Halloween Leftover: Ulta Glow Get a Treat OPI Mini Set

Halloween is over, but I picked up this little mini set at Ulta for a whopping $2.99. It has three polishes, a white glow-in-the-dark, a light blue glow-in-the-dark and an orange creme. I have always wanted Boo-Berry, the blue one, so I snagged this set. Now I don't have to pay eBay prices! An added bonus to this pack: these two glow-in-the-dark polishes are by FAR the brightest I have tried, including Sally Beauty, other OPIS, Wet n' Wild, and China Glaze.


OPI Ghostess With the Mostess, the white GITD:


OPI Boo-Berry, the blue GITD, is very sheer but I LOVE the color:


OPI Pumped Up Pumpkin is darker orange creme than the Tattoo Ta-Boo orange, and I like it better.

Color Club Dark Romance Matte Collection

Frankly I hate these. There are three polishes in this set of mini bottles, a black, a white, and a silver shimmer, and you are also given a matte topcoat. The black and white are not really matte, they are kinda just dullish, like old car paint. They never get totally matte. The matte topcoat produces much the same effect, a kind of half shiny half dull look. In my opinion the silver is the only one worth anything, it's kind of neat. But using say, Essie's matte topcoat over a silver polish will do the same thing. But I don't know of any silvers quite the same as this one, though I am sure one exists. The set is so cheap it may be worth it just for the silver if you like it.


Color Club Dark Romance Matte


Color Club Alabaster Matte


Color Club Smoke and Mirrors Matte

Color Club Master of Disguise Halloween Themed Mini Nail Polish Set

You know I'm behind minis all the way, especially for Polish Monkeys with tons of polish. There's always a new polish being released somewhere, so why not try a bunch of them as inexpensively as possible? Especially when dealing with themed polishes, such as Halloween sets. I like this set just fine. Only $5.95 at Victoria Nail Supply, that's cheaper than one bottle of OPI bought in a brick and mortar store.

This set gives your obligatory white and black, but the orange is so much more fun than the creme oranges, and they add in a great blue shimmer.


Color Club Master of Disguise, your standard glossy black. Formula just fine.


Color Club Ghost of Chance. Hmm is this Chance's Ghost, or did they leave out the "a"? Anyway this one was gluey and hard to deal with.


Color Club Abracadabra is a great orange jelly with big ol' gold glitter, so much funner than a creme! So much more holiday oriented! Love this one!


Color Club TaBoo! is very much like OPI Ink, which I featured today, except it is lighter and much more cobalt than Ink's navy blue. It has the same great deep purple shimmer, again, like Ink, my camera was unable to capture it. A great alternative polish to throw in this set, and very lovely.


The funny thing about this set is it lists the four colors as TaBoo! Abracadabra, Ghost of Chance and "Witchy Woman" not Master of Disguise. I am ASSuming it's just a mistake, and perhaps they decided not to name the black Witchy Woman, but Master of Disguise.

China Glaze Spellbound Halloween Set and Fortune Teller!!

It's China Glaze, I don't THINK I need to tell you this stuff is incredibly cool and fun. But I will anyway. It's incredibly cool and fun.

The Spellbound set (I bought mine at Head2Toe Beauty and got them almost instantly, 4 piece set $8.97 or $2.99 each) has four polishes. White Out, which I didn't buy, I am ASSuming is a glossy white cream, and perfectly nice. The other three are:

China Glaze Liquid Leather, which I blogged about during China Glaze for days, which is a great, easy to apply black jelly that shines like patent leather:


China Glaze Ghoulish Glow is a slightly milky, slightly yellow clear topcoat. I have tried three GITD topcoats so far (will post about others later, already blogged about the Wet n' Wild one here. This one applies just fine, is a bit less yellow than others, and seems to be somewhat brighter than the others, but it fades fairly quickly. Not a bad choice if you want a glow in the dark polish.


