SpaRitual : Up At Noon

I woke up the other morning thinking 'it's been too long since I had a SpaRitual manicure'.

(Yes, I'm aware that waking up already thinking about nail polish is a sign of obsession, but I'm beyond help so just humour me, ok?)

Anyway. I have a decent sized stash of SpaRitual in my cupboard, so I stuck my hand in at random and pulled out this little pretty here:

Introducing Up At Noon. Ah, those were the days... before I had a child, I could get up at noon every day. Well, okay, maybe not every day... I did still have to work. Weekends, though... weekends were definitely for staying in bed and watching TV or just plain snoozing the morning away. It was wonderful and lazy and it felt so good - then motherhood came along and the rest is history. Let's just say, the day they bring out a polish called 'Up at 6.30am', they darn well better send me a whole crate of it for free. Until that day, I'll just have to wear this polish instead and call it irony.

Up At Noon is, at first glance, a bright pink, shot through with a violet shimmer (which makes a nice change from the far more common blue shimmer you tend to see in other pinks along these lines). That's not all you get, though. The pink shifts to orange at certain angles and in certain lights. I wouldn't say it's strong enough to call it a true duochrome effect, but it is pretty! The first picture above is how it looks most of the time, with the pink/violet effect most visible. The second picture shows the more orange side to this polish. It's more obvious in real life than it seems in pictures, and much more obvious in the bottle than on the nail.

Another shot of the pink/orange/violet shift. You can see the orange most clearly at the tip and edges of the nail, and the violet in the middle by the light reflection.

Formula wise this is pretty great - applied beautifully, drying time was reasonably fast even with three coats. Apart from a bit of tip wear (and a chip near one cuticle that was entirely my fault for being cack handed), the polish still looks perfect three days later. The only fault I can find is that it's very sheer. If you have short nails, you'll get away with three coats, but long nailed girls will probably need four unless you're not too bothered about visible nail line. In these pictures I am wearing three coats, and although you can't see the VNL too badly here, it's a lot more obvious in real life. The next time I wear this, I will be layering it over a pink creme (I am far too lazy and impatient busy to wait for four coats of polish to dry. Just blame it on 8 years of Not Getting Up At Noon Any More).

Pros:

I liked the colour. Almost fluorescent pink in bright light, orange/muted pink in subdued lighting, violet flashes everywhere. Pretty :)

The formula is mostly great - not too thick or thin, applies nicely, drying time not too bad.

Wears well. I'm doing a TON of typing at work at the moment and still only have a little tipwear after three days.

I love the bottle shape and the rubber cap on SpaRitual polishes. The brush is good, too. 

Cons:

It's too sheer for my liking. Needs at least 4 coats to get rid of VNL (or layering over something more opaque)

Stash or Trash?

Definitely stash. I haven't found a SpaRitual polish I don't like yet. I also love this polish as a pedicure :)

Rimmel I Love Lasting Finish : Tangy Tangerine

Today's manicure is a sweet Rimmel I picked up a couple of weeks ago when I was in Asda (well, a girl's got to have treats to get her through the weekly grocery shop, right?). Although I'm not really into orange as a colour in general, it's really been growing on me as a manicure colour these last few months and when I saw this one, Tangy Tangerine, I had to just slip it into my basket.

Now I don't normally get on that well with pastel colours like baby pink and lilac (they look funny against my olive skin tone), and let's face it, the nail polish market is fairly saturated with those sorts of colours too. This one just seems a little bit more unusual, though... a pastel orange? Yes, please :) I love that it's bright, yet muted at the same time: a good colour to try if you want to dabble in the summery bright citrus polishes out there, yet don't want to take the plunge into full on neon territory.

Unfortunately the application was a lot more of a pain than I've come to expect from Rimmel's I Love Lasting Finish formula; it tended to be streaky despite the fact it's well pigmented, and needed to be applied quite thickly to counteract this. This is pretty standard for most pastels, though; I don't think I've used one yet that was a dream to apply. These pictures show three coats, over one coat of Nail Envy, with a top coat of Orly Sec 'N' Dry. Even with the Sec 'N' Dry it took ages to dry completely, something which is demonstrated quite well by the sheet mark on my middle nail, obtained when I went to the bathroom over an hour later :-/

What I liked about Tangy Tangerine:
It's a really pretty colour - bright enough to be eyecatching but muted enough you could still wear it at the office. I love that it's an orange pastel - definitely less common than some of the bog standard baby pinks and lilacs out there.
It wears well once it's completely dry. Two days in and no tipwear yet.
The brush is nice. Not as nice as their rounded pro brushes or the mini versions of the pro that come with their 60 second polishes, but it's soft enough and wide enough to flatten out nicely on the nail and give you good coverage and a tidy cuticle line. The pictures above show no clean-up whatsoever.

What I didn't like about Tangy Tangerine:
Like most other pastels, it manages to be both thick and streaky at the same time.
It takes forever to dry, mostly because it's thick.

Keep it or Bin it?
Keep, unless somebody comes out with a very similar colour without the application problems. It's a really good pedi colour too, really summery and cheerful :)

W7 : Orange Dazzle

Happy Friday everyone! The weekend is here at last and I have such a fun polish to show you today!

Artificial Light

This cheerful bottle of sunshine was a present from a good friend of mine who knows how much I love glitter! It's called Orange Dazzle, from W7. It's a juicy, fruity orange jelly that's jam packed with glitter - the glitter looks mostly silver and orange, depending on whether it's on the surface or submerged in the orange base. I like that it's a kind of muted glitter effect; definitely glitter, but not in your face sparkly. It kind of reminds me of a coarser version of China Glaze Riveting (which I don't have but have been drooling over swatches of it for a while now). It also makes me think of yummy fresh oranges, it's so fruity and fresh looking. The orange is really bright too - not QUITE neon, but very, very close to it. I tried holding it under my blacklight and it did glow quite effectively!

Natural Light

I don't know if my bottle is old, but it was kind of thick, bordering on gloopy. That didn't seem to make it any harder to apply, though; actually it kind of helped that it's thick because it made it easier to spread the glitter evenly on my nails without bald spots in between (don't you just hate when glitter clumps like that? This one is dense and stays that way even on the nail). It's pretty sheer so if you don't want to use a coloured base, you'll need at least three coats to avoid VNL. I'm too impatient to wait all day for polish to dry, so normally anything that needs more than two coats puts me off - but not so with Orange Dazzle; it dried pretty fast despite its thickness so 3 coats wasn't a big deal.

Wear was A-MAZING. I kid you not, this stuff lasted through heavy typing, housework, being soaked in water and all other kinds of abuse for FOUR DAYS before it even showed the slightest HINT of tip wear. And even then I had to squint to see it. See that mark on my index finger cuticle? Five minutes after putting this polish on, I scratched that cuticle quite badly and had to wait four days before it healed and I could take pictures. As you can see, the scratch has almost gone, and yet the manicure looks almost exactly like it did on day one. 

Isn't it just so juicy looking? It makes me want to go and drink a cool glass of OJ :-p

Removal was a bit of a pain, but you'd expect that with glitter - and actually it wasn't that bad compared to some of the glitters I've tried. You don't quite have to resort to tinfoil and cotton pads. Interestingly, when I started removing it, the glitter took on a duochrome effect, shifting between silver and green. I suspect it was actually this colour all along but the orange jelly hides the green; you can't even see it in the bottle. It was pretty enough that I might try wearing this polish again and deliberately wipe the surface over with polish remover to see if the effect will reappear - an orange polish with green duochrome glitter would be amazing!