Miss Sporty Crack Me Up Top Coat : Blue

This mani is courtesy of my next door neighbour, who swooped into my house brandishing her new bottle of Miss Sporty Crack Me Up polish, painted my nails with it, then ran away laughing before I could take a picture of the bottle. 

Unhelpfully, I can't seem to find a stock photo of it anywhere, either. So here's a helpful link to the Boots.com website, whereupon you can gaze upon the black version of this polish (you'll just have to picture it in blue, I'm afraid). 

Pictured is one coat, over Rimmel Your Majesty. Like all crackles, it dried quickly to a matte finish (I added a layer of top coat to make it shine). Compared to other crackles I've tried, the crackle effect is a bit more hit and miss. One finger on my other hand didn't crackle at all, and my ring finger on this hand crackled kind of strangely compared to the other nails. 

The cracks also tended to be mostly vertical - not so many crosswise cracks as I saw with the Barry M Instant Nail Effects and Rimmel Crack Your Colour. It was quite sheer, too, which I thought made for quite a nice effect over the silver Rimmel as it turned the blue colour metallic :)

Wear wasn't the best - I had chipping by the end of the day, although this might have been because it was over a manicure that was already two days old, so I wouldn't write it off as an easy chipper until I'd tried it again. Overall, I liked this a lot more than I thought I would - I wasn't that keen on blue crackle until this, but actually it was a pretty nice shade of blue and looked rather festive, especially with the shiny metallic effect it gained from the silver base. 

Rimmel Crack Your Colour Crazy Top Coat : Silver Clash

This mani is a little different to my others: it doesn't have a proper bottle shot. There's a good reason for this: my sister in law took one look at my nails, hooted, then pounced on the bottle and carried it away triumphantly before I got chance to take a photograph. I guess that's a good advertisment for this polish: Rimmel Crack Your Colour Crazy Top Coat, in Silver Clash.

In lieu of a proper bottle shot, here's a promo image from Rimmel.

Now, I'm the first to admit I'm a little bored of crackle polishes: they were cool and exciting when they first popped up, then every brand and his dog brought out their own version, and they got a bit overexposed. However, this one is silver - actual, sparkly, light reflective silver, so it caught my attention anyway. What can I say... I'm a sucker for metallic/shiny/sparkly polishes!

On to the mani. I layered one coat of Silver Clash over one coat of 2True Shade 39, a basic black creme, and two coats of Nail Envy. I also added a top coat of Orly Sec'n Dry, because when crackle polishes dry, they have a slightly odd rough texture that sets my teeth on edge (I'm the same with terracotta). For the record, it already looked nice and shiny before the topcoat - I just prefer not to wince every time I touch my nails!

Application is a piece of cake. The brush is one of those wide ones so you can cover the whole nail in one or two swipes. If you want chunky crackles like these, you use a thick coat. A thin coat will give you dainty, spidery crackles. Either way, it dries super fast! The crackles take longer to appear than the Barry M polish I already reviewed, and the crack pattern is not quite the same, but it's still attractive (some crackles seem to give a very odd pattern that I don't find as appealing; more of a blobbed-on look).

You can see that Silver Clash is definitely sparkly - I've seen some silver crackles that were more like a slightly silvery grey, but not so here. It's not glitter though, it's just very shimmery silver that catches the light easily because of the uneven texture. I got a ton of compliments on this manicure!

I only wore this mani for 36 hours as I have work in the morning and have to go to a meeting where silver sparkle nails aren't the best idea - but in those 36 hours my nails went through three showers, hardcore housework, laundry and lots of typing as well as many hand washes and a ton of hand cream (the cuticle first aid mission continues!) Despite all this, there was no tip wear, chipping or any other sign of wear whatsoever. 

Another keeper!

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!