China Glaze Spellbound is large orange glitter with medium sized silver glitter in a clear base. It's... like wearing a Las Vegas showgirl on your finger. WOW. This is four coats, it dried fairly quickly.


China Glaze Fortune Teller is sold separately, and is basically Lubu Heels but with orange glitter in the black jelly instead of red glitter. So it can't help but be fantastic, right? It's so fantastic even in the bottle, as I was in line at Sally's the woman behind me admired it then went to grab her own bottle. Now that's fantastic.

OPI Tattoo Ta-Boo Halloween Nail Polish Set

It's Halloween! Let's repackage old colors and give them cheesy names! Basically that's this kit in a nutshell.


There's four mini-size polishes, white creme, black creme, orange creme and a cornflower blue jelly that glows in the dark. Unless you want this set for the Glow in the dark polish, just save your money. Or buy it online cheap - $6.11 at Transdesign. Then you can have the lil tattoo pack. Which will surely change your life.


Let's start with the only reason to buy this pack, other than you don't have these colors at all and minis would be a good idea. The glow in the dark polish is a sheer cornflower blue. This pic is 3 thick coats and no topcoat. It spreads decently and dries very quickly, like matte polish. It's thick. It glows fairly well, you can see it but nobody is going to stop you and scream "OMG YOUR NAILS ARE GLOWING!!". I like it well enough that it made this pack worth it. It's very grainy.
OPI Glow-Ink In the Dark:


On to the filler. A black creme, decent formula, no different than anyone else's glossy black really but easy to use. The SCARY name is OPI Witch Arm?:


The white is gluey, thick, full of some unnameable chunky glop, and was a real pain in the ass. I hate its guts. It's called OPI I Love Mummy:


The orange is called OPI Tattoo You Want Candy and frankly it looks summer citrus to me and not at all Fall pumpkin.


Whatever, I'd save my cash unless you are already making an order and want the glowing polish.

OPI Mattes and Some Ways to Salvage Your Money

I love OPI. It's a great brand. Not too daring though, and not too savvy about edgy trends. Their mattes for instance. If I wanted my nails to look like I painted them with flat finish house paint, well, I would do so. And get better colors, OPI. The matte collection is some apparent best selling colors they just happened to make matte. They didn't go the way of Zoya, ManGlaze, Nubar, no, they just said well, just make the finishes flat, that's what the others are doing right? And needless to say the Sephora by OPI mattes are just as bad, though better colors!

I haven't gotten the Suedes yet, I hope they came out because OPI realized their massive flub and corrected it. Good matte nail polish has DEPTH. Matte does not equal flat!

I did not buy all the colors. I did not get the matte You Don't Know Jacques, as I don't need dirt colored nails. But I got the others.

OPI Alpine Snow Matte. Not too terribly fail, a completely flat white is actually kinda cool. Also useful, as I will demonstrate.:


OPI Lincoln Park After Dark Matte. Almost black when gloss, a blackish mess matte:


Russian Navy Matte. Loses every bit of the beauty of the gloss formula. Why bother, this might as well be the LPAD matte, they are both almost black.:


Sephora by OPI Metro Chic. Great color, if not great texture.:


OPI La Paz-itively Hot Matte, the one real success. They left in the blurple shimmer and it lends depth and pizazz to this. I actually love this.:


Sephora by OPI What's a Tire Jack? besides the insulting name, this lackluster black couldn't lick the dirty bootsoles of ANY of the other black mattes out.:


OPI Gargantuan Green Grape Matte. Wow I have green housepaint on my nails.:


Sephora by OPI Domestic Goddess. Nice color.:


Okay so now is where I brought in the Alpine Snow. What if we mixed some Alpine Snow matte into the desperately useless Lincoln Park matte and Russian Navy matte? You might find the results worth it.

Twenty drops of Lincoln Park After Dark Matte to five drops Alpine Snow Matte gets us this: not a huge change but more wearable, kinda. Not one of the more fixable polishes, as it is highly pigmented. You'd need more white to make it lighter than I have it.


