most let down: Loving the Lilacs. I expected a sparkly lilac, but got a somewhat muted and not-so-sparkly one.

We end a little stronger with Rosy Romance, which is a girly pink shimmer nail polish.

That's Jessica Cosmetics' Botanicals Collection for you.

To end on a happier note, I got an email from Rescue Beauty Lounge. Here's the part you probably care about:

"Tomorrow 12-2PM Lunch time First Ever and Maybe the Last Rescue Beauty Lounge Nail Polish Sale 50% off BUT MUST have at least one body product in (What's fair is fair...) There will be no e-mail blast please post your blogs and share with your readers.

Coupon Code Mea Culpa"

RBL is in New York, so I'm assuming Eastern time for this. Have at it!

Until tomorrow, Dear Reader, love and nail polish to you!

OPI Breathe Life

Good morning, Dear Reader!

I've just finished swatching the rest of Colorcopia 2009 for you, but it'll take me a century to select and add text to the pictures, then look up and verify all the original color releases and dates, so I thought I'd keep it simple for now and show you OPI's lung cancer awareness nail polish, Breathe Life.

First off, I looked at the site for the Lung Cancer Foundation of America to get facts about this color, and they're not too available. There's a lot of advertising, and it tells me that OPI "made a generous cash donation" to the LCFA, but I cannot find any information telling me whether some percentage of sales of this nail polish go to cancer research, and that bugs me. I inferred that was the case, but since I can't find anything to verify that, I question my assumption.

For reference, here's the promo flyer for the nail polish.

It was the "Let's Cure It" that seemed to me to imply that OPI was working directly with a cancer research charity with at least some percentage of the proceeds of this nail polish. If you, Dear Reader, have details about precisely how this works, please email me or leave a comment and I'll modify this post to include the new information.

Anyhow, I had been a holdout on this color, which became available on April 1, for a couple of reasons. First, it's quite sheer, and on it's own wouldn't be too attractive against my pale skin. Second, I've smoked for 23 years, and although I've tried to quit a few times, it's the staying quit that eludes me, and so I prefer to not think about lung cancer too much. One of my aunts died from smoking-related emphysema and eventually lung cancer, so I'm 100% clear on what that looks like. Since I have proved to simply be incapable of staying quit for now, I have a hard time mulling over the gruesome details. But I finally cracked on this color, thinking the proceeds went to research, and used it over white to address the sheerness.

I'm taking a cue from The Polish Addict here and showing you my mani failure from last night rather than just keeping it to myself. She's inspiringly brave about showing less-than-perfect pictures! My idea for dealing with just how sheer Breathe Life is was to put it over a white, so after swatching last night, I put two coats over two coats or Orly White Out. Unfortunately, I messed up my ring finger, but I'll show you the pics anyhow. The failure, to me, is in that the white that I used was way too stark. I don't have a picture of Orly White Out alone, but trust me that it's well-named.

I decided to get a do-over on OPI Breathe Life this morning, and used it over a sheerer white nail polish. Right now, I have the ultimate torso-cancer-awareness mani, as the white nail polish I used this time is one of Jessica Cosmetics 2008 BCA colors (which clearly stated that 65% of sales went to cancer research), Hope, which is the whitest of them. Here's Hope alone, two coats.

It's a much softer foundation, and two coats of OPI Breathe Life are much better over it than over Orly White Out.

I'm really pleased with the pearly outcome of the do-over version. It's what I had in my head when I overdid the foundation last night - I guess my pathological fear of VNL got the best of me!

One quick note on the messed up ring finger from last night - it was because I was sloppy applying Nubar Diamont to wet polish. I've had a few emails about troubles with applying Diamont to wet polish, and as you've seen from pics, I generally have great results with it allowing literally zero wait time between polishing the tenth nail and applying Diamont to the first. The way I normally use it is to get a big drop and quickly and lightly spread it over the nail, sort of "floating" it over the colored nail polish. I was tired of doing my nails after all those swatches yesterday, and got lazy with the Diamont and made it drag the colored nail polish underneath while applying it, causing the wrinkle in it. I just didn't have enough on the brush, but didn't care enough to re-dip. I go through a lot of Diamont using this method, but it gives great results, and the big refill bottles are no more expensive per 0.5 oz refill that Seche Vite, so I'm sticking with it. Just thought I'd mention that here, since I have an example picture of the error, as well as the way to avoid such error.

