Alta Costura Vernis Sweet Tooth - Easter Mani

Alta Costura Vernis Sweet Tooth over Ruby & Millie Yellow 200P

My Easter Nails. I was stuck for a colour choice, so I asked my husband for a suggestion ~ usually he says 'blue' so I was a bit taken aback when he said yellow. Egg yellow, with 'sprinkles' to be precise. So here we are!

The base is the 'eggiest' yellow I own - it's an old polish, possibly even vintage - Ruby & Millie Yellow 200P. R&M was a 'designer' range at Boots in the UK, but they disappeared a few years ago. That's rather a shame, as I liked some of their blushers and shadows too. Although I like yellows, I'm not crazy about this colour - I find yellow a bit hard to wear as I'm quite pale and rather pink toned; I prefer mustard-y or lime-y yellows. The polish also has a bit of a shimmer in it  that I'm not wild about, although there's no frostiness or brush strokes. I used three coats here as the formula was quite thin.

The glitter I choose for the 'sprinkles' is Alta Costura Vernis Sweet Tooth. ACV Sweet Tooth is a mix of small pink, white, blue and purple glitters in a clear base. I've worn it over pinks and blues in the past, and while it looked OK, I think the colours pop much better over the yellow. When I looked at the colour wheel, yellow, pink (red),  and blue are actually a colour 'triad' so this is probably why they look good together :)

I just used one coat of Sweet Tooth, then added a coat of Gelous and a final coat of Seche Vite to smooth everything out. I didn't want to layer the glitter through the mani for this one, I wanted an effect like sprinkles over a cake. Or maybe a trifle. Overall, I like the mani - it's very springy and it reminds me of Cadbury's mini eggs. I might try ACV Sweet Tooth over a paler, lemony yellow soon, or maybe over something like Rescue Beauty Lounge No More War (that's a colour you'd get if you mixed black and yellow together).

Happy Easter!!

Alta Costura Vernis Sweet Tooth over Ruby & Millie Yellow 200P

Layering with Wet n Wild Tangled in My Web

Wet n Wild Tangled in My Web

Wet n Wild Tangled in My Web is one of my favourite glitters.  I love black glitter, and this one is so simple and understated. It's just plain black glitters, all the same size, in a clear base. No shimmers, no different sizes or shapes, no complexities or distractions. Less is more :)

There's been a few recent releases of polishes with black glitter in a creamy base - for example the Illamasqua L'Imperfection and  Deborah Lippmann Staccato collections, not to mention a few indies and, at the cheaper end of the market, W7 Salt 'n' Pepper. I like the effect of all of these, but apart from the white, none of the colours really quite did it for me, so I decided I'd have a go at layering my own version with Tangled in My Web. The polish I chose to layer it with was a UK cheapie, Barbara Daly Make-Up in 'Pirate'. This is a soft warm taupe with a slight green duochrome shimmer. I've had this lying around untried for ages; when I bought it, it sort of reminded me of Illamasqua Hemlock - maybe a shade or two darker. But nice all the same!

For this mani I used one coat of Pirate, one coat of TiMW, alternately, three times. I kept the glitter coats very light, and as Pirate is quite sheer, I was very happy with the way the glitters 'suspend' between the layers and give the mani a lot of depth. Here's some pictures  from different angles to show the effect:

Another alternative to get a similar effect would be to mix some TiMW with a coloured polish to get this sort of effect. Chalkboardnails did this really effectively with a creamy nude.

Wet 'n' Wild Tangled in My Web was from the 2011 Fall collection, and is probably hard to find now. But what I wanted to show here was the technique; it will work well with any black glitter (or a different colour glitter if you prefer). Barbara Daly Make-Up polishes are sold in Tesco; there is a core range of colours that seldom change but the small, limited edition bottles are the ones to look out for - from time to time some really nice colours are released. I've accumulated quite a collection of these over the years as they jump into my shopping trolley!

Barry M Gelly Papaya with Alta Costura Vernis Brightside

Barry M Gelly Papaya with Alta Costura Vernis Brightside

A two-stage mani, I wore Barry M Papaya alone on Monday, then added the Alta Costura Vernis Brightside to jazz it up a bit today. Here's the Barry M Polish first:

Barry M Gelly Papaya

This is a very pretty and quite conventional sort of colour, I'd describe it as a peachy salmon. It's one of the recent Spring additions to the Barry M Gelly Nail Paint range, and the first one of the range that I've tried. I found the formula quite thick and there was a definite tendency to streakiness. Because the polish itself is thick, it's rather difficult to manipulate around on your nails so I needed to pay a bit of attention to clean up at the end. I used two coats, Seche Vite top coat, then another coat of polish and a final coat of Seche Vite for this manicure. I'm pleased with the results and I'll definitely use the polish again.

