Hello, lovelies! How do my nails look? These are the first pictures since I broke the index nail of this hand and did an emergency teabag fix. It's holding up great!!
As for this post, I bring you a new product today. Or rather, New York Color (NYC) brings you a new product. It's a mattifying top coat (yep, they called it mattifying) they've named Matte Me Crazy.
I was stunned to find this on the shelf. The only matte top coat to be found around here is Hard Candy's, Matte-ly in Love, found exclusively in Walmart. Hard Candy will cost you about $4 for a .35 fl oz bottle. It will even get you a cute little cardboard topper that fits over the cap. This makes finding it in a polish drawer very easy!
But, the reason I was so excited to find this new matte top coat is that NYC costs under $2 for a .33 fl oz bottle and can be bought in a multitude of locations. Sadly, it doesn't come with a cardboard topper and is not so easy to find in a polish drawer. :(
Now for the nitty gritty. Hard Candy has a much thicker formula. Hard Candy passed the drip test with flying colors. NYC ... not so much. It gave two very quick drips and a slower third before leveling out on the brush.
While on the subject of brushes. Hard Candy has a short, rounded brush with a slightly short and round cap. It fits in my hand okay but its short length may not be comfortable for everyone. NYC has a longer and wider brush that's attached to a round cone like cap. My preference in brushes have always leaned towards the wider and flatter. I adore the Sally Hansen flat brush and the new Wet n Wild megalast Pro brush so I prefer the NYC brush.
I don't think Riveting was the polish to go for when testing out a new matte top coat. I know it turned matte but I'm not sure just how matte. I can however tell you that NYC mattified slower than Hard Candy. I was actually kind of pleased about this though. I've had trouble with one part of my nails turning more matte than another with Hard Candy because it dried and turned matte too quickly. I don't know about anyone else, but I paint backwards so my pinkie nail was just settling into fully matte by the time I started my thumb with NYC. I had no streaking or blobs of darker matte with NYC.
I will definitely give you a more thorough answer on just how matte is matte when talking about these two in another post with another mani. NYC may just be a good substitute for the more expensive Hard Candy. We'll see ... probably sometime next week.
First off ... whoa, what is up with the new posting feature?? Was anyone else horribly confused and panicking a bit? I thought I pressed the wrong button or something!!
Right, onto the post. I'm not sure how long I can keep this daily posting up. Maybe another day or so if I'm not too lazy to paint my nails today, so enjoy it while you can! Today, I bring you Twinkle and Hot Tamale both from Pure Ice.
This alternating mani is two coats of Hot Tamale, the darker polish, and two coats of Twinkle, the lighter polish. I'm just noticing now the slightly visible nail line on some of them. They could probably use another coat or three. I guess this means they're more sheer than I thought.
Twinkle showed up fairly dark in most of the pictures I took. I managed to find a handful of true to color. Twinkle is a simply lovely shade of coral pink or maybe a salmon. It contains a slight hint of orange but I'm not sure if that's just the gold shimmer playing tricks on my eyes or not.
Hot Tamale is a darker color that I think nearly overwhelms the delicate Twinkle. The closest I can come to describing Hot Tamale is an off shade of vermilion, sometimes known as cinnabar. I think this shade works best because vermilion is described as being similar to scarlet but with more orange and less red. Hot Tamale certainly has it's fair share of orange and mixes nicely with the gold shimmer the polish contains.
Twinkle and Hot Tamale close-up shots.
You really get to see the true shades of these colors up-close in direct sunlight.
Hot Tamale shows it's gold shimmer much less than Twinkle. The gold shimmer blends too well with Hot Tamale's metallic finish to really pop. That certainly doesn't mean Hot Tamale doesn't pop all on its own. While pink is my favorite color I don't think I can wear a shade as delicate as Twinkle ... at least not without Hot Tamale to carry it along.
What I didn't know while buying this polish was how closely Hot Tamale resembles Riveting from the China Glaze Hunger Games collection. Riveting has slightly more depth to its color; the metallic finish of Riveting shifts subtly darker than Hot Tamale. However, Riveting leaves Hot Talame in its gold shimmering dust. Riveting has a much, much more present shimmer. The gold flecks are also bigger and brighter; they really shine out of the polish. As you can see from the picture below, Hot Tamale is not an exact match to Riveting but you might be able to make a fairly passable fraken dupe out of it by adding a thicker shimmer.
Will any of you be trying Hot Tamale in place of Riveting? What about Twinkle? Will it work better with your skin tone than it does mine?
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