Rimmel Lycra Wear 10 : Hypnotise

Spring is here!

Okay, maybe not. But I saw snowdrops on the way home today and even though it's still super chilly, it's been really bright and sunny the last few days. So I'm feeling kinda cheerful and ready to come out of hibernation after the long and depressing winter - time to start blogging again!

The polish I have for you today is Rimmel Lycra Wear 10, in Hypnotise. Please excuse the nubbin-nails, I decided to try one last time to have squoval nails, filed them into shape, and then immediately broke one (cleaning my teeth, of all things. HOW DO YOU BREAK A NAIL CLEANING YOUR TEETH??). Anyway. Once I had finished wailing and gnashing my (newly clean) teeth, I filed my nails down past the break, and this was the result.

Of course I then immediately broke another one. It's time to accept that I can't have squovals and that's that: the corners just keep breaking on me. Back to even shorter nubs (sob) for a while and ovals from now on!

Anyway, back to the polish. It's a really nice dark plum creme. It doesn't have the gorgeous wide brush that I adore so much in newer Rimmel polishes, but the brush it does have is pretty decent anyway. It has all the potential to be a great vampy colour (perfect for nubbins - why is it that when I have short nails, I always have the urge to wear dark colours?)

Sadly, it also suffers from horrible tipwear. I kid you not, I had really obvious wear and some small chips after only a few hours, and that was with three coats plus a base coat of Nail Envy. I will admit that I do tend to get more tipwear when my nails are short, but unless I've been especially rough on my nails with housework or typing, I do at least expect my polish to last a bit better than that. Especially if I've gone to all the effort of three coats. At one point I touched up the tips and then added a fourth coat, to see if I could get a bit more life out of it. As you can see from these pictures, taken one hour after the fourth coat, the tipwear is already coming back. GAH!

What I liked about this polish:
The colour. I got two compliments on it within an hour of getting to work.
Application. I didn't have to do any clean-up. It was also opaque in two coats.

What I didn't like:
The wear. Although the colour is pretty, it's nowhere near special enough for me to get over how easily the tip wear appeared. Probably it'd have lasted better if I'd used top coat, but then I'd have had 5 layers of laquer on my nails, and quite frankly my life is too short to sit around waiting for that much paint to dry.

Overall verdict:
I'm normally the first to say how great Rimmel polishes are, especially their 10 day/lycra/pro type polishes. But this one, while pretty, is just too disappointing for me. I probably won't be wearing it on my fingers again although I may keep it for my toes (why do toes always seem to chip much slower than fingers?)

Ebalay Orchid

Afternoon, and, erm, hai... yep, it's me, and contrary to appearances, I'm still alive. Things have been insanely busy at work recently and I've just not had the energy for blogging (more like get home, eat dinner and collapse into bed! BORING).

Anyways I've finally got far enough through the list of things happening that I can draw breath and stay up past 8pm, so back to blogging! And what a beauty I have for you today.

Introducing Orchid, from Ebalay. Just like Golden Green (reviewed here, Orchid is an unassuming colour in the bottle; a shimmery, translucent pink colour with a blue flash through it, quite pretty, but immensely sheer. You'd need a lot of coats to reach opacity; though if you wanted to, you could use it over a pink or white base and it'd look rather lovely. However, I remembered what happened when I layered Golden Green over black, so that's exactly what I did here.

Over one coat of Wet N Wild Ebony Hates Chris (a basic black creme), a single coat of Orchid is transformed into a gorgeous duochrome beauty, the full effect of which is frustratingly hard to capture on camera, but which in real life is quite frankly amazing. It shifts between a lovely blue (midway between royal blue and denim) and a rich royal purple, metallic, sparkly and shimmery. You will spend a lot of time staring at your nails (believe me, these pictures don't do it justice at all).

The bottle and brush are very similar to OPI in shape and style; this is a good thing, because the cap is easy to hold and the brush splays out nicely to cover the nail, without blobbing the polish everywhere. The formula is pretty thin and runny, but it dries fast and doesn't pool in the cuticles. I didn't use topcoat, which was a mistake: I had tipwear quite quickly, although it didn't get much worse than this, even after three days of wear.

Apologies for the blurry camera phone picture; this was the closest I could get to capturing the blue-purple shift (for some reason my phone is better at capturing duochromes than my real camera, even though the pictures aren't as sharp).

What I liked about Orchid:

- Over black, it's a stunning blue/purple duochrome, very sparkly and eyecatching

- As well as the OPI like bottle, it has a brush similar to OPI too. Application was pretty easy.

