See The Shining Light - Rainbowland Collection Glam Polish Review

Yes, these are my toys. No, they are not from when I was little.

I remember reading somewhere when I was quite small that Capricorns tend the age backwards - they start off alarmingly serious children, and slowly grow up into ridiculously childish pensioners. Being a Capricorn and thus an alarmingly serious child, I thought this was total bunkum, but nowadays I wonder if there was any truth to it. I've found myself getting more and more comfortable with the things I tried to pretend I didn't love as a child - whereas once I could read books I pretended I didn't like cartoons anymore, now I will happily collect VHS copies of HR Puff'n'Stuff.

Does anyone else remember how completely trippy this show was?

Like approximately 50 billion other little girls, I grew up on Rainbow Brite. You wouldn't have guessed it from my twenty year obsession with black, but when I was tiny I was absolutely obsessed with this oddly proportioned little princess. After a while I decided I was clearly too clever and sensible for something so silly, but now I've come back around to embracing the charmingly naive ideals it represents, the idea that friendship and good ol' fashioned effort can solve everything in twenty minutes. I know it's not true, but this cartoon reminds me of when I was small enough to think that was how the world worked. It's the same reason I watch shows like Star Trek - sometimes I need a bit of soft, soothing, naivete to round out the edges of being a grown up.

So now you know all this, I'm sure you can imagine how excited I was when Glam Polish announced they were doing a Rainbow Brite tribute collection. I got my hopes WAY up over this collection, and it did not let me down. I have four to show you, so strap in guys, this is going to be picture heavy.

I.Q is a beautiful purple jelly confection of small lavender and light pink dots, with big holographic dots as well. For those who didn't watch the cartoon, Rainbow Brite and her little posse of (collectable) friends all had sidekicks named Sprites. I.Q belonged to Shy Violet, who's colour scheme was...wait for it...violet! Okay okay, it's a show for kids, don't expect TOO much. Anyway, the point is, this polish is great. I didn't have any trouble getting any of the glitter out, which is really unusual for ones with the big holo dots in them. Those little suckers can be quite elusive, but I had no problem with I.Q. These pictures are all two coats of I.Q over one coat of Love Thy Polish Miss Priss.

Direct sun, so you can see how blinding those holo dots are

Inside light, to show how beautifully the dots float in the jelly base.

Twink is actually a little too white for my taste - which is kind of funny because Twink the character, Rainbow Brite's own Sprite, always used to annoy the piss out of me. "We caaan't do this" waah wahh etc etc. Childhood grudges aside, the formula of Twink is lovely. This was two coats over one coat of Illamasqua Scorch, but you could most likely get away with two coats on it's own. Twink pulls off the remarkably delicate balancing act of being pigmented enough that it doesn't look washed out, while still showing off the glitters. And there are plenty of glitters to show off - pink and purple micro glitter, black diamonds, purple hexes, and two different sizes of pink holo dots!

Nite Sprite is kind of a blue version of I.Q, but with more razzamatazz. I didn't actually remember Nite Sprite from the show, but a little digging reveals he was an extra Sprite that was presumably added to the cast to serve some sort of plot mechanic - or maybe just to sell more toys. Regardless, he's a dark blue Sprite, who is in charge of making sure the stars shine. I'm guessing this is why there is so much silver in this polish, and it's a great touch. It really makes this one stand out from the others, turning it into it's own thing rather than just a colour swapped version of the other jellies in the collection. Nite Sprite has large holo dots in a dark blue jelly base, with a generous lashing of silver hexes and what seems to be silver micro glitter as well. My only quibble with this one is that the formula seemed a mite thinner than the others, so I had some trouble fishing the dots out. Even with the shake and dab method, it still took quite a bit of effort to get out at least one dot for each nail, and that was a bit disappointing.

In sunlight, as you might have guessed from the incredible flash off the holo dots.

Inside light, to show off the lovely silver shimmer.

