Simple Nail Art with Barielle Shades

Barielle was kind enough to send along for review five summery colors: Ocean Breeze, Mint Ice Cream Cone, Dusty Lavender, Peach Popsicle, and Pink Flip Flops.



The first one I grabbed to swatch was Dusty Lavender because: purple. This is indeed dusty, a pinkish purple shimmer with a touch of grey. If it had a little more red in it, I'd call it mauve. (The image on the Barielle site makes this look much darker than it is in real life.) This was opaque in two coats.



The shimmer in Dusty Lavender is what I think of as the old school type: tiny silver particles that require a bit of attention during application to make sure the brushstrokes are lined up. In regular room light, the shimmer was pretty subtle, but as you can see from the photo below, in lower direct light it popped a bit more.



The other four in the group are all cremes, and the day I swatched these, I really didn't have the patience necessary to do that many creme swatches in a row. I like cremes, sure, but they definitely aren't as interesting to swatch on their own as shimmers or glitters are. Nail art to the rescue! I grabbed my dotting tools and laid down a pattern with Peach Popsicle and Pink Flip Flops on alternating nails over Dusty Lavender. I added a topcoat to smooth things over, too.



I noticed that I hadn't gotten the lines of dots quite centered on all my nails, so figured the best way to fix that was to add more dots in more sizes—if there's more to look at, any one aspect won't get too much scrutiny.



That left two polishes untried. I went for Mint Ice Cream Cone next. This is a pastel green creme and leans more yellow than what I think of as mint. I'd probably have called this Honeydew Melon Sorbet. For a light creme, this was very well behaved; the swatch is three thin coats, no topcoat. If I'd done thicker coats, I'm sure I could have stopped at two.



I complemented Mint Ice Cream Cone with diagonal color blocks of Ocean Breeze, a medium ever so slightly dusty teal creme. Because of the aforementioned patience problem, I didn't use tape but just freehanded the Ocean Breeze sections, adding topcoat to again try and smooth over any imperfections. I ended up quite liking this combination; the warm green vs. cool green contrast was intriguing to my eye/



Barielle has great cremes, no doubt. (They're not as strong in other finishes; I wish they'd do a collection of glass flecked cremes, for instance.) My pick of this group is Mint Ice Cream Cone, even though it takes my natural rosy glow right into lobster hands territory. That shade of green is just so refreshing, and that it applies so easily is a great bonus.

On the Barielle website, you can get the Summer Fun 5 Pack for $30; it has all of these colors except Dusty Lavender (Berry Go 'Round, a coral creme, is there instead). You may recall that Pink Flip Flops was also part of the Summer Brights collection which I swatched in May.

The polishes shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider.