{gifted} See My Toes Polish: Handstand & Paddle Out

I love trying any nail polish, but it’s always extra fun when you find out about local polish brands! See My Toes Polish, based in Portland, Oregon, reached out to me this year and I was immediately interested. Not just because of the Oregon connection of course, but I have been getting more in to painting my toes since the end of last year and their entire concept is fun polish for your toes! Now, any nail polish can be painted on either your finger or toe nails, but theirs was formulated specifically with toes in mind. The formula is super beginner friendly, as you will see, with creamy opaque polishes that make doing your toes an absolute breeze. They also use a paddle brush so you don’t have to struggle doing 18 brushstrokes to cover your big toe! Besides the awesome formula, their color range is definitely not just your typical “safe” neutrals and reds, they have many bold shades and several blues and greens. Truly living up to “See My Toes!” I did do today’s swatches on my finger nails because I am not quite confident enough to share pictures of my feets, but I have also worn both of these polishes on my toes. I have a fun, bright coral and deep, soft blue shade to share with you today!

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Olive & June Summer 2021: Swatch & Review

Well guys, summer has officially started. Mentally, I am not having a party but that doesn’t mean that my nails can’t! I totally fell for the marketing of Olive & June’s summer collection this year. The Lisa Frank color palette, the box you get to decorate with stickers… oh yeah, I am having as much fun as I did in the good ol’ days of being a kid. Olive & June has only featured once on the blog before because honestly, I mostly use them to paint my toes. Their polishes are designed to work without base coat and the paddle brush makes painting your tootsies super easy. But, we have seven new polishes and I cannot wait to wear several of them as manis so why not start playing with them now? I did recently become an Olive & June ambassador, but these polishes were purchases. Buckle up, you know there’s going to be a lot of pictures. I tried to keep blabbing to the minimum, but, you know, it’s me.

Kelli Marissa X Orly: Swatch & Review

Summer is about to start and I am NOT excited. Last week Southern Oregon decided to sneak in a few early 100 degree days, very thoughtful of it to remind me how much I don’t want this season to start. There have also already been some small wildfires in the area, yay. Luckily I have awesome nail polish to distract me from all of this. No matter how hot it is outside, my nails are always going to be cool 😎 I have barely talked about Orly on the blog, which is weird because they are probably one of my favorite brands. A shining example of how quality does not automatically mean expensive, I think they are very reasonably priced compared to some of the other mainstream brands. They recently collaborated with NailTuber (nail YouTuber… not sure if this is a term I’ve heard other people use or if I just made it up) Kelli Marissa. She does swatch videos for a variety of mainstream and indie brands, her channel is such a great resource! Her collaboration with Orly features some galaxy inspired shades that will work for a variety of seasons. These are so up my alley, it was a no-brainer to purchase them even though I’ve been trying not to buy so much nail polish. Truly, I think about it all the time. I may not act upon it, but I’m thinking about it. If you don’t want to buy more nail polish yourself, maybe stop reading about now because these are SO GOOD.

{PR} Butter London Jelly Preserves: New Shades for 2021

Happy Wednesday! I can’t pour you a nice, relaxing cup of tea through the internet sadly, but I can share some nail polish. Or at least some pictures of nail polish. Butter London sent me their new Jelly Preserve shades and I thought I would share them here. These are super sheer jelly polishes and this time around Butter London is adding a shade with an orange tint and one with a green tint. If you want to see the first two shades, yep, I have a blog post for that! As a bonus, this time around I even wore one of them for ten days. You guys know I NEVER do wear tests because I’m a crazy nail person, but I managed to pull it off on my right hand. These polishes are meant to be treatments to help nourish and strengthen your natural nails. The index nail on my right hand is a particular problem for me (or, more likely, I’m just a problem for it) and I thought I would see what these could do for me.

Olive Ave Polish Flora 2021: My Picks

Any collection that has two greens and two purples in it is just screaming my name. Throw a topper in there and I am 100% sold!!! Olive Ave Polish’s spring collection this year did just that and I think it is a brilliant follow-up to their 2020 spring collection, also named Flora. I reviewed a trio from that collection last year, but this year I ended up getting five of the six polishes and not just a trio. I initially started out supporting Olive Ave Polish because I wanted to support Walker, the owner. She’s one of my favorite nail YouTubers and we both like blues and greens, so I figured I would get along with her nail polish. Well, it’s a year later and I can honestly say I’m now buying Olive Ave Polish because it’s good stuff! Yeah, I still like that I’m supporting her, but this polish is so good that I would probably buy it even if I didn’t know there was a person with a love of polish and great values behind the brand. There’s a lot to be excited about in this collection, like two-coat pastels, so let’s dive right in!