Barry M Gelly Papaya

Alta Costura Vernis Brightside is a polish I've had a difficult relationship with. I want to love it, but it's not easy. Brightside is a mix of light yellow and light pink matt glitters in a base that's hard to describe. I love the glitters in Brightside, it's the base that is the problem. I got this polish in a blogsale and it was a few months old when it came to me, so I don't know if when the polish had a clear base to begin with and the glitters have bled and stained it, or if the colour was intentional. I think there has been bleeding, however, looking at the original pictures of the polish on Alta Costura Vernis' Etsy ; the glitter here looks massively brighter than in my bottle :(

Anyhow, the base of my Brightside is a neon orange-pink, which makes it extremely difficult to pair up with other polishes. I wanted to use it over creams like Illamasqua Load and light yellow greens like OPI Who The Shrek Are You, but this is clearly impossible! This is the first time I've used Brightside and been satisfied with the results.

Barry M Gelly Papaya with Alta Costura Vernis Brightside

See how pale the glitters are compared to the pictures in the Etsy listing! And the base has changed the colour of Barry M Papaya from salmon-peach to quite a bright orange pink. The whole thing works quite well together though, and is bright and pretty mani on this wild and snowy March day. This is one coat of Brightside over the existing Barry M Papaya mani, with two coats of Gelous and a further coat of Seche Vite ~ this is quite a hungry glitter.

Barry M Gelly Papaya with Alta Costura Vernis Brightside

I purchased Barry M Gelly in Papaya from Boots. As I mentioned above, I bought Alta Costura Vernis Brightside from a blogsale; Alta Costura Vernis has an Etsy shop but it isn't currently stocked.

CrowsToes Bone Daddy over Sinful Colors Cinderella

CrowsToes Bone Daddy over Sinful Colors Cinderella

My nails today are something of an experiment - but I like how it turned out.

I got a real surprise when I was walking through Boots the other day; they had a display of Sinful Colors polishes! Sinful is a brand I see talked about a lot by US girls, but they're seldom seen here in the UK. They're a cheaper brand, and although I often see colours I like the look of in other people's swatches, it's never seemed worth it get anyone to send me any, when the cost of the postage will be more than the price of the polish. But here they are, and I was excited to try. They were £1.99 each or 3 for the price of 2, so a real bargain. I'll share the other colours soon :D


Here is Sinful Colors Cinderella on its own. It's a pretty light blue, quite sheer and with a really pretty reddish shimmer, almost like tiny flakies, running through it. It's quite a thick polish, and the brush is on the small side, but application was easy and very little clean up required. These pictures are three coats with Seche Vite.

Sinful Colors Cinderella

I love finding a 'cheap' polish that doesn't look cheap at all!

The classic layering combination with Cinderella seems to be Deborah Lipmann's Glitter in the Air, or it's dupe, Revlon Whimsical. Although I have both those glitters, and I like how they look over pale blues, I wanted to do something a bit more original. So instead I chose CrowsToes Bone Daddy. This is a complex mix of white glitter of all shapes and sizes in a light grey jelly base, together with iridescent glitters that flash blue at certain angles. I've worn Bone Daddy both alone and over various grey bases, but I was interested to see how it worked at toning down another colour.

There are lots of glitters in Bone Daddy, so just a single coat was enough to get the effect I wanted.

CrowsToes Bone Daddy over Sinful Colors Cinderella

The tiny brighter blue glitters and the red glitters are not part of Bone Daddy. Once I'd applied Bone Daddy, I liked how the red shimmer of Cinderella still showed through, and I thought it was calling out for an accent in red! I have a decant of Alta Costura Vernis Chaos that I was given by a very sweet polish friend, and I thought that would be just perfect to add a little highlight to this mani. Chaos is a mix of microglitter, short bar glitter and hexes in various neon colours - some of them are transparent. I only wanted to use the blue and red microglitter and bars, and a couple of carefully selected hexes, so I fished these out of the bottle carefully and dabbed them on my nails just where I wanted them. I used just one red and one blue hex, but took the smaller glitters as they came. I do seem to have picked up a few green microglitters too.  It's not difficult to pick out individual glitters from a polish like this, just load up the brush then wipe the polish off in the neck of the brush and poke the brush back in where the glitters you want are. Apart from picking out the red hex and the blue hex, all I was doing really was avoiding getting the colours I didn't want on my nails on the brush, so the whole thing didn't take very long.

