As you can see, they're not square like most bloggers (square doesn't suit me), but they are sparkly! That's because they're wearing my first ever blog mani: Laval Crystal Finish, in Silver Glitter.
There's a special reason for starting with this mani: it's the first nail polish I ever tried! (No, really. The same bottle and everything. Talk about a blast from my past!).
Laval are still around today, and have probably changed their packaging and formula and just about everything else about a million times since I was given this particular bottle almost seventeen years ago. It's nothing special (not surprising considering its age), just small round particles of silver glitter in a clear base, but back then I thought it was the bomb. Glitter? On your nails? I was hooked instantly.
Originally, it was easy to apply, but now is so thick and gloopy, that it bears almost no resemblance to the original polish - you have to kind of 'splodge' it on rather than brush it, and it takes over half an hour for just one coat to dry. Pictured here are two coats, with basecoat but no topcoat (it really needed at least one or two more layers of glitter, but I was losing the will to live by then - second coat took almost two hours to dry!). But it's sparkly (more so in real life than in this picture), reminds me of being a teenager again, and it still makes me smile. It even got me three compliments on my 'pretty nails' today! Interestingly though, despite the mammoth drying time, this ancient relic has amazing staying power. Three days on and it hasn't even thought about chipping!
(Seeing as this is my first post, I should also probably apologise for how lame my camera is. It’s actually a phone camera, and not a very good one at that. Sadly, I can’t afford a new one right now, so I'm making do with this one until my birthday... in the meantime, hopefully you can at least get an idea of colour/texture etc from these shots, even if they don't look like they fell straight out of a glossy magazine!)
