Oh no! Back to short nails again....

My nails did not survive last night's shift at my retail job very well. We had to move some shelving units around and I ended up accidentally tearing two of them off. When I got home I had no choice but to cut them all very short...I am not a fan! I think having short fingernails like this makes my hands look very strange.

So I'm going to have to take a break from most of my swatching, I just don't want to show awesome polishes on not awesome nails. Plus, is it just me, or is it harder to paint short nails? I feel like there's just not as much area to work with, so it's much harder not to accidentally flood a cuticle.

I'm trying to look on the bright side, though, and am telling myself that this is a good chance to wear dark polishes that don't always look good on longer nails. Am I right? I've always sort of thought that dark colors look strange on long nails. I feel like your nails don't have to be THIS short, however, because they're just ridiculously short right now. (Can you tell I'm really sad about this?)

Anyway, today I'm wearing one of those nameless Urban Outfitters polishes that I posted about here. The formula on this one was great. Perfectly opaque in two coats, the brush was perfect, and I really love the square bottles, because I don't feel like I'm about to knock them over all the time. This is two coats over Orly Bonder basecoat with one coat of China Glaze Fast Forward topcoat.

This one's a bit more olive green than it looks above, but it does sort of go back and forth between brown and green depending on the light. It's got a gorgeous gold shimmer running through it that really just makes the color happen for me. The only thing I could fault it on is that brushstrokes are visible even after two coats, but I think that's just the nature of some polishes.

Please excuse the oddness on my index finger, had a bit of a mishap with some topcoat. I'm not sure it's my favorite color on my nails, but I do love this one as a color. I'm also officially a fan of Urban Outfitters polishes!

Sally Hansen Diamond Strength - Platinum and Bride to Be (Swatches and Review)

Hey everyone! I'm back with a couple new swatches to show you all! These are Sally Hansen polishes, from the Diamond Strength Nail Color line. I've been fan of Sally Hansen since before high school (I got into painting my nails when I was like 9 or 10!), since they're very affordable and available almost everywhere. But these are actually the first polishes I'd tried from the Diamond Strength series. I don't know why they never jumped out at me before, I think it's probably just because most of the colors are things I'd seen before - lots of sensible pinks and reds. But CVS was having a sale on them a couple weeks ago, and I decided to try a couple. I picked out Platinum and Bride to Be, both of which I thought would be nice on their own and nice to layer over other colors, like black or purple.

For this blog post, I'm going to show you just these polishes on their own. Each took three coats to be somewhere close to opaque, which further strengthens my belief that they're probably best suited for layering.

Platinum, shown above, was extremely sheer. Even after three coats, there was still VNL. It was also a super-thin formula, which made it a little runny and hard to work with. Plus, from some angles it barely even looked like I had anything on my nails at all. So, by itself, this one is perfect for when you just want the barest hint of shine on your tips. It was a little old lady-ish, mostly because of the frost finish in my opinion, but it's still something I might wear to work on a day where I couldn't pull off a more bold color.

I didn't like Bride to Be (above) nearly as much. It had the same formula as Platinum, but after three coats it was more opaque. However, this one was far more silvery and metallic than it looked in the bottle. To me, in  the bottle it looks like a grey with some shimmer. On my fingers, it looked like frosty aluminum foil! If I was going to wear a shade like this one--which I might go for as a metallic silver, I'd want it to be a lot closer to opaque after one coat. This one certaintly wasn't that. I'm going to give this one more shot over a different color, but if it turns out as bad as this I won't be wearing it again.

All in all, I'm less than in love with the Sally Hansen Diamond Strength polishes thus far. I really love the bottle shape, with it's multiple sided-ness and "jewel" embedded into it, but these polishes failed to blow me away. I'd give it one more shot, maybe trying some reds or glitters (are there Diamond Strength glitters?), but if they're like these ones I won't be buying after that.