- Drying time was fast!

- Wear was pretty good. I got tipwear quite quickly, though I think that was more to do with my base colour than the Orchid, and would have been prevented if I'd used topcoat.

What I didn't like about Orchid:

- It's so sheer that you have to layer it to avoid VNL. Unless you have very short nails, bottle colour without VNL would only be possible if you layered it over a pink or white first.

Overall this is a really gorgeous polish and worth buying for the effect over black alone.

Golden Glow is available HERE from KKCenterHK. It's priced quite reasonably at £4.50 ($7.24),  KKCenterHK also offer a 10% discount until the 31st January 2013 to anybody using the code glitter-mountain at the checkout. (Use of this code does not benefit me in any way)

Accessorize : Pin-Up

Happy Saturday! At last it's the weekend, ugh this week really dragged :( Why does the time always seem to move slower when you're waiting to go on holiday? Next week is the last week of work before I get the week off to go and do fun stuff with my family. I can't wait!!

Anyway the slowly dragging week somehow gave me the urge to have vampy nails. I haven't done that for a while and it felt like a nice change. My partner in crime for this vampish excitement was the lovely Pin-Up, by Accessorize. 

Pin-Up has an aubergine (eggplant, to you US types) base, filled with magenta glitter. It's opaque in two coats, applies nicely, dries smoothly and has a not-too-shabby drying time. This polish has multiple personalities! From a distance it looks like a dark vampy purple with purple shimmer...

...close up, it looks like this...

...and in the shade, it looks different all over again:

Isn't it pretty?

I really like this polish. EXCEPT. It is TERRIBLE for tip wear. I had tip wear within an hour of first painting! Undeterred, I wrapped my tips with it - and the tip wear came right on back.

This is after one day. It looks worse here than in real life (macro is brutal).

 It was weird though, because although it appeared fast, once it was there, it didn't get much worse. It just doesn't like sticking to tips! 

Pros:

I love the colour. 

The formula is great (apart from the tip wear) - goes on nicely, dries smooth, not too slow.

Wear - apart from that intial tip wear, it lasts ages! I didn't change this for four days and it still looked the same as it did after the first day (ie the last picture above)

Cons:

The tip wear :(

I was a little disappointed that the glitter doesn't show up on the nail as well as it does in the bottle. It sinks into the base too much.

Stash or Trash?

Hmm... it's borderline for this one. Although the tipwear wasn't bad enough to make me take it off for 4 days, I didn't love how quickly it appeared or the fact that wrapping my tips didn't help at all.

I did love the colour though. I'll probably try wearing it again, and wrapping my tips with top coat AND polish.

Ebalay Golden Green

Good morning, beauties!
My card reader is finally here (after a two week wait and three increasingly irritated emails to the company I bought it from! It was meant to be next day delivery, what a joke!) and guess what? The polish I put on to review for you all just WON'T play nicely with my camera. No matter what I try, I can't get the colour to look right. Luckily my camera phone seems much more accommodating and the colour looks a lot more accurate, but how frustrating to wait all that time and still not use my proper camera!

Anyway, enough ranting. I have another polish from Ebalay to show you, courtesy of KKCenterHK. Just like all of Ebalay's polishes it doesn't have a proper name, just a number, but KKCenterHK have given it the description 'Golden Green'.

In the bottle (which reminds me of an OPI one) it does indeed have a gold/green colour, with a pinky/purply duochrome shift. I tried it on its own and it is incredibly sheer. After 5 coats I still had a ton of VNL. The colour was sort of pretty, but I didn't like the colour enough to warrant the zillion coats it would need to achieve opacity (and it didn't look good left with the VNL). Undeterred, I layered it over black to see if that made a difference, because many duochromes look better with black underwear. (Again, pictures are taken on a camera phone, so please excuse their slight dodginess)

CHECK OUT THE PRETTY!!

I almost fainted when this gorgeous, emerald, super-sparkly colour appeared. Where was this hiding in that bottle of goldish murk??

It's not just green, either. There's a strong shift to purple in some lights (which even my camera phone struggled to capture, but in real life it's a lot more obvious.

All the pictures in which I managed to catch the purple are blurry. Hopefully you can still appreciate how pretty this polish is despite the blur.

There's almost no trace of the gold colour in the bottle: the green is a definite rich emerald colour. But sooooo pretty. Lots of people complimented me on this manicure.

