Collection 2000 Hot Looks : Electric Dream

I almost didn't go through with today's post as it's been nothing but an exercise in frustration! For one thing, my cuticles just don't want to behave at the moment. They laugh in the face of cuticle remover and shrug off the attentions of cuticle creams and oils. I knew I shouldn't have done so much housework this weekend! And then to make matters worse, I chose this colour to wear.

Introducing Electric Dream, from Collection 2000. It's an absolutely gorgeous turquoise/teal creme. And herein lies the problem. See this picture, where it looks blue? It doesn't look like that at all. It's a lot more green in real life. I took about a million pictures on more than one camera, and every time it came out blue. For some reason, the green in this polish just doesn't want to be photographed...so here's something else that will hopefully give you all a better idea.

Imagine this colour in both of my photos here instead of that blue, and you'll be picturing what my nails actually look like! Colour accuracy frustrations aside, here's what I actually thought of the polish itself.

Hot Looks is Collection 2000's fast drying range, and while it's not so fast that I'd attempt a full manicure with it when I only had 15 minutes spare, it's certainly not slow either. It comes with a pretty decent formula that applies nicely (I particularly like the brush on these, it's a nice texture, flat and has a rounded end that makes for nice tidy cuticles) and is opaque in two to three coats - I used two and it looked opaque to the naked eye, but when I took pictures you could still see faint visible nail line. Honestly it would have been fine to leave it but I came over all perfectionist and added a third, which also slightly deepened the colour towards the green end of the spectrum (not that my camera wanted you to see that, grr). It also added a bubble to my middle finger, but really that was my fault for being in a hurry and not being careful, not through any problems with the formula.

Wear was average to good - there was a little tip wear at the end of the day but nothing terrible, and I did have my hands in water quite a lot. I also didn't use any top coat for this polish so you'd expect a slightly shorter wear time than if I'd armoured it up with a layer of the glossy stuff. After two days the tip wear was maybe a little worse but there were no chips at all.

Considering that this polish is a startlingly cheap £1.79 for 8ml (and right now they're 2 for £3 in Superdrug), I think this polish is pretty awesome and certainly rivals a lot of more expensive brands. It goes on nicely, lasts a respectable amount of time, and looks really pretty (the range has all sorts of bright and cheerful colours available). I'd definitely recommend picking a few up to try!

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 :-/

Collection 2000 Hot Looks - Spangles

I must apologise for not posting much recently; it's all been a bit manic here with the lead up to Christmas, mad shopping and trying to get work done so I can have 2 weeks off, and quite frankly, swatching hasn't happened much! I've painted my nails intending to photograph them, then life happened and by the time I had the opportunity to take pix, the polish was all chipped. Anyway, hopefully I can make up for it with the posts I've got lined up waiting for you :)

Today's polish isn't even slightly festive looking! I wanted to post lots of Christmassy swatches but nearly all my gorgeous festive polishes are the kind that my camera refuses to work with. So here, for your viewing pleasure, is a polish with a festive name but a very non festive appearance. Yuletide sparkle will have to wait until the new year (4 days til the new camera, people! I'm so excited I might burst!)

Spangles is one of Collection 2000's Hot Looks polishes, which means cheap and cheerful, quick drying, brightly coloured bottles with a teeny price that more than makes up for any other failings it might have. This one is a particularly bright shade of Acid/Lime/Shrek the Ogre Green (did anyone else expect it to be glittery with a name like Spangles? I know I did, but hey ho. Not the first time a polish was oddly named).

It applies a bit weirdly - I don't know if my bottle was just old, but it tended to be a bit gloopy and even stringy in places. Despite the gloop, it still needed three coats to be properly opaque due to its tendancy to dry patchy and show VNL. Drying time was average; not particularly fast despite its fast dry label, but not painful either. Once dry, it was actually pretty decent to wear - although in these pictures it looks a bit blobbed on and uneven, it actually looks much smoother in real life, and it wore well without chipping for two days.

Now, I know it kind of gives me red lobster hands (mmm, attractive), and maybe lime green isn't really my colour, but I actually quite like this polish. It's cheap and cheerful, a fun and unusual colour, and it makes me smile. It's not the best formula I've ever seen, but it's not terrible either and at the grand price of £1.79 you can't really complain!