Barry M : Silvery Lilac

I have an unusual polish to share with you today: Silvery Lilac, from Barry M.

I don't usually get on all that well with lilac polishes - they give me lobster hands. But this one is a foil, and I love foils, plus it's unusual to find a foil amongst the drugstore brands that isn't just silver or gold. Also, it's a duochrome. Foil AND duochrome?? Sold. 

This is a real chameleon polish, almost a multichrome; in some lights it appears silver, in others a dusty lilac, sometimes a sort of shimmery gunmetal shade, and at certain angles it even looks green. Although in the bottle the green flash is quite obvious, it's less visible on the nail, but not completely lost. It's very sheer, but three coats is enough to reach opacity. These pictures are of three coats, and you can still see a little VNL, but it's not visible in real life.

This shot shows the green duochrome flash quite nicely. It's a subtle effect, but adds an ethereal sort of 'glow' to the polish that makes me think of fairies or unicorns.

Application is pleasant, but not perfect. It goes on nicely, not too thick or thin, and the brush is decent. I didn't need to do any clean up with this one. It is a little prone to bubbling though, and the drying time could be faster, so several thin coats are preferable to fewer thick ones (you can see on my index finger where I got a bit impatient and used a thicker coat, resulting in a few bubbles, though again this is invisible in real life. Cameras are not kind!). 

Please excuse the blurry camera phone shot here - I wanted to show how Silvery Lilac becomes a darker lilac/gunmetal kind of shade when lit indirectly, and I found that my camera phone was better at capturing the lilac tones in this polish. My digital camera preferred to see the silvery side :-p

Pros: 

I loved the colour and had a lot of compliments on it too. It's shiny and pretty and unusual, but in a muted kind of way - you could still wear this to work, for instance.

Wear was great - 3 days in, no topcoat, and I am only just starting to see tipwear.

Cons:

The formula could be better. It's sheer. Though I wonder if that would make it good for layering... hmmm...

Prone to bubbling (though only very slightly, can be avoided by careful application)

Stash or Trash?

Stash. I really like this polish and will be experimenting with it for layering too.

Nail Art : Jubilee Nails

Happy Jubilee weekend, everyone!

Just in case you're not from the UK and you have no idea what I'm wittering on about, this weekend marked the official celebration of our Queen's 60th year Diamond Jubilee. Most of us had a four day weekend (today is the Diamond Jubilee bank holiday, the last of the 4 days of celebration) and the entire country turned into a sea of Union Jack bunting and tea parties on the village green. Yesterday I went to a Jubilee Fair in the town closest to us; we saw jousting, archery, stunt bikes, scrambled through laser gun mazes and danced the samba around the field. There was live music, food, arts and crafts, quad bikes, bungee jumping, fairground rides and all manner of celebration.

I felt rather festive so I decided to try my hand at a Jubilee manicure - here is the result!

Sorry it's not the best picture - I snapped it quickly on my phone camera before we dashed out of the door. I used Rimmel My Denim for the blue, Rimmel white french tip for the white, Nails Inc Victoria for the red, Barry M Red Glitter for the red sparkle and Mavala Silver Glitter for the silver. Oh, and some little crystals from the nail art box :)

I know it's not the neatest nail art ever, but I was really pressed for time and I'm happy with how it turned out considering it only took about half an hour!

What did you do for the jubilee? Did you have fun?

Barry M Instant Nail Effects : Gold Foil 320

Good news, I found the battery charger for my camera at last! You no longer have to put up with the dreadful camera phone pictures I've been inflicting on you recently :D

In way of celebration, I decided to paint my nails with Barry M Instant Nail Effects, in Gold Foil 320.

This blingtastic gold foil paint is supposed to look something like a Minx nail wrap, and, well, it doesn't really. It's nowhere near as shiny as a wrap and instead of polished, mirror-like gold, it has an almost-but-not-quite matte, 'brushed metal' kind of finish that I guess you could describe as 'satin metallic'. If nail wraps are the shiny effect of cooking foil, then this polish is the less shiny reverse side. However, it's still utterly gorgeous!

This polish is VERY pigmented; I kid you not when I say it was opaque in one coat; though I actually used two because it made it look smoother and more wrap-like than it appeared at just one coat. As it's such a smooth foil effect, it does unfortunately show up every imperfection in your nails, though it isn't as obvious in real life as it is in these pictures (close up photography and macro can be so brutal!). Regardless, unless your nails are in really good shape, you're going to need a good base coat, preferably a ridge filling one. You're also going to need to apply this stuff with confident, even brush strokes, because like most metallic foils, it's prone to brush marks if you stop to faff around or go back over already wet areas - though again this is less obvious in real life and also improved by adding a second coat. The formula helps make this easier than it could have been, since it's not too runny and not too thick and applies nicely; the brush isn't a bad shape either. Drying time is pretty decent; one coat dries very quickly, two takes a little longer, but nothing arduous.