What I liked about Golden Green:

- Over black, it's a stunning green/purple duochrome, very sparkly and eyecatching

- As well as the OPI like bottle, it has a brush similar to OPI too. Application was pretty easy.

- Drying time was pleasantly fast, even with multiple layers

- Wear was pretty good. I didn't get tipwear until day three and no chips at all.

What I didn't like about Golden Green:

- I don't think the formula is 3-free. It pongs a bit!

- It's so sheer that you have to layer it to avoid VNL. Unless you have very short nails, bottle colour without VNL would only be possible if you layered it over something like a nude or maybe a gold colour.

Overall this is a really gorgeous polish and worth buying for the effect over black alone.

Golden Glow is available HERE from KKCenterHK. It's priced quite reasonably at £4.60 ($7.24),  KKCenterHK also offer a 10% discount until the 31st January 2013 to anybody using the code glitter-mountain at the checkout. (Use of this code does not benefit me in any way)

Disclaimer: this polish was sent to me as a free sample for consideration. My opinions remain my own and are unaffected by this.

Ebalay Glow 003 - Purple Translucent Glow

Good morning! I have something really fun to show you today.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this just looks like a slightly different version of the Beauty UK Mauve Flash polish I showed you last time; that's because it IS Mauve Flash. I used it as a base coat for this little chap here:

Introducing Glow 003, by Ebalay. (Don't mind the blob on the lid, it had a bit of an incident on the way here from KKCenterHK, who sent this to me for reviewing. It's alright now, though). Glow 003 is the unimaginatively named purple version of their range of glow in the dark topcoats. Yes, it looks pink in these pictures, but that's just because my camera doesn't enjoy purple in the same way I do. Imagine this colour, but a bit more purple-y.

Glow 003 is the most translucent purple known to man. Don't even bother trying to layer it up to opacity, it just won't happen. But then again, it IS a topcoat, so I wasn't expecting to be able to do that anyway. On opening the bottle, I have to admit my heart sank, because it's so thick (it wouldn't even drip off the brush) I didn't know how I'd ever be able to get it onto my nails. I was worrying about nothing, though; it went on just fine. Appearances can be deceptive, I guess.

The thick formula didn't stop it from drying quickly, either. I used two coats here. Close up, you can see tiny little transparent particles suspended in the purplish base; they aren't glitter, or shimmer, and I did wonder what they were for. They give your base colour a slightly milky effect, but otherwise you can't really tell you're wearing this. 

Switch off the lights and the particles reveal themselves: they're glow glitter! I was surprised how well this polish glowed, since I've seen swatches of other glow in the dark polish that weren't anywhere near this bright. For some reason, my camera couldn't pick up the brightness as well as my eyes could - all of this pictures are much less glowy than reality. In fact, my first pictures were frustratingly black - I could see the glow, but not photograph it. Just to see what would happen, I charged the bottle and my nails up with a UV blacklight for maximum glow. The result was amazing! In real life, the UV-charged glow was insane. If you wear this polish in a nightclub, you might need sunglasses to shield your eyes against your own nails! When I took pictures of it, the shots looked more like the glow you get from normal light (and which I'd failed to capture before). I guess my camera just loses a lot of the glow, but at least I can show you what it looks like to the naked eye now!

Again, this is what you'd see with the naked eye if you'd stood in your kitchen and held your hands up to the light, then turned it off. Imagine this ten times brighter and that's what you'd see on a blacklit dance floor.

Isn't it fun? Obviously this is a bit of a novelty polish, I mean you have to turn the lights off before you can appreciate what's special about it. And I don't often go to nightclubs so I can't really make use of the cool dance floor effect. But I really liked the purple glow and it was fun to play with in the dark. I could see people having a great time with this at Halloween.

Ebalay Glow 003 is available HERE from KKCenterHK. It's priced quite reasonably at £5.63 (just over $9.00), but right now everything on their website is 25% off for their 5 year anniversary! KKCenterHK also offer a 10% discount until the 31st January 2013 to anybody using the code glitter-mountain at the checkout. (Use of this code does not benefit me in any way)

Disclaimer: this polish was sent to me as a free sample for consideration. My opinions remain my own and are unaffected by this.

Ebalay : Purple Gold Dust

Happy Spring, everyone!

I had this plan to do a cute Easter manicure with pastels and stuff, but I haven't had two minutes to rub together and I've only painted my nails once in about a week now. But it's OK because the colour I have to show you today is gorgeous and spring-like anyway, so I still win :-p

Let me introduce you to the second of the two colours sent to me by KKCenterHK: Purple Gold Dust, by Ebalay. (Click HERE or the banner below to check out their website).

