A Winners Polish Win!

Today I have an exciting find I was not expecting at all during my last trip to Winners. I actually headed there on a whim since I was early for a bus on my way home from work Monday. I can usually expect to find, Color Club, China Glaze, OPI and Essie among other well known polish brands. But when I saw a Layla Ceramic Effect polish I got super excited! Unfortunately there was only one, luckily for me it was a flakie!

Layla Ceramic Effect 52, "The Butterfly Effect", is  a gorgeous flakie comprised of a blurple jelly base, multi-chromatic shimmer and opalescent flakies. This polish is a stunner! It is actually very close to another limited edition hard to find polish in my collection, Nfu-Oh 51. Side by side in the bottle they appear to have slight differences, but I think I will dedicate a separate post for the comparison for another time.

First let's talk about the bottle, the only Layla's I currently own are the holographics that come in the short round bottles. The Ceramic Effects come in a tapered, tall rectangular bottle with angled corners. An interesting shape for a polish bottle but easy to store in my opinion! The brush handle also appears to be made of actual ceramic.

Application was a breeze, no issues at all. Since the base is a jelly the first coat was a bit sheer and slightly patchy, but the second coat evened that right up! The lighting in some of my photos makes the polish apper sheer, but it reality the base is dark enough to avoid any visible nail line. The purple base is almost electric, is is dark but is so saturated I want to describe it as bright. The flakies colours shift between green, yellow orange and red along with the shimmer particles.

Such a pretty shade, I'm not sure if it is readily available for a lot of people, seeing as it is an Italian brand. I checked their site and saw that they still have it for sale. I wish Winners had more, there is a green flakie Ceramic Effect I have been lusting after!

Walkin' in Your Spider Webs

I did a quick mani refresh last week with Pinta, I wanted something quick and fun to change it up so I decided to stamp some Spiderwebs!

I did something similar to this last year around Halloween, I had stamped the Spider webs as a French tip and loved it! I used the image from Bundle Monster plate, BM13 and stamped with Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Whirlwind White. It held me over for a few days before I switched it up.

Pinta

I have a gorgeous creme for fall today, Zoya Pinta. Pinta is a deep blue leaning purple creme that is super shiny and dark. It actually dries a bit darker than the bottle colour. I'm just glad it doesn't look black! Zoya's formula usually doesn't disappoint, but I found Pinta to be a little too thick and gloopy. I added thinner to the bottle immediately after application to one nail! Application was much easier from then on.

I'm sure if you applied one thick coat to each nail to would be fine, but I used one medium coat and another thinner one to even everything out. Since this polish is glossy on it's own Seche made it pure wet shine!

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I feel like my application wasn't the greatest with this one, it's always harder to hide tiny imperfections with such a dark shade as well. I do love the colour though, so rich and dark. Im in the process of deciding how I can use Pinta as the base for some nail art :)

Playing with New BM Plates

Today I have a post I forgot to publish last week! It's a mani refresh with one of my new BM plates. I wanted to add a little something to Color Club's Pucci-licious to freshen it up a bit, but not too much because I would be taking it off the next day.

I decided to add the chain link fence/fishnet pattern from BM 209 to random nails.

Above is my rarely shown right hand with pink and middle finger stamped. And below is my left hand with my pinky and index finger stamped. I used a Sally Hansen purple chrome.

I am really loving the new BM plates, the intricacy of the images and overall quality are really impressive. And that issue I had written about before (defective image in one of my plates) was resolved, no questions asked, they sent me a brand new plate right away! I hope they come out with another collection soon :)

A Blurple Purple

Today I have a polish from last years summer collection from Color Club, Pucci-licious.

The Poptastic collection included many bright and neon colours for summer. This was actually the first Color Club collection I had purchased and it was mostly just for this polish and Twiggy. Almost all of the colours in this collection are awesome for stamping! Color Club has excellent pigmentation and formula, especially in this collection.

Anyways, on to Pucci-licious. This polish is a beautiful blue toned purple or "blurple" that is just so chic! I really love it and am pretty sure this was only 1 coat! It was super hard to photograph, I would say it is darker in real life.

This was also one of the fist Color Club lemmings I had when I first started collecting. I'm not sure where these polishes can be purchased in Canada, so if you are Canadian please let me know. I picked up this collection (among many others since!) from Winners for $12.99 each. Single polishes however, I have only been able to find in specific beauty supplies that want almost $6 a bottle! Online I know these retail somewhere between $2-$3, correct? The full collection packs from Winners of 7 polishes come out to just under $2 a bottle :)

I really like this colour and can't wait to start wearing some of the neons from this years summer collection. It seems that the days I apply polish on are gloomy and rainy, so I don't feel like wearing neons... then a couple days later the sun is out. The weather has been messed up lately lol.