Miss Sporty: Clubbing Colours 320 (Pop Fiction)

Today's NOTD is Miss Sporty's Pop Fiction, from the Clubbing Colours collection.

Miss Sporty is one of those surprise drugstore brands with polish that costs very little, but turns out to actually be rather good indeed. I'm far from a drugstore snob; if it does a good job and doesn't cost much, then so much the better!

There are several types of polish in the Miss Sporty range; Clubbing Colours is their quick dry version and is available in a range of vibrant and cheerful shades. Pop Fiction (the bottle doesn't have a name; it just says 320, but the shelf and the website both claim otherwise!) is a glorious cobalt blue, very bright and rich with a slight periwinkle tone to it that I couldn't seem to capture with my camera. 

A creme, it dries fast despite its quite thick formula, needs only two coats, and has a decent, rounded brush that reminds me of a smaller version of the Rimmel Lycra Pro maxi brush - ie. it makes application fast, easy and practically mistake free.

Wear was okay - two coats had some tip wear after one day, but that was without top coat and with a lot of typing. And I got a lot of comments on this colour! It's very eye catching and pretty; I'll definitely be wearing this colour again.

Color Club : Jack 'n' Jill

Today I have an especially fun manicure to share. Fun for me, anyway, because it's my first Color Club polish and I'm in love!

(partial shade)

Jack 'n' Jill is a pretty, bright, blue toned fuchsia pink with a fine blue shimmer (which proved very hard to photograph; the blue is much more obvious in real life, especially in the bottle and in direct sunshine). Bright and cheerful, it's a really fun colour, not so bright it's neon, but bright enough to get noticed, and definitely made me smile - and this is coming from someone who doesn't wear a lot of pink normally (though having tried this one, I'm tempted to explore the world of pink a little more!).

(full shade)

The formula is almost to die for: beautifully fluid, even and non-streaky, with a brush that picks up just the right amount and doesn't make a mess of your cuticles (no clean up has been done in any of these pictures). It's a little sheer, needing 3 coats to be opaque, but it more than makes up for this by being very quick to dry and of course since it's not too thick, each coat is thin enough to discourage chipping.

(direct sunlight)

Wear was great; barely any tip wear after three full days. The blue shimmer in the bottle translates on the nail into more of a blueish 'glow' when in direct sunlight, which makes for a nice effect, bordering on duochrome.

A nice touch for me was the cute flower adorning the top of the lid. It's little things like this that make a difference to me (I know, I'm fickle, but ya gotta love cute packaging, right?)

I'm really pleased with this mani and I'm looking forward to trying more Color Club polishes in the future: the formula is just so nice, and as an extra bonus, the Color Club range contains all sorts of really pretty and unusual colours not seen elsewhere.

Random fact of the day: Originally, I only bought this polish because of the name. I'm a play-by-post roleplayer and two of my writing partner's characters are called Jack and Jill. Sad? Probably... but I don't care, hehe. Look what a great discovery my writing addiction led me towards!

Revlon: Tropical Temptation

Today's swatch is an exciting one (for me, anyway): I won this polish in a prize draw! Run by the people at Dare! Magazine (the free in-store mag from Superdrug), the prize was a Revlon nail enamel and since I'm one of those people who never seems to win anything, imagine my excitement when this little beauty arrived in my mail!

Introducing Tropical Temptation! Isn't she pretty?

This polish is a lovely bright cheerful coral; not as bright as some of the others I own, but certainly no shrinking violet either. Just like most corals, it suffers from an identity crisis: is it pink? Is it orange? Surely it can't be both at the same time?? Either way, it's a great summery colour and helped make up for the sunshine we're sadly lacking in around here at the moment!

Leaning towards the pinker end of the coral spectrum than most, it goes on smoothly and cleanly - the brush looks like nothing special but is fairly nifty at doing a tidy job around the edges (pictures here are shown with no clean up). The formula is fairly nice, thin enough to apply easily without being watery, but it's rather streaky: it could be opaque after two coats with very careful application but I needed three to cover up the couple of bald patches in an otherwise clean and glossy surface.

I'm not sure how well it wears as I took it off after one day; I had a meeting the next day that wasn't coral-appropriate. But there was no sign of wear after that one day despite lots of typing.

Revlon are a fairly new brand to me polish wise; I only have one other (Gold Get 'Em), but between the two, I'm pretty impressed so far and plan to test out some others as soon as I can.

