Rainbow Honey Yokai Collection Preview

I am very excited to write this preview blog post on Rainbow Honey's Yokai Collection.  It's a preview because the polishes themselves go on sale on October 13th, and it's a preview because it's not my usual manicure blog post.  I am also excited because I was very lucky to be given all the polishes in the Yokai Collection to review!  I got my package from Rainbow Honey in the mail yesterday, and I expected the package to have one polish to review, maybe a mini polish, but I received all three of the Yokai Collection polishes, and all the bottles are full size!  That package really made my day yesterday.  My husband is away on a trip (he's flying back home right now), and I was a little mopey yesterday at home.  Please forgive me military spouses because I know that you have to endure much longer separations from your significant others, but I am just a wuss and really miss my husband when he's gone.  Rainbow Honey's package changed my mood and got me to "do something."  I immediately swatched the polishes on nail wheels.

Rainbow Honey is an indie brand, relatively new but you would guess the opposite looking at their polishes and professional packaging.  These are my first Rainbow Honey polishes, although I have eyed many of them in the past like Hoof Wrassle, 20% Cooler, Koi Pond, A Little Kindness, Pinkie Promise, Celestia, Mare of the Moon, Lunairetic, Siren Song, Snake Eyes, and Frozen Flame.  I think I will be ordering some minis of those tonight before I go to sleep!  I'm really itching for them now even more than before! Rainbow Honey polishes have a distinctive look to me which is hard for me to describe, but it's a kind of look that reminds you of texture and natural grains in stones, even though it's not really grainy polish.

The Yokai Collection polishes are limited edition for Autumn 2012.  There are three polishes in the Yokai Collection.  In alphabetical order, they are Kawako, Kitsune, and Oni.  Kawako is dark blue and makes me think of the night sky; it has tiny silver flakies that sparkle, and it has blue flakies, some of them large.  Kitsune is a camel/nude base with gorgeous tiny gold shimmer and/or flakies and brown microglitter and my favorite part, small orange glitter hexes.  Kitsune looks like "fall" to me.  Oni is a blackened brown base with irregular gold and purple flakies; the combination looks olive or flashes olive and is spectacularly pretty!  All the polishes have cream bases as far as I can tell.  In my opinion Kawako and Oni look best with two coats, but I like using just one coat of Kitsune.  I will be using Kitsune for my manicure tonight, and I will put up a blog post about it hopefully on Tuesday.

There are already a lot of review posts of the Yokai Collection up on blogs.  Two posts really stood out to me.  Sheila has a comparison post on her blog, Pointless Cafe, where she compares Kawako to Essie's Starry Starry Night.  In a post on the No Holos! blog there are pictures of Rainbow Honey Oni with gold nail art swirls.  So gorgeous!  Click through and take a look!

Even though I only just swatched these on nail wheels, I was a little obsessed and tried the polishes mattified and tried Kitsune over lots of different polishes, so there are a lot of pictures coming up.  In the nail wheels below:
#8 is one coat of Kawako,
#9 is one coat of Oni,
#10 is one coat of Kitsune,
#11 is one coat of Kitsune over one coat of China Glaze Papaya Punch,
#12 is one coat of Kitsune over one coat of a burnt orange polish,
#13 is one coat of Kitsune over one coat of a different burnt orange polish,
#14 is one coat of Kitsune over Wet N Wild Black Creme,
#15 is one coat of Oni over Wet N Wild Black Creme,
#16 is one coat of Kawako over Wet N Wild Black Creme,
#17 is one coat of Kawako with a coat of mattifying polish on top,
#18 is one coat of Oni with a coat of mattifying polish on top,
#1 is one coat of Kitsune over one coat of Essie Blanc,
#2 is one coat of Kitsune over one coat of Finger Paints Gossamer White (a light pinkish nude cream),
#3 is one coat of Kitsune over one coat of Sally Hansen Persistent Peony (iridescent nude very similar to Kitsune's base), and
#4 is one coat of Kitsune with a coat of mattifying polish on top.

