2 True Crystal Nail Polish : Shade 1 Midnight Blue

Happy hump day!

Sorry it's been a while since my last post; I've been on my first holiday in 8 years! It wasn't anything exotic, just a fun family camping trip to the seaside, but wow it was the most fun I've had in a long, long time. I can't wait until next year when we can go camping again!

Anyway, let me tear my brain away from kite flying and fossil hunting for long enough to show you the fourth and final polish from 2True's Crystal Nail Polish collection: Shade 1, Midnight Blue.

Released around Christmas time last year, the Crystal Nail Polish collection consisted of four jewel toned shimmer polishes, so shimmery they looked almost like sparkly metallic chocolate wrappers! They were perfect for parties and, at less than £2 each, perfect for your wallet too! I reviewed the other three HERE, HERE and HERE and I loved them all. They apply like a dream, and look amazing, and Midnight Blue is no exception to that rule. 

It's opaque in two coats although I found that adding a third coat added more richness and sparkle. It lasts absolutely ages without chipping or showing any signs of tipwear - when I took these pictures I'd already been wearing it for three days. Do you see any chips? I didn't think so. These pictures show it a little more royal blue than it is in real life; it's closer to denim blue really (the bottle colour in the first picture here is closest to how it looks on the nail). The only negative about this polish was that it took a while to dry; not painfully so, but if you're in a hurry you'll need a quick drying topcoat. I did find that leaving each coat to dry completely before adding the next helped a lot.

Pros:

Gorgeous colour, packed with shimmer. 

Opaque in two coats

Applies easily

Lasts ages

Cheap as chips!

Cons:

A little bit slow to dry

Limited edition (though almost a year later I still see it in Superdrug occasionally)

Stash or Trash?

Definitely stash. I love every polish in this collection. I'm wearing this one right now as a mani AND a pedicure. I'm far too fickle to wear the same polish in both places unless I really love it!

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 : 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.



 



Ebalay : Olive Gold Dust

Hey, I'm back! Finally! Sorry I've been quiet for so long, it's been completely mad around here and blogging has been pretty much impossible. But I've missed you all and I'm back at last!

Today I have a special manicure to show you : 'Olive Gold Dust' from Ebalay. You'll have to excuse the number of pictures: it's absolutely gorgeous outside today and when the sun shines, it's a lot easier to take nice pictures of manicures!

This beautiful polish came from KKCenterHK. (Click HERE or the banner below to check out their website). When I saw this pretty olive/gold shade I knew I had to try it right away! KKcenterHK is located in Hong Kong and I'm in the UK: when I've ordered things from Hong Kong in the past it's sometimes taken a long time to get here but this only took about a week to arrive. Not bad for such a long journey.

The colour is really just called 'EBALAY 020' - not such an exciting name :( But the website describes it as Olive Gold Dust and I'd say this is pretty accurate so that's what I'm calling it from now on. In the bottle it's an olive green with dense, fine gold glitter. On the nail it loses some of the green and the gold becomes more dominant, though the green is still definitely there.

The glitter is so fine that I almost thought it might be a holo once I got it into the sunshine; it has that same sort of muted yet grainy appearance in the bottle that you see with polishes like GOSH holographic. Sadly it isn't holo at all, but it is extremely pretty and catches the sunlight beautifully. Because the glitter is fine, it's not too in your face; it's classy as well as sparkly and you could easily wear it to work.

Application looked like it might be a pain when I opened the bottle: the polish is pretty thick and I have to say I expected it to be gloopy and slow drying - but actually, it went on really smoothly and evenly. It's also so pigmented and full of glitter that you could easily use this as a one coat polish! (All pictures here are two coats, over Nail Envy, with Orly Sec'N'Dry topcoat).

Drying time was good, too. I thought I'd be there for ages waiting for the second coat to dry; but it took no longer than any other (thinner) polish. I did use quick drying topcoat, but not until the second coat was already touch dry. The brush was quite thick and soft and reminded me a little of an OPI brush. Mine was a little bent to one side, but it didn't make it any harder to paint my nails.

The bottle is a generous 15ml for £4.30 / $6.92 so you're getting a good amount of polish for quite a cheap price; in the UK this is about the same sort of price you'd pay for a low to mid range polish brand like Rimmel or Maybelline, but you'd probably get 5-10ml for that price so this is pretty good value.  

In the shade, the glitter is much less obvious; it looks more like a suede effect/textured metallic, or perhaps a glitter that's had a matte top coat added. It's still very pretty though.

It kind of looks like a sandy texture here, doesn't it? Like I dipped my nails in gold dust and it stuck, hence the name! Actually when it dries, it's got a slightly sandy feel to it - not gritty, but not completely smooth. This went away when I added the topcoat, though.

Close up bottle shot, to show the fine glitter! It's greener than this in real life, but my camera couldn't cope with showing that plus all the glitter all at the same time.

Overall, I really like this polish. It's a lovely yet slightly unusual colour, applies nicely and so far in 5 days of wear (including doing laundry, typing, washing my hands and general household chores) I haven't had any chips OR tipwear. It still looks like the day I first applied it. I couldn't really find any faults with it, other than I wish it had a proper name instead of a number and the formula could do with being a bit thinner. It also smells quite strong. I was also a bit confused because the bottle says 'Rose Water' on the bottom, as did the other bottle I was sent, yet neither polish is scented in any way. I guess they just have rose water as an ingredient?

EDIT: 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, using 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.

17 Fast Finish : Sulk

Today's mani is from Boots 17 : 'Sulk', from its autumn/fall collection 'A Woman Scorned'. 

(Please excuse my cuticles; I'm using the world supply of hand cream and cuticle butter right now but apparently they don't care. Stupid winter >.<)

Sulk is a gorgeous jewel tone green; in the bottle it looks closer to turquoise but once on the nail it dries most definitely green. And shimmery. It's not quite so sparkly in real life as it appears in these pictures, but it's most definitely there.

Application is average. There's nothing special about the brush (it's not bad, it does the job well enough, but I did notice the neck of the bottle is small enough that the brush tends to catch on it and get all splayed out. Not really a big deal but you do have to be careful if you don't want polish everywhere). The consistency is a little thick, not unpleasantly so, but it's gloopy enough that it does make it hard to do thin coats (I like thin coats. Not everybody does, though, so if you're a medium to thick coater, this one will be perfect for you!). Sulk is nicely pigmented; two coats is more than enough and it wears well too, BUT it's very far from the 'fast finish' the bottle promises you. This mani is one coat of nail envy, two of sulk, and after 15 minutes it was still really tacky. Like, 'has it even started to dry yet' tacky. So I added a coat of Orly Sec'N'Dry and that fixed things.

Or so I thought.

Check out the sheet mark on my index finger!! And I didn't go to bed for FOUR HOURS after I painted my nails! The bottle shots were taken straight after painting, and these other two were taken after I woke up the next morning. All I can think is that this nail must have had an extra thick coat of Sulk, and even the Sec'N'Dry couldn't save it from doom. (Though I will say that the mark is less obvious in real life than it seems here).

This polish gets 5 out of 10 overall. It's a gorgeous colour; there aren't too many jewel toned greens out there (at least in drugstore brands) that are properly green; most of them lean a lot more towards teal/turquoise/blue tones than this one does. It's also cheap and cheerful at £2.99. But I didn't enjoy the application much and it took way too long to dry for a so called fast dry polish. If you don't rush it and keep your coats thin, plus use a fast dry topcoat, it'll be fine - just don't reach for this one when you only have 5 minutes to paint your nails!