Color Club : Sugar Plum Yum

A festival of glitter for you today: Color Club Sugar Plum Yum, from the Scent-Suous holiday collection 2011. This collection is exclusive to Sally Beauty Supply and took a lot of people by surprise, mostly because it just kind of appeared one day with next to no fanfare and very little promotion at all. The whole collection is Christmas themed and scented, with three chunky glitters and three foils, and when I saw swatches online I knew I had to try and get them all!

Sugar Plum Yum is a fun combination of hexagon glitters: green (small pieces) and purple (various larger sizes) that smells like fruity candy (I assume it's meant to be sugar plums but I don't know what those actually smell like in real life!). It's also a tease: I took a million pictures of this polish and never quite managed to capture how insanely sparkly and pretty it is in real life. My camera was so overwhelmed by the glitter that it simply refused to focus properly!

Application is.... interesting (though with glitter this chunky, it was never going to be that straightforward!). You can apply it like a regular polish if all you want is a few decorative hexagons over the top of another colour, but if you want a full on glitter mani like this, you're going to have to adopt the 'blob' approach. Scoop out a blob of glitter, plonk it on the centre of the nail, then use the brush to  spread it around a little like you're icing a cake. Luckily, the glitter in this polish is very dense, so this approach is opaque in two coats if you're careful (though you might have to go back and fill in a couple of bare patches here and there).

You may well recoil in horror at the thought of two thick layers of goopy glitter on your nails, visions of an 8 hour drying time flashing before your eyes, but actually it's not that bad. Drying time was impressively fast and the whole thing was dry in about the same amount of time as you'd wait for three coats of regular polish (though not a fast drying variety). Once it's dry, you're left with a very rough surface; the larger hexagons tend to be rather curly and don't lie completely flat on the nail. This wouldn't bother me that much (I'm prepared to forgive a lack of smoothness for the awesome sparkle!) except the glitter kept catching on my hair, so I added two thick coats of Orly Sec 'N' Dry as top coat and the surface was significantly smoothed - still a little bumpy, but I think another coat of Sec 'N' Dry would actually have sorted that out and it'd have been almost as smooth as a non glitter manicure. Interestingly, the top coat seemed to make the glitter sparkle even more!

(Picture taken in different lighting to try and show the sparkle: you can see the purple much better here).

I was a little nervous about these being scented polishes: I've had ones in the past that you could smell three rooms away and which gave me a headache, but happily the scent on Sugar Plum Yum is much more subtle than that and you only really smell it if you put your nails near your face: not so weak that you wonder what the point in bothering with the scent was, but not so strong as to be invasive. Conversely, I could still smell it after those two layers of top coat and the strength was only slightly diminished. My son was most excited about the polish being scented and kept wanting to sniff my nails!

One last attempt to show the glitter, which shows up much better when the image is extremely blurred! This polish really is insanely sparkly and earned me a million compliments. I kept staring at my nails just to see them twinkling ^-^