Just checkin'

...in. Yeah, let's have some re-instas, while we're waiting for the final results of the Swedish elections.

Smitten Polish A Wedding Dress That Isn't Bright Turquoise

OPI Black Spotted over Int'l Crime Caper

CND Vinylux Steel Gaze

Essence Blue Cara Ciao

H&M Jungle Me


And speaking of H&M, I don't know about you, but the new 5 ml bottle pisses me off. Yes, they lowered the price, but not as much as they lowered the contents. Pfft! Don't piss off lacquerheads, we're proud people.

Int'l Women's Day reinsta statement nails

Guess what... Since I'm lazy, I'm starting a new series of instagram reposts, so that all of you get a chance to see all the grainy iphone camera pics of what I've been wearing lately. Well, over the course of the last three or so months, as it turns out.

 I still have about 8 minutes, Central European time, to show you some decent feminist statement manicures during one of the most important days of the year - International Women's Day. Check it out.

Feminist warrior manicure with camouflage, leopard spots, and of course the Venus sign.

Olympic games versus Pride, french skittles.

Feminist fire!

Red and white camouflage, leopard spots (yes, again), and V.

And the manicure I actually wore today (and still am wearing): pink and red with red and coral leopard spots, and some neon studs.

Hope you're celebrating accordingly!

OPI Muppets Most Wanted quickie

Time for another new collection, and it's the annual soft shades collection from OPI, called Muppets Most Wanted. The last couple of years, the soft shades collection haven't been as soft as they used to be, and this year is no exception.

Eight shades, of which three are classic soft shades, two are more or less duochrome definite not-softs, and three topping glitters:

Clockwise from top left: Miss Piggy's Big number (blue metallic with the tiniest shift), I Love Applause (pastel pink creme), Int'l Crime Caper (sheer white with pink flash and light blue flecks), Chillin' Like A Villain (peach pastel creme), Gaining Mole-mentum (pink and gold glitter shards), Let's Do Anything We Want! (white and pink glitters with small and large white square glitter), Muppets World Tour (white and gold glitter, silver micro glitter, with larger magenta, blue and champagne pink hex glitters), Kermit Me To Speak (purple to golden green duochrome shimmer).

Believe it or not, the first one to get tried out was Int'l Crime Caper, because it's interesting enough for a sheer. Below is three coats:

It's a shitty photo, but imagine the pink flash stronger, and the blue flecks a little more vivid and reflective. There's still visible nail line enough to scare those of you who dread it, for which I'd suggest some undies. I'd say this is the nicest conservative sheer I have, so don't miss out on it if you're into that kind of thing.

Quick note on the duochrome Kermit Me To Speak: personally I own more than a handful of polishes with this pigment, from OPI's very own catalogue Amethyst Abyss comes to mind, so if you have that (chances getting smaller for each day since it's ooold), or perhaps Nubar Purple Beach, maybe your need for this one isn't as huge as you'd first think. Though, perhaps Kermit Me To Speak is a tad less green and run more between purple and gold, predominantly. If you'd like a comparison, let me know and I could probably manage.

Love letters to dead writers

Here's a real indie gem for you - Scofflaw Nail Varnish in the limited edition Love Letter to Kurt Vonnegut.

These photos are from early summer, and my did I have fabulous nails back then - surely base coated with a sturdy gel manicure. But this polish... Photos don't do it justice, since it's a muted periwinkle blue sorta color that never ends up right on my photos, and added are black and blue glitters and gold speckles, along with blue shimmer. Totally gorgeous.

At the moment, the Etsy shop is sold out, but you should definitely keep Scofflaw on your radar at all times, since this is a very inventive indie brand. Someone who's created a polish like the above definitely deserves the epithet genius.

Re-insta OPI

Let's have yet another bulk of manicures that only ended up on instagram... This time all OPI.

OPI All I Want For Christmas (is OPI), with black and OPI All Sparkly and Gold leopard spots (there were some on the thumbs as well). Both OPI shades from the Mariah Carey holiday collection.

More leopard spots: OPI In the Cable Car-Pool Lane with OPI Goldeneye, black, and own mix of coral pink spots.

OPI Oy - Another Polish Joke! with OPI Black Spotted.

OPI Oy - Another Polish Joke! on its own.

Strawberry meringue water marble as requested by the boyfriend. ("Can you please pick my nail color?" -"Do those meringues with pink strokes in 'em." -*...*) The marbling was hell and I'll never do it again. Colors used  were OPI My Vampire is Buff, I Theodora You and Don't Touch My Tutu!.

Sorta skittles with dotted details, with OPI colors Goldeneye, Suzi's Hungary Again! and OPI... Eurso Euro.

And the well known sh*it disaster OPI It's All San Andreas's Fault. But actually it's way better looking when it's completely dry and not on photo. I think I wore it for three days!


Stay tuned for more of my terrible insta photos!