This beautiful card came with the polishes.

Rainbow Honey does a great job with packaging.
The paper is more eco-friendly than extra bubble wrap or styrofoam.
Under the paper the three polishes were in a bubble wrap bag.
Inside the bag, the three polishes were each in their individual boxes which kept them safe and meant not using more bubble wrap instead.

I like Kitsune at one coat (#10 above).

Kitsune over Papaya Punch was pretty (#11 above).
I think some nail art with Papaya Punch on part of the nail and Kitsune on another part would look nice.

 

Look at how beautiful the polishes are mattified (#17 & #18 above)!

I love the golden shimmer from the mini flakies in Kitsune.

#3 is how I'll be doing my manicure tonight:
one coat of Kitsune over a coat of Sally Hansen Persistent Peony.

The Yokai Collection will be available starting October 13th on Rainbow Honey's website for $10 each.  These are good sized bottles at a half ounce each, and $10 is a very reasonable price for these indies that are so professionally produced and look like little mini works of art.  I see adorable squat little mini bottles on the site for other collections, and those are $5 each, but I don't know if the Yokai Collection will include any mini bottles.  Again, this is a limited edition collection, so when they run out, they're gone!

Thank you for reading my blog!

China Glaze Stone Cold

Thank you so much for your patience while I was sick and then while I completed a very long continuing legal education course in my "free" time.  I should be back to blogging more now, and I will start exercising and keeping a food log again on Tuesday.  I explained why Tuesday on the blog's Facebook page.  If anyone uses the iPhone's Lose It! app or uses Lose It! online, please send me a private message if you would be my Lose It! buddy.

At the end of September, I will have been blogging for six months.  I am planning a giveaway, and I will probably have some indie minis as the prize.  If I reach 50 fans on Facebook (I'm at 48), I will start the giveaway then rather than at the end of September.  I was also keeping an eye on my number of published posts to start the giveaway if I reached 100 published posts before the end of September, but I'm at 80 published posts--this one will be #81--so the Facebook fans will probably reach 50 before I can reach 100 published posts.  Finally, I'm watching my number of followers through GFC (Google Friend Connect), and if those were to reach 75 before the end of the month, I will start the giveaway then; I'm at 67 GFC followers.  At the latest, though, the giveaway will start at the end of September, for my blogging demi-versary.  Yay!

On to the polish review:

I am pretty sure that this was the first time I had ever worn black nail polish.  I would not have thought I would like black polish, and I had no idea how much I would love China Glaze Stone Cold.  When I first swatched it on a nail wheel after I bought it recently on clearance, I was surprised to see it dried matte!  I thought I had bought the other dark Hunger Games collection polish that did not dry matte.  I was very excited about having the matte polish, though.  I like it so much!

It's an amazing formula, opaque in one coat!  It dried quickly.

Cleanup took a while, but it was easier than cleanup of black creme polish.  Using acetone for the cleanup around the edges of my nails took a bit of the black off on the edges, revealing silver underneath.

I was very worried it would not last without top coat, though.  I did do a "funky French" with top coat free-handed on the tips, and I even tried to wrap my tips (maybe for the second time ever, I just can't seem to do it without ruining the manicure with clumps over the edge), but I worried the matte parts of the manicure would chip.  It wasn't long before my OCD self insisted on topcoat somehow.  I wore the funky French for a couple of days, though.  And, for those two days, each morning I touched up the tips with a new layer of top coat.

Here are some pictures:

Sunlight.

Indoors, office lighting.

Indoors, flash.

Indoors.

Indoors, flash.

Indoors.
My poor little thumb nubbin has completely grown out now!  It's been a month since I took these pictures.

Thank you for reading my blog!

