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

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.

Elevation Polish Street Side NYC with Alta Costura Vernis Squared

Alta Costura Vernis Squared is one of my favourite glitters. I love matt glitters, and the squares make this one quite unusual. It's packed full of a whole rainbow of colours, which make it really easy to pair with any base colour.

I was feeling a need for something a bit adventurous today, so I decided to use a yellow base. I love yellow, but it is a difficult colour to wear. Also, a lot of yellow polishes can be difficult to apply. I can't wear a true primary yellow with my skintone, but if the yellow leans either towards mustard or lemon I'm fine with it.

The yellow I chose for this mani was Elevation Polish Street Side NYC. This one has a definite mustard tinge; Lulu's description says it was inspired by New York taxicabs, and the slightly dusty mustard conjures up a perfect image of yellow cars in a busy city. The polish has just a hint of a coppery microflakie running through it, and the formula is great - often yellows can be notoriously streaky. As a general rule with yellow, I usually apply two coats, then a coat of Seche Vite to help even out any streakiness before the final coat. So here I applied a coat of SV to Street Side NYC before the glitter. As you can see the polish is pretty much perfect at two coats plus topcoat, no streaking in sight:

Elevation Polish Street Side NYC

Here it is with ACV Squared. I always find a glitter over a hard-to-wear colour breaks the colour up a bit and brings the colour back into my comfort zone. That said, my comfort zone is pretty broad and I didn't feel at all self-conscious with this mani. I used two coats of the glitter polish, then two coats of Gelous and a further thick coat of SV to smooth everything out. Some of the glitters are quite big, and they are square, so I needed to do just a little bit of manipulation to get them to lie flat on the nail. I wouldn't say this is a difficult glitter to apply at all though, and well worth the effort. Another thing I'd add about ACV Squared is that although the bottle I have is over six months old, there is no bleeding of the glitter into the base or any curling of the glitters themselves - this is a problem I've noticed with some indie polishes.

Elevation Polish Street Side NYC with Alta Costura Vernis Squared

I bought Elevation Polish Street Side NYC from Lulu at her website here elevationpolish. I got my bottle of ACV Squared from a polish friend in the USA - Nikki, the creator of ACV, has an Etsy shop but I think her production is quite small and I've never caught a restock.She doesn't have any stock currently but I did have an e-mail conversation with her a few months ago (November 2012) and she said she was planning to come back with more polishes so I'm still hopeful - here's a link to her blog http://myinvanity.blogspot.co.uk/.

Do you like yellow polishes? What shades of yellow do you find easiest to wear?