Ebalay Golden Green

Good morning, beauties!
My card reader is finally here (after a two week wait and three increasingly irritated emails to the company I bought it from! It was meant to be next day delivery, what a joke!) and guess what? The polish I put on to review for you all just WON'T play nicely with my camera. No matter what I try, I can't get the colour to look right. Luckily my camera phone seems much more accommodating and the colour looks a lot more accurate, but how frustrating to wait all that time and still not use my proper camera!

Anyway, enough ranting. I have another polish from Ebalay to show you, courtesy of KKCenterHK. Just like all of Ebalay's polishes it doesn't have a proper name, just a number, but KKCenterHK have given it the description 'Golden Green'.

In the bottle (which reminds me of an OPI one) it does indeed have a gold/green colour, with a pinky/purply duochrome shift. I tried it on its own and it is incredibly sheer. After 5 coats I still had a ton of VNL. The colour was sort of pretty, but I didn't like the colour enough to warrant the zillion coats it would need to achieve opacity (and it didn't look good left with the VNL). Undeterred, I layered it over black to see if that made a difference, because many duochromes look better with black underwear. (Again, pictures are taken on a camera phone, so please excuse their slight dodginess)

CHECK OUT THE PRETTY!!

I almost fainted when this gorgeous, emerald, super-sparkly colour appeared. Where was this hiding in that bottle of goldish murk??

It's not just green, either. There's a strong shift to purple in some lights (which even my camera phone struggled to capture, but in real life it's a lot more obvious.

All the pictures in which I managed to catch the purple are blurry. Hopefully you can still appreciate how pretty this polish is despite the blur.

There's almost no trace of the gold colour in the bottle: the green is a definite rich emerald colour. But sooooo pretty. Lots of people complimented me on this manicure.

What I liked about Golden Green:

- Over black, it's a stunning green/purple duochrome, very sparkly and eyecatching

- As well as the OPI like bottle, it has a brush similar to OPI too. Application was pretty easy.

- Drying time was pleasantly fast, even with multiple layers

- Wear was pretty good. I didn't get tipwear until day three and no chips at all.

What I didn't like about Golden Green:

- I don't think the formula is 3-free. It pongs a bit!

- It's so sheer that you have to layer it to avoid VNL. Unless you have very short nails, bottle colour without VNL would only be possible if you layered it over something like a nude or maybe a gold colour.

Overall this is a really gorgeous polish and worth buying for the effect over black alone.

Golden Glow is available HERE from KKCenterHK. It's priced quite reasonably at £4.60 ($7.24),  KKCenterHK also offer a 10% discount until the 31st January 2013 to anybody using the code glitter-mountain at the checkout. (Use of this code does not benefit me in any way)

Disclaimer: this polish was sent to me as a free sample for consideration. My opinions remain my own and are unaffected by this.