That's what I have for you for now, Dear Reader. I'll have the rest of OPI Colorcopia 2009 for you in a little bit. Until then, love and nail polish to you!

Jessica Jessana Mischievous

Good morning, Dear Reader!

I have something different for you today, a Jessica nail polish from their Jessana line.  To be honest, I don't really know what the difference is between their regular Jessica colors and the Jessana ones is, other than that the Jessanas come in a 0.25 oz (half sized) bottle and cost a little less.  I only have a few, and I don't think I've shown you one before.

I checked the label of it for any of the Big 3 chemicals I'm avoiding while testing the new Big 3 Free nail strengthener, and didn't see any on it.  Don't quote me on that though, because I'm open to being corrected - I'm no chemist, and just because toluene, formaldehyde, and phthalates are not explicitly listed doesn't mean I'm not missing something reading the label.  I thought my read was good enough to go ahead and use it though.

The color is really rich - it's a blackened red with a strong sparkly red shimmer.  The shimmer is strong enough to show up in regular light, so the polish does not look black on the nail.  The only down side was that after three coats, I can still see through it on a few nails.  I've been getting spoiled by using polishes that are opaque in two coats lately!  The finished manicure is nice though, and I like it.

 

 

That's my mani for today, Dear Reader.  I was about to wrap up, but then I just remembered something...

I also had a request for you, something I forgot to ask yesterday.  A reader let me know that there had been some difficulty with the new comments feature, where a comment just disappeared.  If you've had any problems with it, please let me know and I'll see what I can do.  For the most part, it seems to be working well.  The reader who contacted me and I tested a few things, and we managed to establish that it's working properly now, but the question of the comment that disappeared prompted me to ask you if you've had problems too.  Just email me if you have, and we can hammer out any details that still need to be fixed.

That's really all for today, Dear Reader.  Until next time, love and nail polish to you!

Mom's Recipe Box & More

Good morning again, Dear Reader!

I've just finished today's Konadicure of the Day, which was prompted by a comment tarotbydiana recently left.  It's one I've done before, but not for some time, and is inspired by the little box my mom used to keep index cards with recipes on them.

For reference, my mom left the convent in 1968, and after wearing only black and white for 18 years, she went a little over the top with colors and patterns once she was on her own.  She still made her own clothes as she did in the convent, but with the loud, wacky patterns of the time.  She married my dad in 1969, had my sister in '70 and me in '71 - quite a lot of change in five years, from a nun teaching high school to the stay at home mom of two!  She made our clothes too, and you should see how loud some of them were!  We won't even get into her wallpaper selections in the early seventies...

The only remnant we had of that phase was her recipe box, which was bright yellow with red-orange sixties floral stickers all over it.  Unfortunately, my father was a bit zealous in his efforts to clear things out of the house after she died, and it was thrown away.  However, I learned to cook with her as a kid using that little metal box of index cards, so it is burned into my memory, and I don't need to have it in front of me to do a Konadicure that is clearly inspired by it.  That's what I did this morning.

I started with a base of Jessica's Going to Disneyland.  I had high hopes that this would finally be the yellow that would be opaque and even in two coats, but alas, it took three.  Here's the yellow on its own.

 

 

From there, I selected the floral pattern form Konad plate M64, and chose the pink shimmer Konad polish for stamping.  I know from experience that stamping pink over an opaque bright yellow would have a tinge of orange to it, and it did.  The end result is just as I wanted it to be, and looks just like that recipe box!

 

 

While I was up watermarking and cropping these photos, I thought I'd edit some others I've taken recently.  As you may have noticed, my insomnia has been rampant this week, and there's little to do other than play with Konad or Nfu-Ohs in the middle of the night here, so that's what I've done.

Here's a the Nfu-Oh I haven't shown you yet, #41 over Precision Wait a Melon for Me.  I showed you the base color on its own earlier this week, and here it is layered with Nfu-Oh #41.

 

 

It's subtle, but I like it quite a bit.

I also have two Konadicures you haven't seen yet, so I'll show those to you this morning as well.  Both of them took advantage of patterns that I really like, but have not been able to use in recent months until now.