I used a coat of Gelous to smooth the glitter polishes out and a coat of Seche Vite to finish everything off.

CrowsToes Bone Daddy over Sinful Colors Cinderella

I purchased Sinful Colors Cinderella in Boots. If you're in the US, then obviously it's readily available in drugstores. I bought my Crowstoes Bone Daddy from Llarowe (who ships internationally). Alta Costura Vernis doesn't seem to be making polish at the moment, but there are other neon glitter polishes around - for example Darling Diva's I'm Fwee.

NARS Zulu and Max Factor Fantasy Fire

Max Factor Fantasy Fire over NARS Zulu

Yesterday I wore NARS Zulu. It's cold and grey and miserable here, with flurries of snow, when it should be spring. I wanted to wear something deep, and rich and comforting, so I choose NARS Zulu, one of my favourite dark greens, and I was intending to put glitter over, right away. Here's Zulu:

NARS Zulu

This polish is so amazingly green and squishy, I couldn't bear to put anything over it straight away. It seemed like defiling it somehow, lol! So I just wore it as it was for a day. This is three thin coats with Seche Vite.

In some lights it's very clearly green, but in other lights it's almost black. I think it's a very sophisticated colour, almost (but maybe not quite) business-appropriate. I suppose it depends on your work setting, but I'd wear it with a business suit.

NARS Zulu

Max Factor Fantasy Fire caused a real storm in the nail polish world when it was released last year (2012). It's pretty much a dead-on dupe for the legendary Clarins 230, which, if I remember correctly, was released about 1999 (please correct me if I'm wrong here). These polishes have an amazing colour shifting pigment which flashes from red to copper to green as the angle of the light changes. However, although both Clarins 230 and Max Factor Fantasy Fire look like they are purple in the bottle, the base is only very lightly tinted and they need to be layered over another colour to show their magic - I remember endless frustration putting on elayer after layer of Clarins 230 when I first got it all those years ago, and I couldn't build up any density of colour.

The obvious combination for Max Factor Fantasy Fire is to layer it over a purple or a dark blue, which looks great, but it does work well with other colours too. This is the first time I've used it with green, but I have worn it with red and bronze as well as blue and purple, and it comes out differently awesome every time.

Here's a series of pictures showing Fantasy Fire over Zulu in different lights. These are all (apart from one I'll explain when I get to it) taken in natural sunlight at the window. Astonishingly, the sun shone for a few hours earlier today!

With the sun directly on the nails, the dominant colours are purple and red, although you just see some shading to bronze around the edges:

As the nails angle away from the light, the bronzey green shimmer increases. You can also see through the Fantasy Fire to the green polish underneath, which enhances the effect.

Here's a closer shot of the shimmers:

And just for fun, a fuzzy shot under a lamp to show off the green sparkles in Fantasy Fire:

Max Factor Fantasy Fire over NARS Zulu

I used one coat of Max Factor Fantasy Fire over my existing NARS Zulu Mani to achieve this effect. The Max Factor MaxEffect bottles are tiny (about 4.5ml) but you don't need very much of this polish when it's used as a topcoat, so you'll still get a lot of manis from a bottle.

I think this combination with NARS Zulu is my favourite way I've used Max Factor Fantasy Fire so far!

Max Factor Fantasy Fire over NARS Zulu

NARS Zulu is an old favourite of mine, but it can still be purchased at NARS website here. Max Factor Fantasy Fire is in the Max Factor MaxEffect range and is readily available at Boots and Superdrug. I'm not sure Fantasy Fire is easily available outside of the UK, but there are various similar polishes from indie brands. One I particularly like is Girly Bits Shift Happens, which you can buy from Llarowe. Shift happens is in a lighter coloured base than Fantasy Fire, which means it's good for layering over lighter colours too.

