Polish Spamarama!!!

I've got almost enough nail polish right now I can almost wear a different colour everyday for 2 years.  And with that being said, here's some polish spam action...

The magnetic nail polish trend is still hanging in their and yet I still don't have the hang of it.  This one is Gold Nugget from Layla.  It's nice but I'm not seeing the colour gold in here. I still have to practice tons more to master this trend before it's all over!

I so badly wanted Essie's Sexy Divide to be totally awesome but instead it ended up being totally awful. Three coats couldn't stop the the bald spots and the thin formula lead to chips within less than 12 of wear.  beautiful in the bottle, disastrous on my nails.

I don't wear a lot of pink polish but when I do, Maybelline's Timely Rose is my go to polish.  It's not childish or bubble gummy in any way.  It's positively lady like!

It's pretty obvious by now that grey nail polish is never going to go away.  Good!  The more funky neutral colours the better and Essie's School of Hard Rocks is a pretty good one with a thick and even formula that went on with ease and had staying power and a strong shine.

I haven't even worn To Buy or Not to Buy from Essie yet so I had to rely on my sister to model this lavender shimmer for me.  It looks so much nicer on the nail than in the bottle doesn't it?

Someday, I'll pick up a bottle of gun metal nail polish and say that I've really bought enough of these types of colours and place it back on the display.  Since I didn't have that voice in my head telling me to "just put the polish down and back away" I bought L'oreal's VIP Status.  You can see a bit of balding at the top of my index finger but that's mainly the fault of an unbuffed nail base and not the polish.

Hey!  Did I hear someone say they wanted to see a picture of Tom Hiddleston, Michael Sheen and Queen Elizabeth?  No? Well too bad...here it is anyways:

Her Royal Highness Must Have Thought He Was Tony Blair!

Magnetic Nail Polish by Layla & Nails Inc.

As much as I love nail polish, I have to admit that sometimes I can suffer from a feeling that I can best describe as a "lack of new things" vibe that I think comes from seeing the same brands over and over again and having to make the weighty decision of "should I buy this creme or shimmer finish?"  As the popularity of nail polish has growth hugely in the last few years, manufacturers have had to get a lot more inventive and/or innovative in order to stand out in what is now a very crowded market.  More often than not, some of these "innovations" are just retreads of ideas tried out in the past like matte finish polishes, polishes in pens and crackle top coats.  I've seen all of these trends before (let's face it, I'm old!) and I've tried them all too but one type of polish eluded me for a while and that was magnetic nail polish.  

Magneto, Do Your Thing!

This in itself isn't new.  I've seen them often on many other blogs in the last few years but somehow I either missed out when the polish was first available and since I don't shop online as much as I used to, my options for purchasing were limited.

But now magnetic polish is all over the place from high end retailers like Sephora to your local pharmacy which is where I picked up these two polishes to try out:

First up is Trafalgar Square from Nail Inc. London which is finally available at Sephora stores in Canada.  They didn't have too much to offer by way of colour choices.  In fact, the Sephora that I bought this from only had two: a dark grey/black and a dark purple. 

The second polish is Velvet Groove from Layla.  They had a larger choice of colours that included blues & greens but I think I chose this colour because I still would have liked it even if it didn't have tiny magnetic particles in it.  As you can see, I had a few issues with the application, which obviously takes more time to do than the usual process.

The process is simple though.  You paint your nail and while the polish is still wet, you hold the magnet (which is part of the bottle cap) over your nail for a few seconds as it pulls on the particles to form a design on your nail...

Kind of Like This, Only With a Lot Less Charisma.

And you better work fast because both of these polishes dry like lightning and you'll just end up with a very frosty looking finish. Oddly enough, what helps this process work is much like what it takes to get to Carnegie Hall: Practice!  I botched up my first two attempts on my pinkies and ring fingers by holding the magnets so close, I smudged my polish with the bottle caps!  The first photo is the Nails Inc. cap and the second is the Layla cap.

The Handy, Rounded Guide for Your Nail Didn't Stop Me From Smearing the Polish.

Oops! I Did it Again.

Two words of advice. If you buy the Layla polish and you smudge your nails with the bottle cap, do not wipe the polish off or you will end up ruining the effect of the magnet design as seen in the above photo.  The second is you really should work in a well lit area so that you can see what you're doing and avoid mishaps.

So now for the final word.  Which one is the better polish of the two?  As far as the application process goes both the Nails Inc. and Layla polishes are on the same level but when it comes to results I preferred the Layla polish since once I got the hang of the magnet, the results were much more dramatic.

Ta Da!

Ruby Rush By Sally Hansen & Layla Graffiti Effect

I recently picked up Ruby Rush, one of the Fall 2011 colours from the Insta-Dri Line from what was a pretty full display at my local Pharmaplus.  I don't know if shoppers are not into the usual fall "go to" colours that always come out at this time of year or if it was the fact that the display was tucked away on a bottom shelf.  Maybe they're just looking for something different in terms of polish.

If you're looking for something different, you won't find it in this colour but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  This types of wine coloured shimmer polishes are usually a core type of colour.  Like a pure red or a nice clean nude polish, you should expect to find at least one colour like this in every polish lovers collection.

There were no issues with application and it did dry quickly as advertised but the formula was a bit thin.  It ended up chipping by the end of the first day of wear, so if your looking for something that will last more than a couple of days, then Ruby Rush is not for you.

As for polish buyers wanting something new, I can't help but wonder if we're reaching the end of the crackle craze.  While at the same Pharmaplus, I found a completely full display for a polish line called Layla.  Their take on crackle nail polish is called a Graffiti Effect topcoat but it just adds up to the same thing.  I decided to give the purple colour (the polish didn't have a name) I bought a try on top of Ruby Rush right before I removed it.

If you look closely, you can the problem with the polish right away.  When I polish my nails, I start with the pinkie and work my way over to my thumb.  That way I don't accidently bump or smear a wet nail so you can see that while the polish is cracklingly very well on my pinkie but by the time I got to my thumb, it wasn't doing so well.  If you're wondering, I dipped the brush for a new sweep of polish for each nail.  I guess I can't grumble since it was under $4 CDN but that was the mark down price:  It was originally priced at $15 CDN!  So if you live in the GTA and you want to try out a crackle polish, $4 is fairly reasonable.