Color Club Back to Boho : Nomadic in Nude

There's a lot of brands out there, most of them releasing special or limited edition collections, and usually I'll want one or two from this collection or that, but not all. There are a few brands, though, where I have to hide my wallet to prevent me buying everything they ever release ever - and Color Club is one of those brands. I can't decide if it's a shame that they're quite hard to get in the UK, or whether that's a blessing (for my wallet, at least) - but between TK Maxx and Ebay I seem to have amassed a nice enough collection of these little beauties in spite of the lack of 'proper' Color Club stockists over here!

Back to Boho was the 2011 Color Club autumn collection (that's fall, for those of you who are across the pond), a  shabby chic, vintage 70's styled collection that promised to bring 'Boho Glam' to your nails. Amongst the 12 was Nomadic in Nude, a pale putty nude creme that the press releases described as 'off white', though I'd say it was closer to grey-beige. I don't have a lot of nude polishes (most of them look a bit odd against my olive skin tone), but I loved the way this one looked in the bottle, so I tried it anyway.

Application - well, it's a creme. Not only that, but it's a pale creme (which for me tend to show the same application problems as pastel cremes), and kind of sheer to boot - so it was hard to get it completely even and smooth. It would have been better if I'd done three thin coats, I think - but I was impatient - instead I applied two thick coats, after which it was opaque, but a bit brush strokey. My fault more than the polish! Nonetheless, the formula was mostly nice - dried reasonably fast, went on smoothly (when I wasn't rushing it and blobbing it on too thick). I had no trouble with cuticle pooling, either. No clean up required :)

Wear was really very good indeed. It took over a week to chip and by that time there was only a small amount of tip wear despite my having spent a lot of time with my hands in water and even scrubbing things with a pot scourer!

What I liked:

The colour. It looked pretty nice even against my usually nude-hating skintone, against which most nudes tend to look too orange, or too pink. I liked how it looked almost white in some lights, grey in others, and even like pale chocolate milk at times.

The wear. It lasted forever!

What I didn't like:

It could have done with being a little more pigmented - then two thin coats would have sufficed. I dislike having to do more than two coats of polish (maybe I'm just lazy).

The formula wasn't quite as nice as some of the other Color Club polishes I've tried. It's very far from being horrible, though.

Stash or Trash?

Definitely stash. I can see me using this one as a palette cleanser, as well as a nice neutral/nude polish that doesn't make me cringe to see it against my skintone.

Color Club : Sugar Plum Yum

A festival of glitter for you today: Color Club Sugar Plum Yum, from the Scent-Suous holiday collection 2011. This collection is exclusive to Sally Beauty Supply and took a lot of people by surprise, mostly because it just kind of appeared one day with next to no fanfare and very little promotion at all. The whole collection is Christmas themed and scented, with three chunky glitters and three foils, and when I saw swatches online I knew I had to try and get them all!

Sugar Plum Yum is a fun combination of hexagon glitters: green (small pieces) and purple (various larger sizes) that smells like fruity candy (I assume it's meant to be sugar plums but I don't know what those actually smell like in real life!). It's also a tease: I took a million pictures of this polish and never quite managed to capture how insanely sparkly and pretty it is in real life. My camera was so overwhelmed by the glitter that it simply refused to focus properly!

Application is.... interesting (though with glitter this chunky, it was never going to be that straightforward!). You can apply it like a regular polish if all you want is a few decorative hexagons over the top of another colour, but if you want a full on glitter mani like this, you're going to have to adopt the 'blob' approach. Scoop out a blob of glitter, plonk it on the centre of the nail, then use the brush to  spread it around a little like you're icing a cake. Luckily, the glitter in this polish is very dense, so this approach is opaque in two coats if you're careful (though you might have to go back and fill in a couple of bare patches here and there).

You may well recoil in horror at the thought of two thick layers of goopy glitter on your nails, visions of an 8 hour drying time flashing before your eyes, but actually it's not that bad. Drying time was impressively fast and the whole thing was dry in about the same amount of time as you'd wait for three coats of regular polish (though not a fast drying variety). Once it's dry, you're left with a very rough surface; the larger hexagons tend to be rather curly and don't lie completely flat on the nail. This wouldn't bother me that much (I'm prepared to forgive a lack of smoothness for the awesome sparkle!) except the glitter kept catching on my hair, so I added two thick coats of Orly Sec 'N' Dry as top coat and the surface was significantly smoothed - still a little bumpy, but I think another coat of Sec 'N' Dry would actually have sorted that out and it'd have been almost as smooth as a non glitter manicure. Interestingly, the top coat seemed to make the glitter sparkle even more!

(Picture taken in different lighting to try and show the sparkle: you can see the purple much better here).

I was a little nervous about these being scented polishes: I've had ones in the past that you could smell three rooms away and which gave me a headache, but happily the scent on Sugar Plum Yum is much more subtle than that and you only really smell it if you put your nails near your face: not so weak that you wonder what the point in bothering with the scent was, but not so strong as to be invasive. Conversely, I could still smell it after those two layers of top coat and the strength was only slightly diminished. My son was most excited about the polish being scented and kept wanting to sniff my nails!

One last attempt to show the glitter, which shows up much better when the image is extremely blurred! This polish really is insanely sparkly and earned me a million compliments. I kept staring at my nails just to see them twinkling ^-^

Color Club : Jack 'n' Jill

Today I have an especially fun manicure to share. Fun for me, anyway, because it's my first Color Club polish and I'm in love!

(partial shade)

Jack 'n' Jill is a pretty, bright, blue toned fuchsia pink with a fine blue shimmer (which proved very hard to photograph; the blue is much more obvious in real life, especially in the bottle and in direct sunshine). Bright and cheerful, it's a really fun colour, not so bright it's neon, but bright enough to get noticed, and definitely made me smile - and this is coming from someone who doesn't wear a lot of pink normally (though having tried this one, I'm tempted to explore the world of pink a little more!).

(full shade)

The formula is almost to die for: beautifully fluid, even and non-streaky, with a brush that picks up just the right amount and doesn't make a mess of your cuticles (no clean up has been done in any of these pictures). It's a little sheer, needing 3 coats to be opaque, but it more than makes up for this by being very quick to dry and of course since it's not too thick, each coat is thin enough to discourage chipping.

(direct sunlight)

Wear was great; barely any tip wear after three full days. The blue shimmer in the bottle translates on the nail into more of a blueish 'glow' when in direct sunlight, which makes for a nice effect, bordering on duochrome.

A nice touch for me was the cute flower adorning the top of the lid. It's little things like this that make a difference to me (I know, I'm fickle, but ya gotta love cute packaging, right?)

I'm really pleased with this mani and I'm looking forward to trying more Color Club polishes in the future: the formula is just so nice, and as an extra bonus, the Color Club range contains all sorts of really pretty and unusual colours not seen elsewhere.

Random fact of the day: Originally, I only bought this polish because of the name. I'm a play-by-post roleplayer and two of my writing partner's characters are called Jack and Jill. Sad? Probably... but I don't care, hehe. Look what a great discovery my writing addiction led me towards!