Illamasqua Pink Raindrops

Illamasqua Pink Raindrops

This is really pretty! It's quite a dusky, beige-leaning pink with a lovely pink shimmer running through it (that seems impossible to capture in photographs) and sweet little white flakies.

Illamasqua Pink Raindrops isn't as sheer as the original, light grey Raindrops. These pictures are two coats plus Seche Vite, and the colour is fully opaque. Application is nice and easy. I think I'd need four coats of the original Raindrops to get this density of colour.

The pictures above were taken late afternoon  and the light was quite harsh. The one below was taken the next morning, and (on my screen anyway) is more colour accurate. You can also see a hint of the pink shimmer on my ring finger. One other thing I noticed after a day's wear; the shine on the mani has diminished a bit. This often happens with polishes that have glitter, flakies or shimmers in them - they kind of soak up topcoat (referred to as being 'hungry'). This isn't a problem, but I'd recommend using two coats of topcoat with this one (maybe Gelous then SV) to keep it shiny :)

Illamasqua Pink Raindrops

I purchased Illamasqua Pink Raindrops directly from Illamasqua at their website. I believe Illamasqua ship worldwide; in the UK shipping was free and I received my package today (Monday) after ordering on Thursday - I was impressed with the speed of delivery.

China Glaze Hologlam Strap On Your Moonboots - swatch and review

China Glaze Hologlam Strap on Your Moonboots

This is such a wonderful colour! As I'm sitting here, typing in a darkish room with an overhead light, the colours are quite mesmerising as my fingers are moving around.

I used two coats of China Glaze Strap On Your Moonboots over Nfu.oh Aquabase. No top coat. If you've not used an aquabase before, it's a basecoat which dries to a super-shiny finish and is a recommended base for more difficult holo polishes. When I swatched When Stars Collide and Infra Red I just applied the polishes to my bare nails and I was perfectly happy with the results, but a reader asked me if I thought they needed an aquabase so I'm using it this time round. It makes application really smooth and if you have an aquabase to hand (and time for it to dry - aquabase takes about 20 minutes to dry properly) I'd say go ahead and use it. But if you don't have one, you can certainly use these polishes without.

These first pictures are taken near a window, with an overhead light in the background. We don't have anything like full sun here today, but I guess this is the sort of effect you'd get in full sun. I'm really looking forward to wearing this polish in the summer!

China Glaze Hologlam Strap on Your Moonboots 

The base colour is a dark, slightly teal-leaning blue, but the holographic flare seems to range from greenish to a very dark purple.  Here are some pictures in indirect light, just showing the base colour. This is how the polish would look on an overcast day; the I like the base colour a lot and it is something I'd choose to wear in it's own right, quite apart from the holo awesomeness! There is no streakiness at all in this, the finish looks soft and velvety.

China Glaze Hologlam Strap on Your Moonboots - Low light

Finally, just because I could, I took a few pictures in direct light, to show how striking the colour shifts in this holo can be! Obviously, don't expect the polish to look like this all the time. But when you catch the light like this, it's amazing!

China Glaze Hologlam Strap on Your Moonboots - Direct Light

I guess the question in everybody's mind when there is a new dark blue holo is 'but how does it compare to OPI DS Glamour?'  Well, the two polishes are a different style of holo; Strap On Your Moonboots is a very fine linear holo, while DS Glamour is a scattered holo, with much bigger particles. The base colours are slightly different too - DS Glamour is more of  a straight-up blue where Strap On Your Moonboots leans slightly teal. In low light the don't look *that* much different - you can see the tonal differences in the base colour and OPI DS Glamour has a sparkly feel where China Glaze Strap On Your Moonboots is more of a velvety metallic finish.

China Glaze Hologlam Strap on Your Moonboots  / OPI DS Glamour - Low light

Move into strong light and the differences between the linear and scattered holo become more pronounced -

China Glaze Hologlam Strap on Your Moonboots  / OPI DS Glamour - Direct Light 

To be honest, I don't know which I prefer! I'm very fond of OPI DS Glamour, so I didn't expect there to any contest but I'm surprised how much I like Strap On Your Moonboots. I think they are different enough to justify owning both :)

I purchased China Glaze Strap On Your Moonboots from Faith Cosmetics at Amazon.co.uk. OPI DS Glamour is long discontinued I'm afraid, although it occasionally turns up on ebay, or you might be lucky enough to find a bottle lurking on a back shelf at a shop or salon.