Last but definitely not least is Lucky - I'm going through a big teal phase at the moment, so this is far and away my favorite from this collection. It's a beautiful green jelly base, filled with turquoise, green & melon dots, as well as a smattering of itty bitty turquoise square glitter. The colours in this one just go together so perfectly, I really didn't want to take it off again. These were two coats over Sinful Colours Savage - however I do NOT recommend you copy this, as the Sinful Colours stained my nails something DREADFUL. I put it on over a coat of Duri Rejuvacoat, and it just soaked right through. Horrible stuff! But Lucky is perfect, and wonderful, and with a coat of a teal polish that ISN'T Sinful Colours Savage it is magical.

Ugh, look at those rainbow reflections off the holo dots! Gorgeous.

The whole Rainbowland Collection is available from Glam Polish, if you're in Australia. However, if you're outside Australia, they will also be stocked very soon by Mei Mei's Signatures who ship worldwide.

What Is It With Wonder Woman?

I was going through the airport a little while back, and spotted a woman carrying an adorable Wonder Woman tote bag. Right after my first thought of, "Hunh, cool!" came another less positive thought - "I bet she's never read any of the comics." Two seconds after that, I realised *I* hadn't really read many of the comics either. And yet, I would still consider myself a Wonder Woman fan. And it’s not just me – a quick google for Wonder Woman merchandise reveals a market of fans MUCH larger than I imagine the actual comics readership to be. Hell, if everyone who bought a Wonder Woman t-shirt actually bought the comic as well, DC could discontinue all their titles and just live off that. I see at least three Wonder Woman cosplayers at every comic convention I go to, usually more. The only character I see cosplayed more frequently is Batman, but hell, who DOESN'T want to be Batman? All these people can't be reading the current Wonder Woman - the trade would have been all over the bestseller lists for months if that were the case.

So why aren’t these fans of Wonder Woman, who are happy to shell out for a branded tote or a shirt, or a whole cosplay outfit not interested in reading the comic? Maybe they simply don't like reading comics, and that's a fair enough reason - but I don't think that's the case for all. I think there is a pool of potential readers, that are avoiding the comics.

Part of the problem is pretty easy to spot from a cursory glance across the shelves in any comic book store. There seems to be a prevailing perception within the comics industry at the moment that what readers really want from superheroines is T and A. If you're not a dedicated comics reader, the overall impression of female super heroes in comics is probably this sort of thing.

This is a relatively restrained example.

This kind of art makes me feel like I need a shower just from looking at it. Is it any wonder that women only make up 25% of people who self identify as comic book fans? Imagine if men were portrayed the same way! Oh wait, you don't have to, The HawkeyeInitiative has already done it for you. 

The Hawkeye Initiative is an entire tumblr of people posing
Hawkeye the way that female super heroes are posed.
You're welcome.

Print a few of those out and show them to the men in your life, see how icky it makes them feel, and ask them how interested THEY would be in comics if the male characters were portrayed this way. Happily, not ALL comics portray women this way, and there seems to be a growing demand from fans to move away from this sort of dreck. There are artists and writers out there doing an awesome job of making female super heroes look…well, super. Maybe this is thinphobic or whatever, but I find it easier to believe in a female superhero lifting a car if she has at least some muscle definition. I mean, seriously, look at this costume shot from the recent failed Wonder Woman pilot. The actress is very pretty, but her physique is just too slight to be convincing when playing an Amazon.

A nitpicky point, but it also looks like her boobs are
too far apart in this costume. Like, uncomfortably so.

To my mind if you want me to believe this character is cracking skulls and taking names then you have to portray her as having at least some proportion of the muscle mass required to do so. Here are some examples of what I consider to be convincing super heroine art, from my two favourite superheroine books at the moment.

This is from the first trade of Brian Azarello's New 52 Wonder Woman.
If you want to see something interesting being done with the
Wonder Woman character, I highly recommend it.

J.H William's art in Batwoman is breathtaking overall, but I particularly
love his insistence on putting Batwoman in flat shoes. GENIUS.

These characters are still relatively slender, with a decent rack. But they also have actual visible muscle mass, and are posed in ways that it is actually possible for the human body to pose. The people who read these comics LOVE them passionately, with good reason. Sadly, however outside the comic fan bubble, these comics aren’t very widely known. 

