A vegan nail polish blog. A celebration of colour and light, as well as of justice for nonhuman animals.

Posts tagged ‘creme’

Cult Nails Fall 2011

Since Cult Nails’ winter collection is already up for pre-sale on their website (until November 11th), I realized that it’s well past time for me to post my swatches of their fall collection!

Cult Nails Fall 2011 collection

I originally bought these polishes in the last pre-sale and received and swatched them in August, but wasn’t happy with some of the photos (hmmm, seems like I’ve said that before…) so I recently redid the swatches for Awakening and Enigmatic. So if my nails and the conditions of the photos look different, it’s because they are!

Awakening

This is a muted teal creme; I love this kind of colour. The formula is thin and it’s sheer and a little streaky on the first coat, but with three coats as shown here, it evens out to a smooth creme finish.

Cult Nails Awakening
Cult Nails Awakening

Enigmatic

This is a vampy raisin coloured polish; it has a sheer brownish base with plum coloured shimmer that has flashes of reddish and bluish shimmer particles when the light hits it. An interesting complex colour, but like Awakwning, the formula is very thin and sheer, and it was streaky at one and two coats. This is three coats in the photos, and to be honest I think it might have benefited from a fourth.
Cult Nails Enigmatic
Cult Nails Enigmatic
Cult Nails Enigmatic

In a Trance

This is an army green with gold shimmer. I love this!! This one had a great formula, the best of the collection. It was smooth, self-leveling, and easy to apply. This is three coats.
Cult Nails In a Trance
I also wanted to see how this compared to OPI At Your Quebec and Call and a few other olive green polishes I have. From the bottle comparison it was clear that they aren’t dupes, but they are similar.
Cult Nails In a Trance comparison with OPI At Your Quebec and Call

Here is the comparison photo, from thumb to pinkie: Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics Swamp Thing ( a creme, but I wanted to see how the base colour compared), Zoya Yara, In a Trance, OPI At Your Quebec and Call, and China Glaze Cat’s Eye. All are three coats, all have good application. As usual, you can click on the photo (and any of the other photos) to see more detail.
Cult Nails In a Trance comparison
The base colour of Swamp Thing is indeed close to In a Trance’s base colour, although Swamp Thing is a bit darker. Zoya Yara has more of a blue-grey tone to it so it’s not close at all. At Your Quebec and Call is the closest to In a Trance, but the OPI is slightly more sheer, has a denser shimmer/slight frostiness. The reflection from the denser shimmer makes it look a tad lighter overall. China Glaze Cat’s Eye is lighter and more yellow than In a Trance, and is frostier than the OPI.

Hypnotize Me

This is a pretty unique polish! Sheer aqua blue-green with duochrome aqua/violet glitter (although these photos didn’t capture the violet, it’s quite obvious on the nail when seen at an angle). It’s got a jelly finish, but it dries fairly matte. For the photos I used Nubar Diamont as top coat, but it also makes a great accent nail as-is for any satiny-matte polish. Without topcoat, when dry, it’s not completely smooth but it’s not bumpy either; more like a very fine sandpaper. With topcoat it becomes smooth. The polish has a kind of weird goopy texture, but the application isn’t problematic at all. It’s meant to be a layering polish but I like it by itself too. This is three coats in the pictures.
Cult Nails Hypnotize Me
Cult Nails Hypnotize Me
And here it is layered (one coat) over the other polishes in the collection: from top, In a Trance, Enigmatic, Awakening. It looks great over all three of them!
Cult Nails Hypnotize Me, layered

Overall this is a great collection; I really love the colour choices! I’m looking forward to their winter collection…

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Cult Nails

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A few Halloween manicures

A few Halloween NOTDs (nails of the day) from the past couple of weeks! (Although, really, I would wear these anytime!)

Milani Flashy Orange with Wet n Wild Ebony Hates Chris stamped on (I’m not very good at stamping yet…)

Milani Flashy OrangeThe other hand, with scurrying spiders!

Milani Flashy Orange

A candy manicure: China Glaze Liquid Leather with Nubar V for Men matte topcoat, in an attempt to make nails that look like Panda Licorice!

China Glaze Liquid Leather, Nubar V for MenWet n Wild Cougar Attack (I broke down and bought this on ebay… I doubt they even release these limited edition collections here in Canada…)

Wet n Wild Cougar Attack

The next day I added some nail art using the orange and black striping polishes from the Orly Instant Artist “Flights of Fancy” collection. The collection also included a dotting tool which is what I used to create the web-like design.

