And now I can die: Color Club Oil Slick multichrome nail polish swatches (with excessive photos)

Disclosure: Affiliate links.
I felt like I was pretty much over nail polish after amassing a ridiculously large hoard and then purging dozens of bottles from it and not being able to find anyone to take them off my hands (pun intended?). The rejects are still sitting in a box in my closet taking up space. Anyone want them?

But then I saw photos of the Color Club Oil Slick Collection on beautygeeks, and my acquisitive drive fired right the fuck back up. Multichromes are my absolute favorites, and these ones looked as stunning as the many indie options out there, but more accessible. I've just never really got into indie polishes. There's definitely some fascinating stuff out there, but the prices and (often) the need to pounce before things go out of stock just don't appeal to me. ILNP, for instance, has dozens of multichromes - but the choice is overwhelming, and they are more expensive than Color Club. I've used and liked Color Club before, and I really hoped I would be able to find these polishes at Meijer, where I once got some of the Halo Hues (holos) for under $4. No such luck, of course.

Color Club Oil Slick collection: Cash Only, It's Raining Men, We'll Never Be Royals, and Burnt Out

I'm not impulsive. I told myself that I wasn't allowed to buy them until I could redeem 200 coins in Habitica. In the meantime, I wanted to find the cheapest possible price online. I only wanted four from the collection: Cash Only, It's Raining Men, We'll Never Be Royals, and Burnt Out. You can find them on ebay, and I'd heard that some people had picked them up there for about $6 each + free shipping. I checked several times over the course of a few weeks and never found anything lower that $8 + $3-4 shipping per bottle. Amazon's prices fluctuate, but over the weeks I was looking, they didn't go lower than ebay. I looked at several other beauty and nail supply sites, but when Color Club had a 31% off sale on their site for Halloween, I ended up getting them there for a total of about $33 including shipping for the four bottles. If you want a few bottles, I'd recommend getting them from the Color Club site, if you don't mind waiting for a sale (right now they have 25% off), though if you just want a single bottle, $10 + free shipping on Amazon is probably a better bet.

Color Club Oil Slick collection: Cash Only, It's Raining Men, We'll Never Be Royals, and Burnt Out

Anyway, enough shop(ping) talk. I have them now and they are nearly everything I imagined and we are very happy together. Some general points about the formula of all of them, and then I'll move on to photos. They are nice and opaque, so you only need two coats. If you're very good, you might be able to get away with just one coat. But all four of these polishes are quite thick, so I anticipate having to thin them sooner rather than later. That also means that you have to wipe the brush off carefully or you might end up with a big glob rolling down the wand as you're painting your nail and messing everything up. Dry time is average, but I always use a quick dry top coat, because I am not at all patient enough not to. I used Orly Polishield (reviewed here, but I've found recently that I like it much better when I use a thick coat of it) for all the photos below. I applied Cash Only without a basecoat and it chipped the next day. For all the others, I used Orly Bonder basecoat and went at least two days without chipping (it's rare that any polish lasts much longer than that for me).

So let's get on with the swatches. It's impossible to capture all the shifting colors in photos, because it's really movement that brings them alive. I did my best with my mediocre camera. I exercised almost no restraint, so I've put many, many photos below the cut. Indulge me! I haven't been this excited about nail polish in a long time.

First up: Cash Only. This was a surprise. I hesitated about getting it, but it turned out to be my second favorite of the bunch. It's really amazing and not like anything else I've seen. It would be hard to name all the colors in there. It goes from rosy beige, to gold, to steel grey, to silver, to lavender, to blue, to green, with a bunch of other shit in between.

The photos below are in all sorts of different lighting, and let me warn you one last time that I went overboard with the number of photos here (you can enlarge them by clicking on them). But they're all different! All equally important.

How to make every nail polish you own double as a holographic polish for $6-15

I've posted about this before, but there's no real need to buy holographic nail polish in every shade when you can just buy a holo topcoat and use it to transform any polish you have into a linear holo. It really works. Here's are some examples:

One coat of holo topcoat (shade)

One coat of holo topcoat (direct sunlight)

See? Just buy one bottle of topcoat instead of ALL THE HOLOS. The easiest at-home dupes.

New Items Added to Blog Sale (including Butter London, OPI, and Julep)

I added a few new things to the sale (including, but not limited to, the above). Check it out.

Review and comparison: CoverGirl Outlast Stay Brilliant Nail Gloss

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.
Whoops, this post has been sitting in my saved folder for a while now, after I picked some of this nail polish up on the recommendation of srizzo. Better late than never? These aren't limited edition or anything.

These CoverGirl Outlast Stay Brilliant nail polishes glosses are supposed to have basecoat and topcoat included. Look, I'll just be upfront about it: I think that's kind of bullshit. I mean, basecoat is supposed to be a layer between your nail and the polish, so how does that work? It's not going to prevent staining, for one thing. Also, I don't wear nail polish without putting a quick dry topcoat on top, because I usually do my nails less than an hour before I go to bed, and that's the only way to avoid fucking them up. There are a bunch of blogs out there where people tested these on their own, so if that's important to you, google. I'm just going to treat these like regular nail polishes.

1 Year Anniversary Giveaway: Fully-fucking-stocked makeup kit (15 pieces)

I've been fucking around here for a year now, so I'm celebrating by giving you a present. Well, one of you. I put together a makeup kit that has almost everything you need to do your face and claws. I tried to include an assortment of basics and neutrals that would suit just about anyone  - and for that reason I didn't include anything skin-colored, because I don't know what shade you are, mysterious future giveaway winner. Okay, so maybe the self-tanner isn't for everyone, but whatever. To make up for the lack of skin shit, I included an assortment of nail and lip products.