My very secret eden

I'm sure you wish you knew what it is, but I won't tell - except this actual polish sorta was one, back when I wore it several months ago (!). Huge lemming for a long time, finally made available for overseas purchase, this is Our Secret Eden from Le Chat Dare to Wear.

Very difficult to photograph, but this is a blue jelly with pink shimmer. Actually, it's perfect. And that is all.

Persephone's pomegranate

It's been a while since I last had a pomegranate, but one whose consumption of said fruit is notorious, is Persephone. Here interpreted by Darling Diva Polish.

The base is actually slightly pomegranate colored, but since I wasn't in the mood for building the polish on its own, I layered it over a medium red, which is a bit obvious if one examines the area close to the cuticles in these photos. However, it was a wicked combination, with the aqua blue to violet pink duochrome on top.

This shade is still available in the Darling Diva Etsy shop, go check it out.

Enjoy the silence

The silence has been so long, that I'm just going to leave this post here to announce that I'm still alive.

It's one of those posts where I'll just puke out a series of photos that didn't get their own posts, mostly due to lack of decent photos - sometimes only one good comes out of an entire session.

Hare Polish Ancient Affairs.

Polish Revolution Coffeeshop Politics over Kiko 336.

Orly Elation Generation - yes, that is actually holographic glitter.

Darling Diva Polish Pendragon over OPI Here Today... Aragon Tomorrow Suede. Pendragon is in turn mattified with such a topcoat.

Smitten Polish Pink Goes Good With Green!

Essence Princessorize.

Gina Tricot Python Green.

Hope you enjoyed. Promise to be back with somewhat decent posts soon-ish - I have plenty of material!

Swedish word of the day:
tystnad -noun silence
Lots of it lately.

High on pretty Hope

Let's have one of the classic brands, shall we? There were a few from Orly's spring collection Hope and Freedom Fest that looked intriguing, and after seeing swatches I ultimately decided I needed only one of them, and that was High on Hope.

I wish I had gotten better photos of it, because this is a real beauty. This is three coats of this midnight blue filled with multichrome pink to gold and every shade in between foil sorta shimmer particles. How is that not a winning concept? You're right, this is win in its purest form.

Needless to say, I loved this shade. I wore it for several days, which is very generous for being me. If you still haven't snatched it, you should.

This product was purchased with own funds.

Swedish word of the day:
hopp -noun I hope II jump
Swedish is fun like that.

Awe of the Moon

I'm sure most of you have heard about Rainbow Honey polishes by now, and perhaps even tried one or two. But for me, this is the first. Full of night sky, this is Mare of the Moon.

Two effortless coats of Mare of the Moon over an existing dark blue manicure (saved for a later day). Blue base with blue to pink duochrome shimmer, two sizes of holographic hexagon glitters - and moons! Moons... Moooooons.

Personally I'm sometimes hesitant towards shaped glitter, but I love moons. And this is a perfect night sky, or perhaps dusky sky, with the little purple-pink haze left there by the last few sunbeams crossing the horizon. The hex glitters are sparse enough for my liking - after all, I live near the capital of Sweden, and rather close to its international airport, so my idea of a night sky is one heavily diluted by light pollution.



Today also marks the grand opening for Sweden's own webshop for independent and otherwise slightly unobtainable polishes, and it's called Edgy Polish. It's run by a nice lady called Katarina, and she also kindly provided me with the above polish for review. Edgy Polish stocks a wide range of brands, such as my favourites Darling Diva Polish and A-England, along with Glitter Gal, Pahlish, Smitten Polish, and much much more. During the entire weekend they offer 10 % off all purchases, and yes, they do ship internationally. Domestic orders over 350 SEK ship for free!

This product was sent for review.

Swedish word of the day:
mardröm -noun mare
Way too recurrent.

Norway on a cloudy day

Some polishes are just better in theory. Or at least not properly executed ideas. One of H&M's newer colors, Norwegian Sky, surely is one of them.

Three, viciously painful coats. In fact, this polish was painful in so many aspects. Application, cleanup, and then as a photographic object. And then there was the removal process... Terrible. The thick, messy base covers pretty much all of the gorgeous shimmer, which you'll be able to see no sooner than while doing the infuriating cleanup, or when you finally want to take it off and all that hidden, gorgeous, duochrome shimmer sticks to your nail despite endless acetone and cotton friction cleaning. Had the shimmer been visible in these photos, you would have seen the blue direct angle shift, and the pink that is barely there in the extreme angle second picture. Can you see it?!

While the base is very pigmented and covers the shimmer all too well, it's indredibly chalky and streaky and ...gahh. When I applied the third layer, I thinned my bottle contents a bit (a "bit" being something like 15 drops of thinner), to see if the shimmer could surface more if I was able to apply the product more thinly. While it actually did, it sorta gets lost on top of the base color being so close in tone. Well, since I had worked so damn hard to get the polish on, I actually kept it for at least a couple of days. By the second day I was still not friends with my experience, so I topped it all off with Essie As Gold as it Gets, which certainly buried Norwegian Sky's own shimmer for good. It actually looked kind of nice, but guess what? I couldn't get a decent photo of that either. Now I want to kill this polish.

