Dior Bikini and Saint-Tropez Swatches and Comparisons

I buy almost all of my high end polishes online because department stores aren't a part of my usual shopping rounds. This means I don't see the displays, so I had to do some research to find out that the two Dior polishes I have today are from the Croisette Collection for Summer 2012.

Bikini is a soft coral creme. Well, an almost creme, I should say. It's possible to catch glimpses of very sparse shimmer in it under certain conditions, but those conditions are so fleeting that the shimmer might as well be in my imagination. I used two coats, no top coat.



Also, it's very hard to get a photo of bottle and its very shiny cap and not have my camera clearly reflected in the shot; the one above was the best of about six I took.



I have a good number of corals in my stash, but Bikini is unique among them because it's more muted. Did that stop me from doing a comparison? No, it did not. I pulled out China Glaze Life Preserver, Orly Olé, and Barry M Coral. All three of those are cremes; since the shimmer in Bikini is so subtle, I thought it made more sense to compare it to cremes.



Bikini was the only two-coater in this group; I used three of each of the others. Left to right below: Life Preserver, Bikini, Olé, Coral.



Saint-Tropez (which I have seen both with and without the hyphen, but my bottle looks like it has a hyphen, so I'm going with that) is a blue green almost creme. Like its warm colored sibling, this was two coats.







I thought it would be fairly easy to find a dupe or near dupe for Saint-Tropez in my stash since I do love my turquoises and teals and aquas. I grabbed L'Oreal Water's Edge (the 2010 dupe of Essie Greenport), L'Oreal Now You Sea Me (from the recent relaunch), and Revlon Sheer Seafoam (from this year). These three are all cremes, too, for the same reasons as the Bikini comparison. I had an even harder time spotting the shimmer in Saint-Tropez than in Bikini.



As it turned out, none of these were quite a match. Water's Edge was too green, Now You Sea Me too dark, and Sheer Seafoam too sheer and too green. The L'Oreal's, like the Dior, were two coats. The Revlon was six. Yep, you read that right, six. I know they warned right in the name that it was sheer, but I honestly didn't expect six coats to still be this sheer. Left to right below: Water's Edge, Now You Sea Me, Saint-Tropez, Sheer Seafoam.



Here I am awkwardly trying to get my index and ring fingers next to each other to see Water's Edge and Saint-Tropez side by side.



I was pretty sure I'd like Saint-Tropez before I bought it, and I do. I mostly got Bikini because when a brand does a collection of only two polishes I like to support that restraint on their part by getting both of them, but I ended up liking it more than I thought. The mutedness of the coral makes it interesting.