Four parts Russian Navy Matte to one part Alpine Snow Matte gets us this: I added a bit of glitter, to mediocre success. Sigh.


What if we use Alpine Snow Matte with another nigh on useless OPI, Here Today, Aragon Tomorrow? I like it. Once again five drops Aline Snow Matte to twenty drops of Aragon.


Eh there's my try at it.

Tyler Durden's opinion of OPI Mattes:
You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

Whew! O! a Daily OPI! Three Days Worth! And Contest Extension!

Since I was busy and didn't feel great all weekend, today I have to post three days worth of daily OPIs up! Also I will extend the goveaway til tomorrow at 4:00 pm PST.

Today's jewels:

OPI Purple-Opolis. I love this juicy purple shimmer:


Too Similar to OPI Purple-Opolis? Similar but not really the same. This is OPI's version of the fuchsia with blurple shimmer. OPI FlashBulb Fuchsia:


And now for something completely different! OPI Alpine Snow. Good time to do this because I'll be posting about the matte version in a few days.:

China Glaze for Days! - Last Day Glass Fleck Extravaganza

To celebrate the last day of China Glaze for Days, I give to you all my glass fleck polishes I have not already posted about on the blog. Enjoy!

China Glaze Fairy Godmother:


China Glaze Belle of the Ball:


China Glaze Straight Up:


China Glaze Martini Lunch:


China Glaze Martini Pedicure:


China Glaze Shaken Not Stirred:


China Glaze Tarnished and Varnished:

Diamond Cosmetics - $2 Polish and Not Bad At All!

Rebecca kindly sent me a metric fuckton of nail polish the other day, because she's kind and generous like that. She found Diamond Cosmetics, and decided she'd add some stuff for me onto her order. She also, dear Polish Monkeys, bought YOU a gift, which I will post about next.

Diamond has a pretty decent formula! It's more on the runny side, only one creme did I find thick (Oh, Tiff!). All had good coverage with two coats except the Glow in the Darks, which are very sheer. Some cremes could probably even be one coaters, if you put on a thick enough coat, but I prefer two coats in most circumstances to prevent sheer spots.

Diamond has some July Specials, which I will start with first. The first special is six "neons" plus a topcoat and a white, for $15.00. I do not as a rule use whites for base coats, as Diamond suggests, I find that rather than provide a bright base for colors, they wash them out. But that's just my opinion, you may like them very much that way. All these swatches are without white as a basecoat, but, as they are neons and many neons dry matte, I used a topcoat.

Diamond Froggy:


Diamond Beware:


Diamond Danger Zone:


Diamond White:


Diamond Safety Zone:


Diamond Hot Summer Pink, fuchsia pink neon with purple shimmer and an INSTANT all-time favorite of mine:


Diamond Wow, just the bottle and washed out at that, could NOT photograph this bright hot pink correctly, but it's very, very like Essie Punchy Pink:


The second July Special is the "Summer Special" - six red/pinks and two blues, and a topcoat for $12.00. These are two coats with no topcoat.

Diamond Oh, Tiff! - with which I will be doing a comparison against other Tiffany blues later:


Diamond Pink Passion:


Diamond Fiery Coral, which I say is red:


Diamond Don't Teal My Heart Away, a very nice dark teal creme:


This collection also contains Hot Summer Pink, already pictured, and a soft pink called Cotton Candy, which Rebecca kept. The next are not on "Special", but are only $2.00 each, and they are Glow In the Dark, so damn straight I love them. Sorry I did not test out the GITD ability it was daytime and I had a lot of swatchin' to do. :( This is four coats and topcoat. To make up for needing so many coats, they dried quickly!

Diamond Tangeglo:


Diamond Gloworm Green:


Diamond Blue Moonglo:


Diamond Pink Flaminglo:


I have some others, but I am gonna hold them back as I see "A Daily Diamond" daily polish review in the future. :D