Revlon Evening Opulence Collection

There are four nail colors in the Revlon Evening Opulence display for Holiday 2013: Elusive, Rich, Divine, and Seductive.



Divine is a deep burgundy shimmer. I used two coats, no topcoat, for my swatch.



Divine looks its best in lower levels of direct light; see how glowy it is:



Seductive is a very deep plummy purple creme. Just for fun, I did some funky French tips with it on Divine and smoothed over the whole look with topcoat. This ended up being a more subtle combination than I expected.



When I swatched Seductive on its own, I did two coats, then added dots of Rich (plus topcoat) on an accent nail because Seductive alone wasn't doing it for me. I like purple, sure, but Seductive is so dark it barely registers as purple with my brain.



There is a certain squishiness to Seductive, though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a jelly since it does cover in two coats. A crelly, maybe.



Rich, as you saw from the dots above, is a charcoal foil tinged with golden olive tones. This was another two coater.





Some of you may be thinking that you've seen Rich before somewhere. I know I was. Digging into my stash, I came up with another Revlon that looked just like it:



That's Carbonite on the left above, Rich on the right. Carbonite was Revlon's answer to Chanel Graphite. Perhaps Rich is Revlon's answer to leftover Carbonite.

Left to right below on the nail: Rich, Carbonite, Rich, Carbonite. They look pretty much the same to me. If pressed to find a difference, I might say that Rich is a touch more olive-toned, but it's so slight it could be chalked up to a difference in batches or how I'm holding my fingers.



Another angle below, with Rich on top, Carbonite on the bottom:



Elusive is the most interesting polish in this collection. In the bottle, I thought it would be a similar to Revlon Sparkle Aplenty, which had silver and black glitter in a black jelly base. But no, it was not. Elusive's black base is not a jelly but rather a satin finish creme. This means the green and blue green glitter in it stays rather hidden; one might even say it's elusive. Here's what it looks like at two coats, no topcoat:



I'm not sure if this was an attempt to do a textured matte glitter or what. It definitely dries with a texture, one I call lumpy.



As you'd expect, topcoat helps with the lumpiness. The glitter is still submerged in the black base, of course, but the topcoat helps the pieces that are closer to the surface show a bit more by heightening the contrast between the black and the glitter.





The more I looked at Elusive with topcoat, the more I liked it. Yeah, I wish the base were a little less opaque so the glitter showed more, but on the other hand, the murkiness here gives it a different look than a lot of glitters out there, and different is good.

For me, Elusive is the clear keeper in this collection. Rich is nice but only if you don't already have Carbonite or something similar like Chanel Graphite or OPI Number One Nemesis or Nicole by OPI A Phil's Paradise. It's the same story with Divine and Seductive; colors like this are good to have in a well rounded nail polish collection, but most of us already have them. There's a comparison of Divine to OPI Germanicure on Nouveau Cheap that convinced me they're dupes. I don't own Germanicure but I'm sure I have something that's close enough. As for Seductive, it's no secret that I own an excess of purple cremes already. I don't need another vampy one. Some people do, I'm sure. Revlon could let those people could shop in the core display, I think, to make room in the holiday ones for more interesting choices.

What's your take on Evening Opulence?