Barry M : Silvery Lilac

I have an unusual polish to share with you today: Silvery Lilac, from Barry M.

I don't usually get on all that well with lilac polishes - they give me lobster hands. But this one is a foil, and I love foils, plus it's unusual to find a foil amongst the drugstore brands that isn't just silver or gold. Also, it's a duochrome. Foil AND duochrome?? Sold. 

This is a real chameleon polish, almost a multichrome; in some lights it appears silver, in others a dusty lilac, sometimes a sort of shimmery gunmetal shade, and at certain angles it even looks green. Although in the bottle the green flash is quite obvious, it's less visible on the nail, but not completely lost. It's very sheer, but three coats is enough to reach opacity. These pictures are of three coats, and you can still see a little VNL, but it's not visible in real life.

This shot shows the green duochrome flash quite nicely. It's a subtle effect, but adds an ethereal sort of 'glow' to the polish that makes me think of fairies or unicorns.

Application is pleasant, but not perfect. It goes on nicely, not too thick or thin, and the brush is decent. I didn't need to do any clean up with this one. It is a little prone to bubbling though, and the drying time could be faster, so several thin coats are preferable to fewer thick ones (you can see on my index finger where I got a bit impatient and used a thicker coat, resulting in a few bubbles, though again this is invisible in real life. Cameras are not kind!). 

Please excuse the blurry camera phone shot here - I wanted to show how Silvery Lilac becomes a darker lilac/gunmetal kind of shade when lit indirectly, and I found that my camera phone was better at capturing the lilac tones in this polish. My digital camera preferred to see the silvery side :-p

Pros: 

I loved the colour and had a lot of compliments on it too. It's shiny and pretty and unusual, but in a muted kind of way - you could still wear this to work, for instance.

Wear was great - 3 days in, no topcoat, and I am only just starting to see tipwear.

Cons:

The formula could be better. It's sheer. Though I wonder if that would make it good for layering... hmmm...

Prone to bubbling (though only very slightly, can be avoided by careful application)

Stash or Trash?

Stash. I really like this polish and will be experimenting with it for layering too.

The Color Workshop - Across the Universe

Good morning, lovelies!

Today I'm going to start reviewing some of the great polishes I got for Christmas. Apparently my family have realised I'm a polish addict: I received no fewer than 24 bottles of nail polish as presents this year! 14 of them actually came as part of a gift set sold at ASDA, along with two nail buffers, a set of toe separators, and tubes of cuticle remover and cuticle cream. Now I have to confess that initially I thought 'oh, how nice, I bet they're not very good though' - it's one of those non-recognisable collections that appears at Christmas and disappears soon after, and past encounters with this sort of thing haven't been that impressive.

Not so the Color Works set. I'm actually really impressed with this one. For one, it contains TWO holo glitters, a silver glitter and a really pretty duochrome that looks perfect for layering. For another, the cuticle remover actually works, and the nail buffers are this great twisty shape that just... works. The polish I've tried so far also has a great formula, but more about that in a moment. I looked up the price and it was a measly £9.99! Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the box this time round, but rest assured I'll be swatching all of these polishes very soon, so I'll get it next time ^.^ 

So without further ado, I present Across The Universe. It's a fine silver glitter polish in a clear base, and at first glance it looks like it'll be really sparse - you know how some glitters need 98572 coats to be anywhere near opaque? Well, this isn't one of those. Pictured are just two coats, and not particularly thick ones either. The brush was standard shaped but unusually soft, which actually made things easier since it splayed out easily and made application a breeze. Drying time was impressively fast, and once dry, it's pretty smooth (for a glitter) and shows some pretty decent wear. I wore this for two days, with no topcoat, and it still looked great. It's very sparkly without being garish - it's a shame it's done nothing but rain here recently, or I'd have tried to get a shot of it glittering like mad in the sunshine like it did in the 5 minutes of sunshine I went out in (without a camera, darn it).

Overall, I love this polish - yes, it's just a basic silver glitter, and there's a lot of those out there, but this one works out at 71p a bottle and has the kind of formula I'd expect to see in a polish far more pricey. 

Rimmel I love Lasting Finish : Your Majesty

Something festive for you today! 

Another one of Rimmel's lovely Lasting Finish polishes, Your Majesty is a beautiful metallic silver polish that I've worn several times now. It goes on nicely with minimal mess - though it's a bit of a glitter bomb when you remove it; your skin will be rather sparkly until you wash your hands. It is very pigmented (one coat could be opaque if you put it on thickly, I used two thin coats) and dries fairly quickly to a bright silver, almost chrome effect shine. It's not a chrome, though - it's pretty sparkly, almost enough that you'd call it a glitter, but not quite. This is a good thing; chromes show every single lump and bump and imperfection in your nail, but that sparkle makes this polish more forgiving. This is my non swatching hand for a reason; my nails on this hand are far from perfect and I don't really want my polish to broadcast that fact to the world!

Here it is without the bottle, in better focus. Apparently bottle + nails is too much twinkle for my camera to handle in one place!

Wear is really good. I wore this alone for two days, then added a crackle polish and wore it for another day. There was no tip wear at all and I only saw chips at the end of the third day. 

An attempt at a Christmassy pose, with glittery tree decoration; cue more freaking out of camera at all the sparkle!

Overall I love this polish. I don't have too many silvers in my collection but most of the ones I've tried have been more like a silvery grey than a proper metallic silver. This one fills that niche nicely and is my go-to silver, with its nice formula and great wear, yet cheap price, it'd be hard to beat this one!

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!

Laval Crystal Finish: Silver Glitter

So… Hai. These are my nails!

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!)