Happy holiday-of-choice, all! This large pink woman may or may not be blogging much over the break since a temporary divorce from any and all computer screens is totally in order. Be good to each other!
As the weeks have been winding down to Christmas and slowly but surely my chance to spend two weeks wearing a maxi dress/a selection of old t-shirts with leggings, not doing anything with my hair, and generally slouching it up, you can understand a girl needs some sparkle to keep the motivation up.
Sparkle I have in abundance, especially enhanced by the purchase of OPI Gold Shatter – where my wonderful local Unichem failed I turned to Kirkcaldie’s, who may sell stupid stockings but won’t usually set you wrong on the path to Serious Brand Name Products.
The first look was really accidentally Christmassy, and set off this whole thing. I wanted to try out the third of my Unichem-on-special trio, Chicago Champagne Toast, and I wanted to try my gold shatter. And fortunately these things combined in a way that was pleasing to me.
Notes on gold shatter: where black shatter is gluggy, gold is downright goopy. It applies like clotted sludgy grossness, as the second pic kinda shows and that makes it a lot harder to deal with than black shatter – probably not a shatter shade for the newbie.
It’s also got a serious glitter to it, which – at least in this colour combo – made the crisp shatter-y effect less striking. But if you want to glam the hell out of your nails, this is the polish for you.
And, as I realised once it all fully dried, the whole shebang reminded me of nothing so much as an 80s Hallmark card, all rose and gilt and anatomically-impossible rosy-cheeked babies. Which … works. It certainly didn’t scream “Christmas” and I got no comments as I had with my bright-pink-yet-somehow-Christmassy watermelon colour scheme, but it combined subdued elegance with OMG SPARKLES and definitely brightened up my day.
I’m not, however, a woman to do things by halves. Like an episode of Mythbusters, once I establish a principle is sound I ramp it up until there are fireballs. Or we hit the other end of the 80s style spectrum. The amazing end.
I’m calling this my Flash Gordon scheme.
(Incidentally, best movie ever.)
So, the look: it’s two coats of I’m Not Really A Waitress under one of gold shatter. It’s a little bit lava, a little bit Christmas-on-crack, it’s wonderfully over-the-top.
A further gold shatter note: it’s probably something to do with my brushing technique, but I did find the coverage sometimes faded at the top of the nail.
Given how goopy gold shatter is I think loading the brush up until you’re not sure it’ll get out of the bottle may be the way to go to get your full gold hit. Tragically for me, this may require further experimentation.
It certainly also doesn’t crack as delicately or finely as the black, so really the take-away is something like “Gold shatter: for letting the world know your style is unsubtle and quick to anger.”
Did I mention Flash Gordon is the best movie ever? Someone should encourage me to do a post on how Princess Aura and Dale Arden are brilliant style icons, especially for the hyper-femme glitter-focused among us.
Of course, after a harrowing two weeks straight with the same basic undercoat-and-shatter look, with one final working week to get through before holiday relaxation could commence … it was time to bring out the big guns.
The big, Muppet-y guns.
And you’d better believe this look got some Christmas comments.
I’d already done a Waitress-based look for the Flash Gordon bestmovieever style above, so went with Meep Meep Meep for the base colour. Besides, the aim here was for maximum sparkle.
Not that you can really see MMM’s subtle orange shimmer under two coats of Rainbow Connection.
It’s … an interesting polish. Completely clear, huge amounts of glitter in all shapes and sizes, but it sure doesn’t apply the way you’d imagine from looking at the bottle. The glitter disperses itself far and wide, and there’s the gold shatter issue of not really getting a lot of colour at the end of a nail-long brushstroke.
Once I got used to it, I liked it, but still ended up with two coats and dabbing the glitter on rather than brushing, plus a topcoat layer to smooth the edges where the big chunks of glitter were poking out from their medium.
Rainbow Connection is definitely not recommended if you’re wanting even application or a consistent look across all your nails. I suppose you could be really pedantic about it, but at that point I’d suggest getting a naturally-glittery colour like Excuse Moi or just sprinkling $2 Shop glitter over a clear basecoat.
Needless to say: all three of these were hell to take off, and Rainbow Connection was the worst.
Now I’m sitting here with naked nails pondering what to do for Christmas proper. And I just received an Avon delivery …
I’m not really a New Year’s Resolutions kind of person in the first instance – I connect a lot of the pressure around them to the Fantasy of Being Thin – as in, you’re meant to commit to some kind of huge life-changing new behaviour which will magically make you a whole new awesome perfect person – despite the fact that humans are pretty crap at changing the big things that make them them, and that even if you do lose the weight, quit smoking, stop drinking, join a gym, etc etc, you’ll still be you, with your past and your habits and your personality.
