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?
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages ... today I present circus nails!!!
Okay, being truthful. I was a bit disappointed with both the circus and these nails.
This is two coats of China Glaze Riveting with a coat of Wet n Wild Party of Five Glitters and though I didn't count after the first three coats ... anywhere between five and ten coats of Fantasy Maker Night Glow, a glow in the dark polish from the creators of Wet n Wild.
This picture is more true to color. The glow in the dark polish is cloudy and somewhere between a cloudy clear and a cloudy yellow/green. You can see that Riveting has lost its bright and fiery gleam with so many coats of glow in the dark polish. I wouldn't have minded so much but Night Glow is very old and has lost most of its glow. I did not know this when I was layering it on. I expected for the lights to go out at the circus and my nails to grab nearly as much attention as the circus acts themselves ... at least from my nieces.
Sadly, this didn't happen. The nails didn't glow at all during the circus!
I only managed to get the glow in the dark pics by quickly holding my nails to the bathroom light, flicking off the lights and snapping the pictures. These pics are also taken through my editing program and the glow brightened so you can actually see it! Very disappointing!! I will have to look into getting more of this polish.
Here is the original, unedited version of the first glow picture. You might see the glow if you highlight it first. The unedited second picture is even worse and not worth posting.
The only thing more horrible than a bad nail design is a polish that's gone bad ... even worse when it's gone bad unnoticed. :(
When I started my journey to acquire six polishes from the China Glaze Hunger Games collection I certainly didn't think Riveting was going to be one of the hardest won polishes. The only harder to find polish was Luxe and Lush ... which I did expect. Riveting seemed such an odd and out there color that I didn't think many would hurry out to buy it.
How wrong I was! I searched everywhere and finally had to break down and ask a professional friend to buy it at a cosmetology shop.
I am so glad I did. This color is amazing and so eye-catching, especially in sunlight. As you can see, it practically glows in direct sunlight!!
Riveting before its name change was known as Fire in Flight and was inspired by the flaming Mockingjay. I can certainly see why. The metallic orange turns a fiery reddish orange and the golden shimmer flickers through turning the whole nail into flames.
For those wondering what this mani looks like out of direct sunlight here's a picture. :)
I am absurdly pleased to start this post with the happy, happy news that I now own both Electrify and Riveting from China Glaze's Hunger Games collection, Capitol Colours. I'm still trying to find Luxe and Lush, but that's not what this post is about.
Cloudy
2 coats Fast Track, 1 Electrify, 2 top coat.
Taken while out; I didn't have a nail polish bottle handy so forgive the partial zombie/lobster claw I have going on.
I was hoping to get better (read: sunny) pictures of these nails, but we'll all just have to make due with what I do have because it's a rainy mess in small town Pennsylvania right now.
Still, look at just how great Electrify looks with Fast Track. Personally, I think Electrify is one of the prettiest glitters I own with its small gold hex glitters and its larger bright red hex glitters. The red and gold really brings out the golden shimmer in Fast Track and adds spice to it's nude/tan color.
Luck shined upon me today ... with sunlight!!
Morning Sunlight
Ignore the wear at the tips. I was particularly hard on my nails this weekend. Actually, they held up much better than I expected with only slight wear & no chips.
This is definitely one manicure I have no want to remove! :)
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