Farewell… but see you again

After a brief intense love affair with nail polishes, my time with all these lovely liquids has to come to an end. I still paint my nails but I have lost interest in swatching them or buying the newest latest product from OPI. I’m sad to let this blog go but I have nothing more to say on this topic.

However, I have not left the blogosphere. I have a new home at this address below:

http://paleorina.com

where I blog about lifestyle, health and fitness. These are topics that have always interest me and I will be able to talk about a wider range of subjects there. If you have similar interests, please follow me at this other home.

Farewell all ye gentle readers, if I don’t see you again!

Are you a “superchromat”?

Sometimes I read nail polish blogs and I think to myself, how is it possible that companies are able to come up with colour after colour every season? Surely there are finite colours and after all, a red is a red is a red. Maybe that explains the recent deluge of special texture nail polishes. When the colours run out, start selling crackles, denim textures and caviar polishes.

This question was answered recently when I read a fantasy novel by Brent Weeks called The Black Prism. It was Book 1 of the Lightbringer Series and featured a very interesting magic system, in which the mages of the books were able to transform light and expel it as a physical substance, say a ball of fire. Different people can draft different colours. Some can only draw blue. Others can draw red or yellow or purple, or even colours not visible to human eyes, such as ultraviolet. 

Amongst them were special people called superchromats (a made up word by the author) who can see the minute changes in shades between what most people would assume are the same colour. Now in this book, most superchromats were women, which is a parallel to how it works in the real world as well – women are indeed more sensitive to colour than men!

In fact, some scientists believe that there are humans with superhuman vision who can see hues of colour on the spectrum that others cannot – they are known as tetrachromats. According to this article, “Researchers suspect, though, that some people see even more. Living among us are people with four cones, who might experience a range of colors invisible to the rest. It’s possible these so-called tetrachromats see a hundred million colors, with each familiar hue fracturing into a hundred more subtle shades for which there are no names, no paint swatches.”

That is incredible, don’t you think? Can you imagine these people working in nail polish companies and arguing that this shade of pink is different is different from that shade of pink, and the marketing manager going, “We can’t sell that! They look the same to me!”

To see if I have the colour vision to work for OPI or China Glaze, I took this test: How well do you see colour?

The idea is to arrange the colours in order from lightest to darkest. At the end you get a score between 0 and 99. The closer to 0 you are, the higher your colour acuity.

Here’s what I did.

Score of 4! Well, I bloody better be getting low scores considering I blog about colours!

What is your score? And have you read the amazing Brent Week books?

Singapore national day nail art 2011

Alicia’s nails

Liwen’s nails

Serena’s nails

Nails for charity

Nail painting for the needy, anyone? As part of our company’s charity drive, Liyen and I offered nail painting services for $10. The proceeds went to MIND, TOUCH and Kwong Wai Shui Hospital and Nursing Home. Here were the results:

Maggie’s nails, OPI Alpine Snow (matte), China Glaze Snow Globe and jewels

Weifen’s nails, random OPI red polish, China Glaze Sugar High, China Glaze Something Sweet, jewels

PJ’s nails, Chanel Diabolic, Maybelline Cloudy Grey, jewels

Cammy’s nails, China Glaze For Audrey, Orly Snowcone, white nail striper pen

Yingmin’s nails, Pop Beauty O Boy, random sparkly OPI, jewels

Huifang’s nails, Orly Snowcone, MAC Blue India, Zoya Charla, jewels (this is essentially the blue version of Weifen’s nails)

Jac’s nails, Zoya Moxie, MAC Originality, white nail striper pen, jewels

Vida’s nails, China Glaze Peachy Keen, Orly Pointe Blanche

 

Cynthia’s nails, China Glaze Something Sweet, random sparkly OPI

Liyen’s nails, OPI Parlez-vous OPI?, China Glaze Millenium

Liyen’s nails, China Glaze Sugar High, China Glaze Snow Globe, jewels