But most of all, I just want someone to execute this idea a million times better than this. It has got to be possible, don't you think?

Well, let me show you the best photo from this shoot, in my own opinion:

The Stöj - always where it happens. Hi readers!

Nothing gets my writing skills going like a healthy dose of anger and frustration.

This product was purchased with own funds.

Swedish name of the day:
Norge Norway
Certainly deserves better than this.

OPI The Bond Girls - bottles and quick swatches

By now we're all familiar with the gritty Liquid Sand finish which supposedly is the big thing this year. From OPI, we've already got four in the Mariah Carey collection, and one in the Oz the Great and Powerful soft shades collection, and to fully exhaust the concept, we're given six new shades for summer, called The Bond Girls collection.

Clockwise from bottom left: Solitaire, Pussy Galore, and Tiffany Case.

Clockwise from top left: Jinx, Vesper, and Honey Ryder.

Pussy Galore, pink with pink glitters; Solitaire, white with silver glitters; and Tiffany Case, blue with silver glitters.

Vesper, vampy plum with black and purple glitters; Honey Ryder, gold with gold ans silver glitters; and last Jinx, coral with gold glitters.


I wasn't expecting much from an entire collection of Liquid Sand polishes, but these are actually way better than the promotional images would make one believe. Perhaps the selecion of colors isn't the most brave, which is always sort of expected from OPI, but they are fairly well executed. Pussy Galore and Tiffany Case doesn't strike me as particularily interesting, but at least Pussy Galore is a baby pink with a little more attitude than we're used to. Honey Ryder doesn't make me tingle either, but it's a gold, and will solely for that reason be welcomed by many.

Jinx is actually very nice, although I can't really see myself wearing it. My photos don't make the glitzyness of it look anywhere near reality. The shades I'm certain I will be wearing at one point or another, is Solitaire, and of course Vesper. Solitaire is crisp in several senses, and as long as it doesn't catch a lot of dirt, which will inevitably show, it will look like your nails are covered in snow. Vesper is the outstanding one in my personal opinion. She doesn't look like much in the bottle, only very dark, but once dried, all the different aspects show up. Considering that my previous favourite among the Liquid Sands were the lava-like Stay the Night, I dare say the vampy ones are OPI's forte in this genre.

The formulas vary a bit in thickness, possibly due to pigments used. Vesper was the most thin, but I'll forgive her that. All swatches above are three coats, but some only need two.

As the names are once again, just like those of the Skyfall collection, classic Bond names, I have no problem with them. I sincerely hope OPI will back off the terrible sense of humor and pick some more less inventive names in the future.

The Bond Girls will be available in Swedish stores in May, so US girls may be able to find them in April already.

Will you be picking any of these up, or are you tired of the sandy finish?

These products were sent for review.

Swedish word of the day:
Bondbrud -noun Bond girl [litterally: Bond bride]
That's what we call them.

Dotting Centrale

I suddenly felt the urge to bring out my dotting tools and dot away some. Close at hand I had the larger bulk of OPI's Euro Centrale collection, and regardless of how one may feel about the shades isolated, they really go well together.

Perhaps not the steadiest of executions, but I tend to feel more than I think while dotting. The base is of course Can't Find My Czechbook, and blue dots in Eurso Euro, pink ones in Suzi is Hungary Again!, finished off with Oy - Another Polish Joke!.

And be warned, for I have more dotticures prepared for ya!

All products were sent for review.

Swedish name of the day:
Ungern -noun Hungary
More Eastern Europe than Central, actually.

A New Year Sky in March

There may be only one Starry Starry Night, but there are many like it. When cruising the mall for random nail polishes, this one was found. Kicks, Nothern Europe's own equivalent to Sally Beauty or something like that, has their own line of cosmetic with, among other things, an assortment of seasonally appropriate nail polish minis. This one was one of the holiday specials, and it's called New Year Sky. Oh, and have you missed my typical sideshots?!

Three coats of dark blue jelly with silver shimmer and glitter. One of the nicer substitutes for the coveted and oh so hard to find Essie classic.

I went on to make what I'd think of as a mistake.

I added Lights of Emerald City from OPI's upcoming soft shades collection Oz - the Great and Powerful. It was way too much, but seemed to work quite well as what we like to call muggle bait.

Me and my friend snatched the remaining two bottles at my local Kicks, but if you're in Sweden, Finland or Norway and have one close to you, maybe you'll get lucky!

New Year Sky was purchased with own funds.

Lights of Emerald City was sent for review.

Swedish word of the day:
stjärnhimmel -noun starry sky
Not only on New Year.