The first has a base of Sally Hansen Salon Hearts on Fire.  This is three coats, as it's slightly jelly in its finish and took a third coat to be completely opaque.

 

 

To this one I added the diagonal pattern from plate M65 using white Konad polish.

 

The last one I have for you is the one I recently wore to my uncle's funeral.  I wore a charcoal grey Aran sweater, and this went with it very nicely.  I started with a base of two coats of SpaRitual Surreal, which I've shown to you at least once before, so I didn't take pictures of it on its own.  To it I added the houndstooth pattern from Konad plate M63 using a purple/grey Konad shimmer polish.  I like the Konad polish quite a bit, but unfortunately I don't recall what color it is, and it's not marked on the bottle.  Here's the result.

 

That, Dear Reader, catches you up on all of my shorty pictures.  I still have a few in the vault with long nails, but we'll save those for another day.

On a side note, I did hear from the winner of the Black Tie Optional for which I drew a name on Friday, so it will be going to live with her.  The winner was Sunny from the USA.  Congrats to Sunny!  Even better news for those of you who did not win is that I have another hard-to-find color to give away this week, and I'll be creating the entry form for that soon.

That's all for today, Dear Reader.  Until tomorrow, love and nail polish to you!

Today's KOTD: Jessica Windsor Castle

Good evening, Dear Reader!

I finished my mani much earlier in the day today, and was really happy with the outcome. I have lots of other things planned for this week, and I thought it was worth a post all by itself.

The base color is Jessica's Windsor Castle, which I ran into this morning while unpacking. I was struck by what a perfect purple creme it is and set it aside to use today. When I applied it, it went on beautifully and was opaque and perfectly even in two coats. When I looked at the finished Windsor Castle mani, I decided the only thing that could improve it would be a touch of silver.

I went through my Konad plates to find a pattern, and decided to use one from plate S6 that I've wanted to use for some time, but which is both too short and narrow for my nails. My solution? To use it sideways on just my tips. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out!

That's today's Konadicure of the Day, Dear Reader. Until tomorrow, love and nail polish to you!

Jessica Empowered Collection for BCA

Hello again, Dear Reader!

I told you I had some swatching to do for you, and I've that I have done. What I chose for today, the beginning of the last week of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, is the Jessica Cosmetics Empowered Collection. It seems like the ultimate BCA collection to me because 65% of all purchases of these colors made through December 31st will be donated to the American Institute for Cancer Research - that's a generous chunk of the purchase price compared to other BCA products, so definitely spring for any you like! They're here (that's the link to the collection) on Jessica's site (that's the link to the main page).

Now you know what I've chosen and why I chose it, so now all you need to see is the polishes themselves! The fun thing about them is that they're sheers (gasp!) that even I can comfortably wear (double gasp!). The reason is that they're translucent, not totally sheer, so my nails don't look or feel naked in these colors, and with the whole white tip of the nail showing, it doesn't look or feel like an unintentional VNL. They applied beautifully - with many translucent polishes, I've had problems with evenness of color, but that wasn't an issue with any of these. All are two coats over a base coat, photographed in artificial light, and here they are!

Bravery is a Band-Aid But Better shade, but since it's not opaque, the BABB effect isn't strong. It's a good bare neutral nude shade.

Courage is a pink with a slight hint of beige to it, but is more clearly pink on the nail.

Hope is tied with the next one coming up (Endure) for my favorite. In the bottle, Hope is totally white, and on the nail looks very clean and sophisticated.

Endure is the my other favorite from this collection. It's a classic baby pink, and is extremely feminine and just plain pretty on the nail.

Breathe is a pinky apricot colored sheer, and its effect is very subtle. This is another great nude shade.

Finally, we have Faith, which is barely pink (almost a cross between Hope and Endure). This is another I really liked a lot, because like Hope, it looks very clean and classic on the nail.

So this, Dear Reader, is Jessica's Empowered Collection. Again, the majority (65%) of the price of these goes to cancer research, so if there are any that appeal to you, or if you'd just like to try out Jessica Nail Colours (which I strongly recommend), please give these a try to help out a good cause.

That's all for today, Dear Reader. Love and nail polish to you!