I was happy to note that in the recent superhero themed XBox game, Injustice:Gods Among Us, the designers did bother to give Wonder Woman a relatively imposing physique. It seems particularly important that Wonder Woman have a convincing physique in Injustice considering it’s a straight up fighting game, and I’m really glad they stayed away from the Soulcalibur technique of “More jiggle = Better”
 

I also dig that they gave her pants. Sort of.
Image courtesy of Warner Bros

I don’t think untapped Wonder Woman fans are only looking for more realistic visuals though. As part of the launch of Injustice: Gods Among Us, Warner Brothers did a poll of 1000 Australians featuring various questions on who their favourite superheroes were, and why. Participants were only able to choose from the characters featured in the game, and considering there are only two female superheroes in the game (Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl), the results are pretty skewed towards the male characters. 

What really stood out for me about the results of this poll, in between fluffy questions like “Who is the classiest superhero?” is what super powers people nominated as the ones they would most like to have. Number one was of course, flight, because that would be undeniably awesome. However, super intelligence was second. You would think, given the way that superheroes are marketed, the audience would be all in favour of the biggest, the strongest, the most powerful. But they're not. Superhuman strength came in fourth, behind moving as fast as The Flash. These results seem to indicate to me that superhero fans as a whole are kind of over the Superman school of superheroes – all powers, no personality. It’s dull, and people have plenty of other ways to get their geek on that don’t involve reading about someone being punched to the moon AGAIN.

Intruiged, I put the question "Who is your favourite superheroine, and why?" to my Twitter feed. I speak to a bunch of super serious comic fans on Twitter, so I was really surprised by the number of people who nominated superheroines from TV, rather than comics. Buffy came up repeatedly, as did Xena. (You could argue these aren't really female superheroes in the strictest of terms, but I was interested to see what characters people associated with the term) In terms of comics, by far the most nominated character was Batwoman, who has only been around for a relatively short time. Ms. Marvel was a close second – another character that is almost invisible outside the comic fan bubble. Someone else mentioned Wonder Woman, but only in the stories written by Brian Azarello. One person nominated Power Girl, but again, only when portrayed by a particular creative team. This is where an interesting theory clicked into place for me. 

I think that what women want in a female superhero is a simply a character who is a woman, and also a hero.

They want a hero- someone with not only physical strength but also strength of character: courage, compassion, intelligence. But they also want a woman: a fully fleshed character, written consistently, complete with character flaws. One of the characteristics most mentioned by my Twitter respondents was “human weakness”, closely followed by "passion"'. Superhero fans don't just want a shallow caricature that can punch real good - they want a depth that simply isn't there most of the time in the way comics traditionally write women. 

TV writers seem to have figured out this is what fans are looking for. The depiction of women on TV is far from perfect, but I feel like there are more bad ass women on TV right now than there have been in a long time. Xena and Buffy have paved the way for more gritty, real life (non superpowered) heroines like Olivia from Fringe. While there is still a lot of jiggly jiggly nonsense in video games, the tide is starting to turn there too. Being able to play a female Commander Shepherd in Mass Effect drew a LOT of new female players into the gaming world, and the new Tomb Raider reboot seems set to try and capture and retain these people looking for a tough female character to play now Mass Effect is done.

FemShep is my jam

I'm not convinced by Tomb Raider yet.

Comics need to catch up with this demand from fans for interesting female superheroes in a big way. Thanks in part to recent changes in the way women are portrayed, women now constitute 42% of all people who play video games. But comics? DC did a poll recently to gauge how well their New 52 reboot was going, and only 5% of respondents were women. FIVE PER CENT. This is totally ridiculous. 

The most recent run of Wonder Woman and Batwoman are a fantastic start, but it's still a tiny fraction of what is being produced. The fanbase is obviously there, ready made, holding out for someone to write the heroine they need. 