Butter London Spring 2021 {PR}

This week is a very wonderful week. I’m getting my first vaccine dose ON THURSDAY!!! I seriously have never been this excited to get a vaccine in my life; I truly hate needles and usually dread these occasions, but I am willing to do whatever I can to help. The second wonderful thing is that we are talking about Butter London’s new spring collection, which they very kindly sent me. I almost did a happy dance when I opened the package, good stuff people, good stuff! The four new polishes are all part of their patent shine line and excitingly, there is a lighter green, which I don’t think they had anything like in the patent shine collection until now, and a new topper. I’m way too happy about this, let’s just get into the swatches because you know there’s going to be some blabbing.

Cadillacquer A Beautiful Mess

Cadillacquer A Beautiful Mess, 3 coats plus top coat

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Last year, St. Patrick’s Day was the first day all of the restaurants in Oregon were closed to dine-in. I went to my local Irish pub to get some takeout on St. Patrick’s Day and then the next day they shut down completely, not re-opening for takeout until earlier this year. It’s only a few blocks away from where I live so I was quite disappointed to have fewer takeout options within walking distance, but balance has been somewhat restored in the universe. Today we’re taking a look at a gorgeous green polish from Cadillacquer, perfect for the occasion! It is called A Beautiful Mess and is from the Shameless collection. I’ve never seen the show Shameless, so I can’t offer you any knowledge of the inspiration. It is a green jelly base that is packed with tiny green to gold flakies, turquoise microglitters, and those beautiful, prominent bronze-orange-red multichrome flakies. I hope you love this one as much as I do!

Duri Below Zero Collection: Part II Swatch & Review {PR}

*Just a heads up, the polishes featured in today’s post and last week’s post were sent to me as PR.* Winter is wrapping up and so is my review of Duri’s newest collection. No offense to the polishes last week, but this week’s are all my favorites! They are all cool tones: we have a grey, blue-green, and blue. Perfection. Although it sounds like a wintery line up of colors, I think most of us would be reaching for these colors in a variety of seasons. All are perfect two coat cremes; I’ve come to expect this from Duri at this point but I’m still really impressed!

Duri Below Zero Collection: Part I Swatch & Review {PR}

*Just a heads up, the polishes featured in today’s post and next week’s post were sent to me as PR.* It feels like we’re farther into the year than we actually are. I think after Valentine’s Day, my brain thinks it must be spring now. It doesn’t help that yesterday was pretty much sunny all day. Of course, actually stepping outside and feeling how cold it is brings me back to reality, but for some reason I am struggling with the fact that it is still indeed winter and will be for a little less than a month. On the blog front, that’s good news for me because I have a winter collection to share! Duri sent me their newest Below Zero collection, which features a fun mix of polishes that I think I could wear across multiple seasons. Today we are going to look at the warmer shades in the collection and next week we’ll take a look at the cooler shades. I’m either an old lady now or a little kid, because sitting and swatching more than three polishes at a time makes me stir-crazy. Dividing up collections like this helps me keep my mental sanity.

a-england Moments With Virginia: My Picks Swatch & Review

It’s my first nail polish review of 2021 and it’s none other than a constant favorite, a-england! If all goes to plan, it is going to be very a-england-y on the blog this year. I am going to be starting a color comparison project that I hope will be helpful for some. However, today we are looking at one of the four new collections a-england dropped on us at the end of 2020. It is based on works by Virginia Woolf and, I have to admit, I haven’t read much of her work. I had to read A Room of One’s Own for either a lit or geography class (cannot remember) but that’s it. I do have several of the books that inspired these polishes on my enormous to-read list, hopefully I will get around to those at some point. But I definitely got around to trying the polishes first. I am the proud owner of six of the seven new shades, the seventh being a light pink called Shakespeare’s Sister. I’m not a fan of pink, but definitely am a fan of these rich jewel shades. So perfect, there are colors here I would wear all year round!