Fact.
It’s been pretty dreary here in LA for the past few days, and the chill and drizzle are quite an odd converse to the 90ºF we hit on Friday. But as gloomy as it may be outside, I’ve been livening things up with my new nail polish!
I’ve considered myself an experienced nail painter since at least the 7th grade. In fact, I remember challenging myself at one point and painting my nails a different color and/or pattern every day for 2 months straight. These days I just hope that my polish makes it through more than a day without chipping so I don’t have to redo them. Don’t get me wrong, I love painting my nails, but all my free time lately is just before bed, and fresh polish + sheets + I swim in my sleep = disaster.
Anyways, this green is not being properly represented in these pictures, and I don’t have the wherewithal to color correct them now that Picnik no longer exists, but they are a brilliant shade of emerald. Think Wizard of Oz, or a box of Thin Mints. The color in the pictures is pretty, but not nearly as vibrant as it looks in person. Boo to that.
So I picked these new colors at Forever 21 over the weekend. (It was weird for me too, those bins by the checkout stands are so dangerous.) When I was a polish novice, I used to think that a couple of coats of glitter shellac were enough to convey a color on their own. Then at some point, when I was older and wiser, I realized that by pairing a glitter polish top coat with a base coat of a solid in a similar hue, the sparkle and color impact would be tenfold. Take my toes for example, in real life they look like the finish on a bowling ball. Epic. (I purchased those colors at Forever 21 as well. They have a solid summer palette! You’ll notice that the teal glitter is finer than the green, and I actually prefer that aesthetically – even though my nails are totally kickass!)
According to the Forever 21 website, the base coat on my fingers is Go Go Green, and the glitter is, cleverly enough, called Green Glitter. For my toes, I used a base of Cobalt Blue, and topped it off with Blue Glitter. (In real life, the labels on both the blue bottles say “blue,” and the green say “green.”)
Having never used it before, here is my review of the polish. The one downfall of this particular brand seems to be that is that it’s super matted, including the glitter, so to get a any shine you’ll need to use a clear top coat. Besides that, I did 2 coats of the solid green, and 2 coats of the glitter. The opaque color coated just fine in one, but I wasn’t sure how the glitter would distribute since it’s not fine, so I wanted to make sure everything was covered. You don’t have to do as many, I get carried away. On the major plus side – surprising with what I thought would be a very cheap polish, and despite the fact that there are so many layers – they still haven’t chipped, and it’s been over 3 days! (knock on wood.)
So there you have it. If the gloom has got you down, shake up your regular nail routine and pair your matte colors with a cop coat of matching glitter. Now you too can spend your dreary days like I do – grinning stupidly at my nails every time they catch my eye.
They Call Me Crafty 