Wet n Wild Cougar Attack

China Glaze It’s Alive from their recent Halloween release:

China Glaze It's Alive

It’s Alive with OPI’s glow-in-the-dark Zom-body to Love as slimy tips:

China Glaze It's Alive, OPI Zom-body to Love

My attempt at capturing it glowing in the dark:

China Glaze It's Alive, OPI Zom-body to Love

Happy Halloween everyone! 🙂

Category:

China Glaze, Konad (stamping plates), Milani, Nubar, OPI, Wet n Wild

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Orly Flagstone Rush and China Glaze Brownstone

These were my nails of the day last Friday. I started out with Orly Flagstone Rush, a metallic reddish brown (just a bit too dark to be a copper). It’s a two-coater with a nice formula; a little bit of attention is needed to get the brush strokes straight but it’s not too hard to work with. It’s one of Orly’s core colours.

Orly Flagstone Rush

I then added some half moons (my first attempt at half moons!) in China Glaze Brownstone from their fall 2011 Metro collection, thinking its brick red-brown creme finish would complement and contrast with the metallic Orly in an interesting way. I liked how it turned out! Brownstone has a wonderful smooth and creamy formula, by the way.

Flagstone Rush and Brownstone

Then I decided to mattify it using Nubar V for Men – not sure which way I prefer, I like them both!
Flagstone Rush and Brownstone, Matte

These photos were all taken indoors in the light of my new Ott light, on account of it being dark outside!

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China Glaze, Nubar, Orly

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Soulstice Spa swatches

Soulstice Spa is a relatively new brand of all-vegan nail polish that I learned about a few months ago, so I figured what better way to start off my vegan nail polish blog than to review a few of their shades.

Here are the five polishes I picked up on my first Soulstice purchase: Rio, Milan, Kona, Tokyo, and Montreal.

From left: Kona, Montreal, Tokyo, Milan, Rio.

On to the swatches! These swatches are all without base or top coat. Any ridges you see are my nails, not the fault of the polish! Photos are taken in my solarium in direct sun, except where noted.

Tokyo, indirect sunlight.

Tokyo. This is a burgundy-wine with purple undertones and golden-bronze shimmer particles. The formula is excellent, thin, smooth and easy to control. This is three thin coats. After two coats there were a few slightly balder patches (again, these were thin coats though) but three coats was perfect.

The first photo was taken in the evening just as the sun had dipped below the building across the park (argh! was hoping to get the swatch done while the sun was still shining!), so, indirect sunlight. The next day the sun was cooperating so I took the second photo while I still had Tokyo on before moving on to the other swatches.

Milan. Similar to Tokyo except a little lighter and without the purple undertone; this is more of a burgundy with a slight dark rose tone to it. The golden shimmer is also finer than Tokyo’s shimmer. This is also three thin coats.

Rio. A very bright frosty coral red. This one is more sheer than the others. This is three coats, the last coat being fairly thick. My nails aren’t in the greatest shape these days so I wanted to hide the unevenness and places where there were some peeling spots that had absorbed the darker burgundy polishes. This had a similar formula to the other non-cremes and didn’t really give me any trouble with brush strokes. Hanging out in the background of these shots is our kitty Wu being cute; I didn’t have the heart to crop him out!!

Montreal. Ahh, my favourite city. I lived there four years and sometimes I really miss it. This is a gorgeous medium purple shimmer, a slightly red-toned purple. Love this one. Maybe not the most unique shade, but it’s beautiful. This is two coats; the first coat was just slightly streaky but the second evened everything out. As with a lot of purples, the photos make it look more blue than it is. The last photo is taken inside in the light of my light-therapy lamp in an attempt to get a shot truer to colour.

Kona, indirect sunlight.

Kona. The only creme that I picked up, a light sky blue that leans slightly toward turquoise. Again, maybe not the most unique shade, but speaking for myself I can’t seem to get enough shades like this. The formula on this one was thicker than the others, and gave me a little more difficulty to apply. This is two coats, the second quite thick. It did do a good job of leveling itself out with the second thick coat. I got a few tiny bubbles so next time I’ll be sure to roll, not shake this polish like I did this time. Overall I do really like this shade a lot, it’s opaque and it dries very nice and glossy!

As a whole I was quite impressed with the polishes I picked up. As mentioned, the formula on the shimmers was excellent and easy to work with even on my currently peeling and uneven bare nails. I’ve tried Kona again since taking these photos (they were taken during the summer) and didn’t have the same issues with application, so it may just have been the heat and humidity when I swatched these. Drying time on these was pretty good; no complaints there. I’d say my favourites out of these were Montreal and Tokyo.

All in all these were great and I’ve bought a few more Soulstice polishes in the time since I took these photos. …maybe someday they’ll come out with some greens…? 😀

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Soulstice Spa

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