Thanks to Warner Bros for supplying survey results and Injustice:Gods Among Us images

If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It - Loki's Lacquer review and nail art

I'm excited to have something super fun to show you today! As you might have noticed from my previous reviews, Loki's Lacquer LOVE doing tie in polishes with movies, tv shows, and anything generally nerdy. I was scrolling through the Etsy store a little while ago when I came across a glow in the dark polish called, "If It Bleeds, Kill It", and I knew that it must be mine.

If you've somehow managed to avoid seeing Predator at any stage in your life, then let me give you a very brief run down. Arnold Schwarzenegger's and some cut and paste commando characters end up on a jungle planet, where they start getting picked off one by one. Turns out they're being hunted by aliens called Predators with super invisible suits, but with sufficient bullets and teeth gritting Arnie prevails in the end. "If it bleeds, we can kill it", is a line from Arnie about the Predators, tweaked slightly for the name of this polish to avoid any possible copyright issues. The Predators also have glow in the dark blood (which I always thought was a pretty poor characteristic of stealth hunters), so this polish is a perfect tribute to this over-the-top, wonderful action flick.

Even if you don't give a damn about the Predator references, it's still a freaking COOL polish. The pigment will glow for up to 12 hours after being charged under a light (a UV light is quickest), and because the pigment used is designed for use in solvents, the pigment will stay stable for...well, ever, more or less. Like almost all the other pretties Loki's Lacquer put out, this has a gorgeous array of different glitters in it. There are large green matte hexes, medium green hexes, small gold squares, tiny gold dots, and itty bitty blue flakie flecks, which combine to give it enormous depth. The glow in the dark pigment does make the polish a little bit gritty, but two coats of topcoat smooth it out perfectly.

Because I was so excited about this polish, I decided to get my crap together and do some decent nail art with it. So I looked up the Predator clan symbols, and away I went!

 Happily, the Predator alphabet is ludicrously easy to draw, so I was pretty confident they would come out okay. But I was really surprised with how nicely the background came out. I was going for a "shadows on leaves" kind of mottled look, so I started with a base coat of teal and then sponged a light minty colour over the top really unevenly to make the mottling. Then I put two coats of If It Bleeds over the top, and it all came together perfectly!

Unfortunately, it turns out I really SUCK at getting pictures of the glow in the dark effect, so you will have to take my word for just how bright it really is. I don't have a UV lamp so I just stuck my nails under my normal photo lamp then ran into my room to get these.

If you squint you can KIND of see how it glows more against the whiter parts of the background, making a really neat mottled effect. If you layer it over straight white or straight black, the glow is much more even.

I was so pleased with these I did the other hand to match and wore it into work today, and a grand total of one person so far has commented - which just reminds me why I never bother with work safe polish when I could have this!

I Wanna Do Bad Things With You....Loki's Lacquer and Lilypad Lacquer Review

It seems that there are just too many awesome Australian indie polishes these days to show them to you one at a time - I'd never have time to do anything else, let alone do the job that allows me to buy them. So today I'm doubling up with two True Blood themed polishes; V from Loki's Lacquer, and True Blood from Lilypad Lacquer.

I was a huge fan of this show back when it started. For the first two seasons I was absolutely HOOKED (I'm sure this had nothing to do with Alexander Skaarsgard being incredibly hot). But unfortunately after that I feel like the plots got too messy, the cast too crowded, and the whole thing became a bit of a mess. I hear it's still going, but I haven't watched it for some time now. BUT I have fond enough memories of the first two seasons that I was quite excited to get my hands on these polishes.

First up is V, from Loki's Lacquer. You might remember my post about her Futurama collection a while ago, and Tara has been busily putting out so many geektacular polishes since then I can barely keep up! As a result, V is relatively old, but one you don't want to miss. These swatches are two coats over black.

LOVE the bright red sparkles in this.

This picture is probably the most true to real life colour.

Cookies if you can pick the prop I used.

