Salon Perfect Studio FX and Avon Cosmic Holographic Swatches

Today is another installment in my Better Late Than Never series; this time I have swatches two holographic collections that I was pretty excited about when I bought them but then kind of forgot about while waiting for sunshine and swatching time to coincide. I know some people are very dismissive of lightbox swatches, but if it weren't for my lightbox, I would hardly ever get any decent photos for this blog (and this blog is one of the main ways I justify having such a large stash, so I value this blog very much). But much as I like my lightbox, I haven't figured out how to use it to get the most rainbows out of holographic polishes, so sometimes I do need to wait for Mr. Sun to grace me with his presence on a day I'm not working. In the interests of making swatches while the sun shined, I went with Skittles (though my attention span tends to be short enough that I rather doubt I would have done whole hand swatches of seventeen colors in one session regardless of whether I needed to get them done before sundown).

First up, I have the Salon Perfect Studio FX Holographic collection, seven colors that were released in WalMart stores late this past summer. I was excited about these because they were less expensive than a lot of the holos that had come before ($5.98 for a 14ml bottle versus the suggested retail of $14 for China Glaze Hologlam). Left to right below: Pixel Pink, Leading Lady, Silver Screen, Fade Out, Green Room, Spot Light, and Starlet (or Startlet, if you take the label at its word).



Indoors in indirect light, these are just shimmery, with not really any rainbows to be seen. Left to right below: Pixel Pink (actually pink, which is almost surprising what with the way polishes seemed to get named at random), Leading Lady (plum), Silver Screen (pewter-leaning silver), and Fade Out (charcoal).



Outside in direct sun, rainbows do appear. They're not as crazy linear as Layla Hologram Effect to be sure, but I didn't pay Layla money for these either.





It's the same story with the other colors; no rainbows inside. Top to bottom below: Green Room (green), Spot Light (gold), Starlet (navy), Green Room (I chose it to go twice because I don't have many green holos).



As I mentioned earlier, my bottle of Starlet is dubbed "Startlet" on the label.



In the sun, there were some rainbows.





Some say blurry, I say artistic:



There's a reason I mentioned China Glaze Hologlam above when I was comparing prices; five of the seven the Studio FX are dupes for the China Glaze. There's a great comparison post on Oh Three Oh Four showing how they match up.

The Avon Cosmic collection, which came out this past summer but was still available on the website when I checked this morning, has ten colors in it. These are also reasonably priced, at $6 a 12 ml bottle.

There are five warm colors: Radiant, Starlight, Saturn, Super Nova, and Starburst.



And five cool colors: Moonbeam, Celestial, Galaxy, Aurora, and Eclipse.



I paired Radiant (gold) and Moonbeam (silver). Indoors in my lightbox, there were no rainbows but there was shimmer. The shimmer here leaned more toward microglitter than the Salon Perfect had.



Outside in the sun, some scattered rainbows showed up.



Next, I tried Starlight (every so slightly green-leaning yellow), Saturn (orange), Super Nova (orangish red), and Starburst (pinkish red).



Here are the juicy warm Cosmic colors in the sun:





I finished off the collection with Celestial (pale greenish blue), Galaxy (turquoise-leaning blue), Aurora (warmish purple), and Eclipse (almost black teal).



And in the sunshine:





For all of these colors, Salon Perfect and Avon, I used my regular base coat (Salon Sciences Instant Artificials) to smooth out my nails and then applied two coats of color. For Avon Eclipse, I could have probably done only one coat. I didn't use topcoat; the Avon were more shiny than the Salon Perfect.

My favorites of all of these are Salon Perfect Green Room, Avon Celestial, and Avon Eclipse. There's nothing wrong with the others, just I have similar colors in my stash that I like as well or more than these.