Close up, with flash. As you can see, when the light hits it, this polish gleams! It might not be full on polished metal Minx effect, but it's very definitely gold, and actually I love the semi-matte effect; it means that most of the time this polish is subtle, not too in your face, and just shines and catches the eye when you move your fingers. I wore this at work and wasn't even the least self conscious about having garish nails. Two days later and there's still no tip wear or chipping anywhere. I'm really impressed!

Oh, and for those of you that are into stamping nail art; I'm told that this polish is very good for stamping!

Barry M Nail Paint : Berry Ice Cream

Okay so firstly let me apologise up front for the quality of these pictures; I'm still stuck taking pictures on a not very good camera, and although I normally edit my pictures on a computer, this time I tried to do it with the camera's built in editing software. It was meant to just be an experiment to see how the software fared  (I think we know the answer to that one, sigh) and didn't realise that it wouldn't keep the original images. And by the time I realised this, I'd taken off the mani and painted my nails another colour. I'll try and revisit this one another time when I have my new camera (a much awaited christmas present), but for now, here's a lesson in how NOT to take pictures of a manicure.

The poor long suffering nail polish that I've put through this indignation is Berry Ice Cream, from Barry M.

(Image manipulation lesson one: do not use an app that, on cropping an image, automatically blows up what you've got left over to the point everything turns pixellated and blurry. Those are my nails, in case you can't tell any more :-/ )

Berry Ice Cream is aptly named, since it makes me think of ice cream or milkshakes when I look at it. It's a  pink toned lilac creme that's mostly opaque in one coat, although a little prone to bald spots which is why I've used two coats here. It comes in the standard Barry M square bottle with a standard thin brush, nothing revolutionary here although it applies nicely enough, with its thick creamy formula (something that seems to be common amongst pastel toned polishes in general) you don't really need special brushes as you won't have too many problems getting the polish to go (and stay) where it's supposed to be. Like many other pastels, it also takes a while to dry - not unbearably so, but enough that you can't just slap it on and forget about it. It's also rather prone to denting for a while after it's touch dry. This is probably because the thick formula prevents the polish from being applied thinly, so everything just takes longer.

(Lesson two: don't let the app decide to alter your colour balance. The polish will look about the right colour, which is a bonus, but your hand will take on a weird greenish colour and people will think you're an alien)


Once it's properly dry, Berry Ice Cream is really nice to wear. I got two days out of it before the tip wear was noticeable, and it didn't chip until day 3. It did look a little strange against my olive skin tone, since lilac doesn't really suit me (not that I let this stop me - I don't think there's a single colour I wouldn't try), but that's my skin's fault and not the polish! It's a really nice colour and I like how it can't quite seem to decide if it's purple or pink, depending on the light you view it in.

One thing that kept occurring to me whenever I looked at this polish was that it would be really fun to have something this colour, but scented like ice cream. You could have a whole range of shades and scents: mint, berry, vanilla, chocolate... scented nail polish is coming back in at the moment, so maybe I won't have to wait too long before I can enjoy Neapolitan scented nails!

Barry M Instant Nail Effects : Black Magic

Today's mani was at the request of my 7-year old son, who volunteered to choose my next colour, and picked out my bottle of Barry M's crackle polish (he likes the crackle effect and loves to watch it appear, and try to work out how it happens). There's a lot of crackle polishes out there; seems like every brand has jumped on the bandwagon in every colour thinkable, from black to pastels, brights and metallics, but Barry M was one of the first to start this craze and I still prefer their version to most of the others, mostly because its crackle pattern seems better and more reproducible than I've seen in swatches of other brands.

I thought it would look good over yesterday's gold mani, it looks pretty with the metallic gold peeking through the cracks don't you think? Here you see two coats of Aztec with one coat of Black Magic, no top coat. Application is interesting; if you put it on thinly you get a small crackle that reminds me of lizard skin, whilst thicker coats give this dry river-bed like effect with larger chunks of black and wider cracks between them.

Drying time is lightning-fast, a nice side effect of the crackle effect (it has to dry quickly to make the cracks form). Unfortunately this fast evaporation process also means it evaporates quickly in the bottle, too. I've only opened my bottle 3 or 4 times so far and yet it's starting to get claggy around the neck where I wipe the excess off the brush. This doesn't seem to affect the application, luckily - a couple of quick swipes of the standard style brush across the nail and you can watch the cracks appear!

Unfortunately, beyond the speed and thickness of application, and the fact they tend to follow the line of the brush strokes, you can't really control where the 'chunks' will appear. So sometimes you get a weird looking nail (that you probably notice more than other people, in all honesty) but despite this, it's a really fun effect that gets a lot of comments and compliments. I've used this polish with top coat before (it's usually matte) and it made it look kind of like snakeskin!