(Halogen light)

Like Olive Gold Dust (reviewed here), Purple Gold Dust is actually just given a number (#011) by Ebalay, however on the KKCenterHK website, it's described as Purple Gold Dust, so that's what I'll call it here.

(Halogen light)

Like Olive Gold Dust, Purple Gold Dust has a coloured base (though in this case the olive green has been replaced with a really pretty lavender purple) and it's absolutely jam packed with fine glitter, although this time the glitter is silver instead of gold. In certain lights, if you squint a bit, it kind of looks a bit golden in the bottle, but once it's on the nail, it's 100% silver and that's that.

(Halogen light)

The glitter in this polish is absolutely gorgeous - it's actually a bit more sparkly than the glitter in Olive Gold Dust, but still subtle enough to wear anywhere and any time. Unfortunately I couldn't get any natural sunlight while taking these pictures so you'll have to picture everything a bit more twinkly than it seems here.

(Halogen light)

 The formula is almost exactly the same as Olive Gold Dust : quite thick, possibly a bit thicker in fact, but it goes on smoothly and evenly and dries in a reasonably fast time considering how thick it is. It's pigmented enough/glittery enough that you could get away with one coat, though it looks much better with two.



(Natural light)

Since Olive Gold Dust lasted for such a long time without chipping (5 days before even tipwear!) I decided to put Purple Gold Dust to the test: I skipped topcoat completely (all pictures show two coats over two of Nail Envy) and STILL it refused to die! Without topcoat, I had a little bit of tipwear after 4 days, but quite honestly I still have this stuff on my nails today and 6 days after painting them, there's still no chips at all on my left hand. My right hand has only one coat - I wanted to see how it would wear that way - and although there's chipping, it's about the amount I'd normally expect to see after 3 or 4 days of a two coat manicure of your average polish. This stuff LASTS, people.
 

(Natural light)

From some angles/in some lights, it looks more silvery than purple. It's one of those polishes that changes colour, like a chameleon.

Close up bottle shot. Check out that sparkle!

Overall, I love this polish every bit as much as I did Olive Gold Dust. It applies well, lasts ages, costs little and looks stunning. It also removes easily, despite the glitter. Just like before, the only improvements I'd made would be to reduce the thickness of the formula a little and give it a slightly more interesting name.

KKCenterhk have kindly offered any readers of Glitter Mountain a 10% discount on all their products until the 31st of January 2013. Just use the code glitter-mountain at the checkout! (please note, use of this code does not benefit me in any way)

This is a PR sample sent to me for review by KKCenterhk. The opinions I have given are my own, honest and unbiased and I was not paid to carry out this review.



 



Avon Nailwear Pro : Violetta Sparkle

Now that the trauma of TMI Thursday has passed, I thought I'd soothe my frayed nerves with glitter.

Enter Violetta Sparkle, from Avon.

Were my nerves soothed by this lovely glittery purple? 

Not in the least. I've spent all day trying to get a good picture of this polish. I've used two different cameras, four different rooms and about a million light sources. Unfortunately the camera that came closest to capturing this colour accurately was my camera phone, so you're going to have to ignore the kinda blurry pictures I'm afraid. But at least the colour's right!

(with flash)

Violetta Sparkle is a Cadbury purple jelly with lots and lots of gold glitter. It goes on quite nicely, no particular problems with application (though the brush is pretty bog standard and I don't especially like the square lid, which makes it less than comfortable to hold, but that's minor really). Like many other jellies it does need three coats to be opaque; I tried to get away with two because the purple was more obvious that way, but it dried patchy and I had to add a third, whereupon the purple became less of a Cadbury/royal purple and turned into a darker, more vampy shade. 

On the nail, it reminds me of a darker version of Orly Oui, or OPI It's My Year. Though in every single one of my shots, it looks darker on the nail than it does in real life. It's so frustrating trying to capture this sort of shade perfectly!

Drying time was okay, not especially fast, but not painfully slow either. It doesn't claim to be quick drying, so that's okay. Wear was a little disappointing, though. It didn't chip after two days, but there was tipwear by the end of the first day. Maybe if I'd wrapped my tips it would have helped, but it still appeared too fast for my liking.

See how it looks in the bottle here? That's how it looks on the nail in real life. The glitter is absolutely gorgeous - just enough to catch the light and twinkle beautifully, but not over the top. In some lights I even caught a green flash amongst the gold, but couldn't see any actual green glitter, so it must be something to do with the way this particular gold reflects at certain angles.