Rimmel Lycra Pro : Oyster Pink

Today's mani is an unusual one for me: I'm not usually a pink polish person (and when I do wear it, it's usually more at the fuchsia end of the spectrum), so you won't be seeing too many posts like this. But never let it be said that I don't enjoy pushing the limits of my comfort zone! Oh, and excuse the somewhat bizarre pictures and lack of cuticle preparation: I didn't plan to take these until the following day, but half way home from work the sun came out! It's been so overcast recently that taking any sort of swatch pictures has been alnost impossible, so I of course screeched to a halt and took swatch pictures right there in my car at the side of the road. Good job too; it poured with rain 5 minutes later and for the rest of the day!

Rimmel Lycra Pro (anyone noticed yet that I have a lot of Rimmel? I have a LOT of it. I love Rimmel, plus it has a display right there in the shop I get all my groceries from. It's just too tempting. I'll be reviewing other things too, I swear!) is the earlier formulation of what is now called Lycra Pro Colour Memory, and shares its 10 day finish claim and awesome mistake-free maxi brush.

The shade I'm wearing today is called Oyster Pink, a shimmery frosted pearly pink that looks kind of salmon colored in the bottle, but lighter on the nail. When I first bought it, I was a little concerned that it would turn out to be a little.. well... grannyish. Is that even a word? When I saw it in the bottle I was reminded of the old fashioned frosty pinks my grandma used to wear, back when nail polish came in pretty much two shades: tarty red and nondescript frosty pinkish-salmonish-beige. I decided to try it anyway, and I'm glad I took the risk.

Shown here are three coats over one layer of base coat. It's pretty sheer; you'd have to use a lot of layers to make it opaque, but then it isn't really supposed to be. To be honest two coats would have been enough, there was very little difference between the second and third (except for me being in a hurry to get finished and leave for work, thereby rushing the 3rd coat and introducing the horrendous bubbles on my middle finger and the strange line on my ring - ignore those, it's my fault, not the polish!).

Drying time was pleasantly short and application was a breeze, I didn't do any clean up at all and yet the result was pretty tidy (especially considering the speed I was working, about a minute per hand!). The frost finish was less pronounced on the nail than in the bottle - sometimes frost can mean obvious brush marks and frosty looking 'smears' where the pearl pigment isn't evenly spread, but here it translated to a nice, even pearlised glow rather than an obvious frost. I'm sure the wide brush helped matters here, only having to swipe twice per nail leads to far fewer brush marks!

Wear was good although I only wore it for one day; I took it off that evening because my red hair dye stained the polish a strange rusty colour!

Rimmel London Lyrcra Pro Colour Memory: Peppermint

Today's mani is actually three days old; the moment I first laid brush to nail the skies opened up and it's done nothing but rain ever since. I've taken a million indoors pictures and none of them do justice to the awesome minty green of this polish, but with rain continuing to fall and my fingers itching to change my mani to another colour, I've decided to post the best I've got for now and replace them with better ones when the sun is shining!

Rimmel Lycra Pro polishes are a favourite of mine; they generally have a decent, easy to work with formula, a not too slow drying time, they go on evenly and they last longer than most of the other polishes in my stash (although I'm not sure about the ten day claim they make; I never keep a polish on that long!). They also come with the awesome maxi brush: a super wide brush with a rounded end that makes application dead easy, two swipes and the nail's covered, with nice tidy cuticles and not much need for clean up, if any. Up until recently the colours available in this range tended to be mostly vampy darks, play-safe pinks and the obligatory basic red, coral and nude shades - but all that has changed now as Rimmel have reformulated the range to include an 'anti colour fade' ingredient (not that I ever noticed it fading in the first place) and introduced some new, bright and cheerful shades for summer, including this eye catching fresh minty green: 'Peppermint'.

I loved this colour in the bottle, though once on my nails I loved it a little less - it seemed to lose some of it's zing. Although in all honesty this is probably because of my skin tone; I'm quite olive skinned and pale greens and other pastels don't always suit me. Application was good, two coats was enough to be completely opaque, it dried within 20 minutes even though the creme is quite thick and.. well... creamy (!), something that can sometimes slow drying time down. The finish was a semi-glossy satin 'sheen' like you often get with pastel cremes like this one. Pictures you see here are without topcoat, and as you can see after three days of wear and no top coat, there are no chips and next to no sign of tip wear.