China Glaze Magnetix Attraction

China Glaze is one of my favorite polish brands, and I like their magnetic polishes.  I have reviewed their blue magnetic polish, Pull Me Close, here.  I have also worn their magnetic polish in a gold/brown shade, but that was before I started taking pictures of my nails and blogging about them.  I have also reviewed some Nabi magnetic polishes, most recently their red and black polish called "Wine" here and earlier their gold and brown polish called "Dark Gold" here.  I think I like the formula on the China Glaze polishes more, but the color selection (60 different colors of magnetic polish, all in very vibrant colors) of Nabi is amazing, and they cost me less than the China Glaze magnetics.  Also, the Nabi polishes have their magnet built in, whereas with China Glaze you had to buy the magnet separately (and store it--storage is always something I think about).  But, the China Glaze magnets are stronger than the Nabi magnets.  And, the China Glaze doesn't have the strong smell that the Nabi polishes have.  I don't even notice the Nabi polish smell anymore.  I use Seche Vite as a top coat, and it has a stronger smell to me than the Nabi polishes.  But, there are people who are very sensitive to strong smells in nail polish.

I started trying to make the star pattern with the China Glaze magnet, but it is hard to get the star centered on your nail the very first time.  Eventually I had gloopy multiple layers of polish on the first few nails I did.  Inevitably, I smudged the polish on a nail on my right hand as I moved on to start painting my left hand.  When I went to use a brush instead of an orange stick with cotton to try to remove the polish on that nail without getting cotton fibers all over, the brush fell into the bottle of acetone.  It was a brand new 16 oz. bottle of acetone.  The brush was an E.L.F. concealer brush with the white paint on the handle.  I couldn't get the brush out quickly, so I had to move to the kitchen, pour out the acetone (now with white paint in it) into a glass, get the brush out (now with a rough and unpainted handle), and pour the acetone back into the bottle.  It was a brand new bottle, so I didn't have a backup bottle, so I had to use the paint-filled acetone later for cleanup.  I was *not* in a good mood.  And, I had been, as usual, trying to rush through the manicure because it's always the last thing I do on Sundays before dinner, and I always seem to take much longer than I expect.  So, there I was rushing, and now I had to start over on my right hand.  So, I switched to the diagonal stripe magnet pattern.  It is much more forgiving and takes much less time.  If you are too high or low on your nail, it doesn't make a difference.  You still get diagonal stripes all over your nail.  If you are too much to the right or to the left on the nail with the magnet, again, it makes no difference because the pattern doesn't have a center like the star magnet does.

I like the China Glaze brush.  It's thin like the Revlon brushes.  Those are the brushes I first used decades ago to polish my nails, so I'm attached to them and used to them.  Now I am slowly learning to like the slightly flat and slightly wider brushes, like the ones in the Hits polishes.  The polish was easy to apply and dried quickly but not so quickly that I couldn't go over strokes if needed.  I used two coats of the magnetic polish over a base coat.  Then I used a coat of Seche Vite top coat, and throughout the week on some days I added a coat of Revlon's Quick Dry Top Coat.  The wear was the same as with my other magnetics.  They last a week on me just like my other manicures, but they do start to wear away around the edges faster than non-magnetic polishes.  They didn't chip at all, though.

I really liked the look of Pull Me Close with hematite bracelets and dark bracelets with a gritty finish that I have.  My secretary even noticed the manicure!  The polish is a beautiful dark gray, and parts of it are like metallic silver or metallic charcoal but with a gritty and grainy look that is really pretty.

Here are some pictures:

In Sunlight

Sunlight

Sunlight

This is blurry, as the camera seemed to focus on my skirt rather than my nails,
but you can see the sparkle in the polish and how it reflects a rainbow of colors.

Indoors, office lighting.

Indoors, office lighting.

Indoors, using flash.  Look at that beautiful metallic-like shimmer!

This was after a few days of wear.  I was trying to get a picture of the polish in sunlight, and the sun came out for a moment while I was walking my dogs.  We have had several weeks of bad weather in South Florida and not much sunlight.  Normally I crop the photo to just show my nails, but in the upper right-hand corner of the picture you can see my little girl doggie out of focus.  Aw!

After a week of wear.

Thank you for reading my blog!