Looking at it in the bottle, I was worried it would be too orangey red for my tastes, but over black it comes out a lovely deep blood red. It's also surprisingly complex - I'm annoyed I didn't get any sunlight shots of this because the sparkles really stand out in the sunlight. I have no idea just how many different colours and sizes of glitter are in this, because I kept seeing more depending on the light. There are definitely large black hexes (which I could probably do without), medium red/holo hexes, and a ton of red shimmer. Application was really great. I didn't even have to fish for the big black hexes, they just came out all on their own!

Lilypad Lacquer are a very new indie maker, and at the moment they are largely specialising in holographic polishes of all colours of the rainbow. I picked out True Blood because anything vampy is more or less a must have for me. I took all these pictures in sunlight, because under lamp light it pretty much just looks like a nice, shiny burgundy.

Lilypad Lacquers are a touch more expensive than some of the other Aussie indies, most likely because of the huge amount of Spectraflair required to make them shine so nicely. They are sold in quite a big bottle though, and the formula is just beautiful. This was two coats with nothing underneath, and it's totally opaque. You could probably get away with one thin coat if you wanted, which makes this pretty awesome value for money.

Out of these two I think I like V a little better, just because it's more complex, but it's hard to turn down a gorgeous burgundy holo. What do you think of these? Do you think they captured the spirit of the show?

Conscientious Objector In The Weight Wars

I was actually tossing this topic around in my head for some time, trying to decide if I had anything to say that hadn't already been said. There is almost as many words out there on women's weight and associated issues as there are actual women, and I wasn't sure that my point of view was something that really needed to be added. However, when I put the word out on Twitter and Facebook that I was looking for input, the response was pretty overwhelming - which at the very least convinced me this is something that DOES actually need to be written. I've tried to wrestle as much of it into a post as possible, but it's a huge subject to try and condense down. I described writing this as being like wrestling with a kraken made of feels, and now it's done, I totally stand by that. But really, the core of what I'm trying to say is simply this; how about we women try being kinder to each other about our bodies, and save the vitriol for the institutions that actually contribute to making our lives harder?

Wander the streets of Tokyo with Sayuri Nail Lacquer

As soon as I opened my package from Sayuri, I started kicking myself for not ordering earlier. Sayuri Nail Lacquer launched a couple of months ago, with their inaugural Streets of Tokyo collection inspired by the diversity and creativity of Japanese street fashion. I was fascinated by the idea, but my growing obsession with indies means my To Buy List is forever getting topped up, and somehow this label got lost in the hubbub. Finally I got back around to this little note on my list, and I'm so very glad I did.

Left to right:Mizuiro, Love Sayuri, Fairy Kei

The Good, The Bad, and the Horrific of Customer Service

The basic principles of customer service always seemed to be pretty straightforward to me, but it's become pretty clear to me lately that a lot  of companies just don't have the first clue how to treat customers in such a way that they are actually likely to return willingly. I find it hard to believe so many businesses employ people who have no interest or ability to treat customers pleasantly - that just doesn't make sense to me. There can't possibly be that many clueless people in the world. The alternative is that a lot of businesses are actively turning away and discouraging potential and current customers because they're not the kind of customers they want, for whatever reason. Maybe they're too fat, or too poor, or too black, or too gender ambiguous. Whatever the reasons, this is a completely ludicicrous business model. The global marketplace is packed with alternatives to whatever you happen to be selling, and it's getting more crowded by the day. The ability to sell things online has made the number of potential businesses in any given marketplace virtually limitless, and I've heard a lot of brick and mortar storefront companies complaining that this is ruining their businesses. In my opinion, this is complete nonsense. Online stores are only taking business away from brick and mortar stores because they've been treating their customers so badly for so long that customers are fleeing now they have a choice about it. Sure, you have to wait ages for stuff ordered online, and you can't try it on, and sometimes it's not at all what you thought it would be like - and STILL customers are fleeing brick and mortar stores. The way they treat a lot of their customers has been SO BAD that all the downsides of online shopping are still preferable. When the prices are higher, and the hours you can shop there are restricted, pretty much the only upside that brick and mortar stores have over online stores is the immediacy of the purchase, and face to face customer service. But it seems a lot of them can't even get that right, even though it's almost all they have to draw in business.