Finally I got an accurate shot of how it looks on the nail! This was picture no. 9364583853652. Or at least, that's what it felt like >.<

Overall, this polish is absolutely stunning. The colour is lovely, the glitter is beautiful. It's definitely one of those polishes that looks better on the nail than you thought it would when it was still in the bottle - I thought it was pretty to start with, but when I painted my nails with it, I kicked myself for not having tried it sooner. The only minus is the tipwear, and I suppose the need to use three coats is less than ideal (but then it's a jelly so I can hardly complain). Considering that Avon often play it safe with rather boring colours, I think they've outdone themselves this time. Let's hope they keep going like this (but also make it a bit longer lasting)!

EDIT: So... I was going to change this mani but first, I filed my nails. I often file them down while wearing a dark polish because it helps you see the shape better and helps protect the nail from being damaged by the file. And after I'd filed them, the polish still looked great (I filed off the tipwear). And since then, no more tipwear has appeared, and it's now 3 days later!! I don't know what the problem was first time round, because now it seems like a really long lasting polish. Go figure!

Rimmel Lycra Pro : Night Flight

Can you believe we're already 11 days into the new year? It seems like only yesterday we were celebrating, now I'm back at work and it already feels like I never had a break at all. Boo, Hiss!

(excuse the cuticles - they don't like cold weather, no matter how much I coddle them with cuticle creams and such)

In an effort to cheer myself up after that 'back to work' feeling, I decided it was time for a dark, vampy manicure as it's been a while since the last time and dark nails always seem particularly appropriate when it's dark and wintery outside! Out came my bottle of Rimmel Lycra Pro in Night Flight.

Night Flight is a dark, dark, blackened aubergine creme. In most lights it looks black, but with a purple undertone that is more obvious in real life than in these photographs... it can't quite decide if it wants to be aubergine or indigo; in the bottle it looks more 'blurple' than on the nail, where the blue inky tinge is less obvious and it becomes more of an aubergine. I tried with two different cameras to capture the purple glow that this polish has, and the only shots that came close were these ones here.

A big pro for this polish is that, since it's a Lycra Pro, it has the lovely wide curved brush that Rimmel uses for its Pro range. It also comes with a good, pigmented, reasonably fast drying formula that goes on evenly and is opaque in two coats. The finish is glossy (so much so that in most of these pictures, it looks like there are marks in the polish, but it's actually reflections of other things in the room!).

Wear was really good, although since it's a dark polish the tipwear etc is much more obvious than it would be with something lighter. I used two coats and no topoat, and did a lot of typing as well as some hardcore manual work dismantling a machine at work, and after three days I had some tipwear and only the vaguest hint of a chip on my index finger (one of those that you only really notice in a close up photograph but in real life it's not obvious).

Overall rating for this polish would have to be an 8 out of 10. It goes on beautifully, dries well, lasts a decent amount of time and it's a gorgeous colour. The only con is the slightly increased tipwear compared to other Lycra Pro's (it won't meet the 10 day lasting period claimed by this range) but this is a common problem with dark colours anyway so not that surprising.

2 True Crystal Nail Polish : Shade 4 Regal Purple

Today I have an absolute beauty of a polish to show you all: 2 True Crystal polish in shade 4. Like the mysterious turquoise I reviewed recently; it's known only by its number unless you check out the 2 true website, whereupon you discover that it's also called regal purple. Just like the turquoise, it has the same super cheap price of £1.99 (and their 3 for £4.99 offer never seems to end, either), the same great formula that outshines many of the more expensive polishes I own, and the same insane levels of glitteriness that make me rather surprised my camera didn't refuse to focus completely.

It wears like iron, it's opaque in two coats (three shown here for extra depth of colour), and it's absolutely beautiful - really metallic looking, in fact I wish they'd also made this in a fuchsia colour so I could finally stop searching for my holy grail of the perfect metallic fuchsia!

I took about a million pictures of this, trying to capture how awesome it looks - in some lights it takes on a two-tone, almost duochrome effect, moving from magenta purple to a more regal, blueish tone. It reminds me of the foil wrapping you get on certain types of chocolate at Christmas time!

Please excuse the odd lighting and weird finger positions. This is the closest I could get to capturing the insane almost-two-tone metallic glow! 

I can't stress how much I love this polish. It's going to be hard to find something I like more than this one (and at such a cheap price too). I just wish it wasn't limited edition!

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!