The nail polish community, especially the indie polish community, has had a rough week. Thanks to a bad seed, indie nail polish has been drawn to the forefront of several viral news sites. As I feared, there is a lot of misconceptions being fueled in the comments of these posts, and there is trepidation about indies in general right now. I've been wearing indies almost from the time that I started getting into nail polish in 2012. I like mainstream polishes too, but there's just something about the level of customer service you get from almost all indie makers. Most of them are active in fan groups of their brands, and they put everything they have into making sure their customers are happy!
I've joined with other bloggers to share some indie love. I'm going to share a couple of my favorite indies. This is by no means a complete list, but just a small showcase of some of my favorites! Not all of them are currently available, but I've linked each shop (as well as my review) for you.
Hi guys! Sorry for the lack of posts this week, I've been insanely tired when I've gotten home from work. I'm still suffering from fatigue (and I wish I could figure out why!), so this is going to be a pretty short and sweet post. But I really wanted to share another polish from the Definitely Not Cute collection from Digital Nails with you!
Hi guys! I hope you're having a great Friday! I'm still over here fuming about of my blog being singled out by a bunch of bullies (you can read all about it here if you missed my post on Tuesday). I don't get mad very often, but when I do, it seriously takes me awhile to get it out of my system! I had a small victory when I was successful in having the bullying post removed from Live Journal since they were using my photos without permission.
At the end of June, Raph from Digital Nails launched the Definitely Not Cute collection. This collection is a seven polish set that was inspired by "Bee and Puppycat." What is Bee and Puppycat you ask? It's an animated series of shorts about a 20-something girl who can't seem to keep a job and her strange new pet. I will warn you, it's freaking addictive. I've become obsessed with it. Sadly, there are only a handful of episodes but they are awesome!! You can watch the episodes here!
I picked up four of the polishes from the collection, and over the new few posts I will be sharing them with you! The first polish that I want to share is "Use The Sword AS A SWORD."
Today, I've got a slightly different post, and I'll warn you now that it's gonna be be text heavy. There might be a little rambling, and I'm sorry, but I'm trying to not edit my thoughts much on this subject. I want to talk about bullying... mainly cyberbullying.
You see, this morning I woke up to an email box absolutely full of emails and comment alerts. My little blog doesn't get that much traffic, so I was a little shocked by the sheer number of messages. I quickly glanced at my stats pages on Blogger, and saw that I was getting a lot of traffic from a Russian Live Journal page (I'm assuming that it was Russian since that's where the bulk of the traffic was coming from). I had to get to work, so I didn't think anything of it. When I took a break, I started to read the emails and comments, and my heart just started breaking. The things that people were saying were so mean... asking me if I knew how to do proper clean-up, why do I bother taking pictures of polishes when my nails are so bad, that I should stop painting my nails (something that I love) because I shouldn't draw attention to them.
I took a look at the Live Journal page, and it was basically an article that crucified my blog. There was picture after picture, taken from my blog, with increasingly disparaging remarks. Worse than the article itself were the comments from their readers... comments saying that they thought my nails were toenails at first... that I must be poor if I can't afford a proper manicure, yet I can afford expensive polish - what a paradox!
I was so hurt; I sat at my desk and cried. I deleted the emails, deleted all the rude comments, and I might have deleted the entire blog if it hadn't for the wonderful ladies in Hobby Polish Bloggers. I vented there, and the comments of support really did make a world of difference (not to mention some very creative ideas of what they can do with their opinions). Over the course of the day, I went from sad to just mad. Didn't anyone teach these people that if they can't say something nice, they shouldn't say anything at all? DIDN'T THEY FREAKING WATCH BAMBI?
I had enough bullying when I was a kid. I was the shy kid, the smart kid, and worst of all, the fat kid. I heard the comments said behind my back. I acted like they didn't bother me, but God knows that they did. Thank God for my friends is about all I can say about that time. They took the time to see past the shyness and insecurities to get to know the real me. It wasn't until I got to college that I was able to break out of that self-imposed prison of shyness and found my voice.
As bad as it was... we were kids. And let's face it, kids can be dicks sometimes. But we grow up, right? Apparently not. For whatever reason, these women (and maybe men) have nothing better to do with their time than gossip about lil ol' me. You know what, FINE, GO AHEAD! I won't let you hurt me any more.
I'm going to continue to post my nails. I am proud of my nails, even those "terrible" photos from when I first started blogging (and even before that when I was a microblogger on Facebook and Instagram). They show me how far I've come ... with my nails, my photography, even my writing. So...
If I want to color outside of the lines a little, so be it!
If I have a rough day when I'm filing at work and break all my nails down, oh well you might be seeing some nubs.
If the nubs bother me, and I want to pop on some fakies and go with that, that's fine too.
If my nails are uneven, I'm sorry, but that's freaking life.
And it's my life, and polishing my nails is something that I love, and it's something that I truly love sharing. I love helping people discover a new polish that they fall in love with. I love getting emails asking me for tips to stop biting their nails. I love the interaction with other bloggers.
I just want to see the bullying stopped. It's not just me that gets bullied. I want to stop seeing the "Eeewww" comments on Instagram. I want to stop seeing the "WTF was she thinking?" when a talented nail artist posts creative and outside of the box designs. If I see these comments on my blog, they'll be deleted. If I see them on fellow bloggers Instagram, Facebook pages, or blogs, I'll report them.
Remember.... If you can't say anything nice... just STFU!
Hi guys! I am soooo glad it's Friday! My husband and I have been watching Deep Space Nine, and we're coming to up to the end of the series. I think we have like 5 more episodes left. I didn't watch it when it originally aired, but I'm really enjoying it. I always hate the ending of series... it's so bittersweet. I don't know about you, but I tend to grow to care about the characters!
Today, I've got Quasar from Nerd Lacquer for you which was part of the Spaaaaace collection. I picked this up in the one of the more recent restocks.
Hi guys! I hope you had a great weekend, and a fabulous start to the week. At least it's no longer Monday!
In May, Pahlish launched Through the Looking Glass collection - a collection based on Alice in Wonderland. I only picked up one from the collection, despite them having the most adorable custom labels. The collection was heavy on the pastels, and for some reason I just wasn't feeling in a pastel mood. But aren't these labels so cute?!
Hi guys! I recently participated in my first RedditGift exchange. I'd been wanting to join, but kept missing the deadlines, but when I saw that one of them this round was Nail Polish, I knew that I had to join in! I've been seriously stalking the gallery page to see what my giftee says about her gift!
So a few months ago, a certain ugly dress swept the internet. Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with with debates over its color - blue & black or white & gold. I personally saw it both colors, and that drove me crazy!
As all of the craziness was going on, Raph from Digital Nails created two polishes that resembled the dress. She'd initially made them just for herself, but shared swatches of them in a fan group, and most of the members wanted to buy them! She ended up mixing up a batch of each color, and I was lucky enough to snag them both. Today, I'm going to share the white/gold version of the polish.
Hi guys! I hope you had a great weekend! We went to see the new Mission: Impossible movie, and then since I was able to get today and tomorrow off work, we headed down to see my husband's family. Gotta love looooong weekends!
Today, I have a polish from Pahlish's Wood Between the Worlds collection from last year that was inspired by The Chronicles of Narnia.
