Fresh Paint Once Upon a Time Collection

I haven't always paid much attention to the Fresh Paint brand. I'd buy a bottle here and a bottle there if something looked especially good, but I didn't go for whole collections like I do with a lot of other brands. For instance, I bought Sugar Crush because it was a flakie, and flakies are a good thing to have around, but completely missed that it was part of a Candy Crush themed collection even though I play a lot of Candy Crush (I'm on level 570-something) and probably would have picked up the other colors if I'd even looked at their names. Muling for the Five Below Group Buys group on Facebook has got me more focused, so much so that I've more than doubled the number of Fresh Paints from what I had before I joined the group in January. Granted, looking at the number of bottles involved, going from six to thirteen is not such a huge deal, but still.

Today I've got the latest Fresh Paint collection, which is called Once Upon a Time according to the cards in the store (though those do also say Funky Fingers on them, so that's weird). The Five Below website just calls this the Semi Matte collection. Whatever we call it, there are four shades: Belle of the Ball, Hakuna Matata, Enchanted, and Glass Slipper. All of them are shimmers that I expected to dry to a satin finish but if the label hadn't said "semi matte" I probably wouldn't have noticed any difference between these and a lot of regular shimmers. The names definitely point to this being inspired by Disney, as do the Cinderella blue color of Glass Slipper and the yellow of Belle of the Ball (though Belle's ballgown in Beauty and the Beast was a deeper yellow than this). I'm not so sure about Enchanted being pink; I seem to recall her big dress being white but it's been a while since I saw that movie. Hakuna Matata is the most Disney name of the bunch; I don't think of that as a fairy tale like the other three, but I suppose Nala is a sort of princess, too.



Belle of the Ball is a pale yellow with subtle golden shimmer. At three coats, there was the barest hint of visible nail line.
Despite waiting longer than normal before taking pictures, it didn't look especially semi matte to me.



It did have a nice glow in direct room light:



I added OPI Matte Top Coat and it looked like frosted glass, which I really liked.





The pink Enchanted was up next. The shimmer in this is more subtle than that in Belle of the Ball. I used three coats and got pretty much full coverage.



This was not as glowy in direct room light, though the faint pink shimmer did show up a bit:



I topped two nails with a shiny topcoat and two with the OPI matte. Seeing it truly glossy did make me appreciate how satiny the unadorned finish is. Again the matte made it look like frosted glass, and again I liked that look a lot.



Hakuna Matata is a soft orange with a very subtle shimmer similar to Enchanted. I used three coats for my swatch.



In direct room light:



With the shiny and matte top coats:



Glass Slipper is the turquoise blue sister, with shimmer similar the Enchanted and Hakuna Matata, perhaps even a bit more subtle. As with the others, I used three coats of this one.



Direct room light:



Shiny and matte:



The mattified blue reminded me of sea glass, which reminded me of the Funky Fingers Broken Sea Glass glitter topper (previously seen in my Essie Spring 2015 post), so I grabbed that and added it to Glass Slipper, topping the combination with the OPI matte. I really really liked this look.





Funky Fingers Scattered Sea Shells was right next to Broken Sea Glass waiting to be incorporated into long term storage, and I noticed it looked like it would coordinate very nicely with the other Once Upon a Time colors. I did a base of Belle of the Ball then added freehand diagonal color blocks with Enchanted and Hakuna Matata on alternating nails, then topped with Scattered Sea Shells and OPI Matte Top Coat. Yep, really like this combination, too.





My last experriment was not nearly as successful. I tried these over black to see how they'd do as the top layer in a combination. Belle of the Ball (far left) was okay, and Hakuna Matata was tolerable, but the other two were just yucky. You can see my desire to get this off my nails sooner in the sloppy cleanup. But hey, not everything is gonna work, and you just gotta try stuff to see what does.



The semi matte part of this collection is wasted on me, but I really like them with a matte topcoat and they make good bases for glitters, too. I'm definitely not sorry that the Five Below Group Buys ladies brought them to my attention.