Collection 2000 Hot Looks : Blue Hawaii

Happy New Year, everyone! Hope you all had a great end to 2011, and that 2012 is filled with promise and exciting new opportunities for all of us! New years bring change and new experiences and I have lots of fun things planned for this blog - watch this space!

Here's my first mani of the year : Collection 2000 Hot Looks, in Blue Hawaii. I received this polish as a Christmas gift and I really like its bright, almost milky sky blue, which makes me think of tropical islands. Yes, I know it's winter here, but recently I've really been craving hot summer colours on my nails. Must be the lack of sunshine from pretty much the whole of 2011 :(

Anyway. Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way first: this mani is not exactly well applied and looks rather blobby. There's a very good reason for this: 

Check out the nightmare brush! There's a split in the side of the 'stalk' and the bristles are escaping out of the side of it. I did the best I could, but you'll have to excuse my nails not being very tidy! I had to kind of blob it on with the side of the brush and it wasn't a whole lot of fun.

Now on to the polish itself. 

Despite the brush, I was actually really impressed with the application and formula of Blue Hawaii, which is actually a shade darker in real life than in these photos. It's creamy, thick (without being gloopy), and smooth, and could actually be a one coater if you're careful - shown here are two coats with topcoat, three on my ring finger because I dinged it just after application and the brush issues made it too traumatic to strip it all off and start again! Blue Hawaii is supposed to be a quick dry polish: I wouldn't call it that since it did take a while to dry - not painfully so, however, but long enough for me to resort to quick dry topcoat to give it a helping hand! As to wear, I'm torn. I chipped a nail on my other hand about 10 minutes after the mani finished drying. However, since fixing it, it's been well behaved ever since (8 hours and counting), so I'm inclined to say that wear is average overall. We'll see how it holds up tomorrow, since I'll be back at work and typing most of the day!

2012 blogging/new camera discovery number 1: Macro Is Brutal. You  know how you think your nails and cuticles look alright, right up until you see them in super-super-zoomed-in-close-up mode? Yeah, that. Please bear with me on this one - apparently, I have work to do :-/