Ruby Wing Sweet Fantasy Collection

It's Wednesday, but there is no nail wheel today as I have too many swatches to share and haven't been able to do that yet this week due to much busy-ness at work, including two half days of training and working on gathering information to apply for a visa to go to Belarus and visit with our contractors there. (If anyone reading this has any tips to share about Belarus, either nail polish related or no, I'd love to hear them.)

Ruby Wing kindly sent all six colors in their Spring 2014 collection for my review. Since these are sun-activated color changing polishes, I had to wait to swatch them until the sun and an available spot in my schedule coincided, which took a while. Finally on a recent weekend, conditions looked good and I pulled out the bottles. The shades here are Silk Sheets, Dolled Up, Kitten Heels, Centerfold, In Your Dreams, and Deepest Desire.



Indoors, Silk Sheets is a light orange with fine golden shimmer. I used three coats for my swatch, though two would probably have been fine. Here it is in my light box:



Still indoors, in direct low light:



In the sun, Silk Sheets darkens to coral:



I was determined to show the before and after colors side by side, so I tucked two fingers into my jacket and waited until the polish had returned to its indoor color, then quickly pulled them out and snapped a quick picture. Not quite quick enough, as you can see below that the two fingers on the right are already starting to darken. These changes happen pretty quickly.



Dolled Up has red, yellow, and blue large hex glitter plus small red glitter in a milky pastel peach base. I used two coats plus topcoat. This left me with the barest hint of visible nail line on some fingers, but I didn't want to add a third coat of color lest the glitter pile up too much. Some of the large hexes had started to curl a bit; this affected the blue ones the most, with the yellow being the best behaved. The topcoat smoothed over those issues.



In the sun, the base turned red, which meant the red glitter started to blend into the base color, especially the smaller glitters. It sort of looks like the color changing pigment got absorbed by the topcoat, as some spots I didn't see to clean up indoors sure turned colors outdoors, and it almost looked like I'd added a red jelly on top of a lighter milky glitter base.



Here's my half and half of Dolled Up, with the rightmost two fingers showing an early phase of the color change.



Kitten Heels is a super bright purple-leaning pink creme when worn indoors. I wouldn't quite call it neon since it dried fairly shiny rather than satin/matte as neons do (my swatch is two coats, no topcoat), but it is definitely very vibrant.



In the sun, Kitten Heels turns coral.



Here's the two colors, one polish shot. I took these shots, so I'm sharing them, even though it looked like this for only two seconds (time approximate).



Centerfold has black and silver glitter in a rosy pink jelly base: very large black hexes, large silver hexes, and small silver pieces. The hexes in this were better behaved than those in Dolled Up; some of the silver ones look curled but that's reflective curling, not actual curling. I used two coats plus topcoat.



The color change of Centerfold is very dramatic; in the sun, the base turns deep purple, so deep that the black glitter blends right in. So deep that I went out in the sun to take photos and then went back inside to do some additional cleanup.





In Your Dreams is a pale blue creme indoors. Two coats were ample for full coverage.



In the sun, In Your Dreams becomes a deeper dusty blue.





Deepest Desire is a shimmer with very slight frosty tendencies. Indoors, it's olive green. My swatch is two coats, no topcoat.





In the sun, Deepest Desire becomes a bronzey brown.





My favorites from this collection are Deepest Desire (though it feels more like a fall color to me than spring), In Your Dreams, and Kitten Heels. I like the outdoor color of Silk Sheets but the indoor isn't that flattering to me, and I'd see the indoor way more often. The glitters just don't quite do it for me.

These colors are available for $10 a bottle on the Ruby Wing webiste. I've seen the brand at Meijer, too, though this particular collection hasn't appeared there yet.

The polishes shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider, and I get to keep the polishes for my own use.