Color Club Safari Garden Collection

With summer colors already showing up in stores, I figured I'd best get moving and share the Spring 2014 collection from Color Club, Safari Garden, which they were nice enough to send for review. There are six shades here: Lion's Den, Safari Sunset, Look Don't Tusk, In De-Nile, Tribe and True, and Nail-robi.



This collection was my first exposure to Color Club's new look, with white caps on the bottles and a bolder logo. The flower on the top of the cap is gone, replaced by two nested Cs. (Or should that be C's? Back in the Jurassic era when I learned grammar, I was taught that capital letters took an apostrophe to form their plurals, but now that seems to have fallen out of fashion/favor.)



Look Don't Tusk is an ivory creme. It was pretty well behaved for a pale color; my swatch is three coats but I might have been able to stop at two.



Lion's Den is a golden microflakie shimmer that shows hints of green and rose shifts in the bottle.


I wasn't sure how sheer Lion's Den would be, so I first tried it layered on top of Look Don't Tusk. Since light bases are not great for coaxing out duochromes/multichromes, I was not surprised to see that two coats of Lion's Den over the ivory led to straightforward golden goodness. There was maybe a tiny hint of a pink shift at some angles, but it was very subtle.



On its own at two coats, Lion's Den showed a bit more of a color shift but pretty much still read as golden. Maybe a third coat would have amped this up. Layering it over black would most likely help bring out the shift, but I was ready to move on and see what the rest of the colors in this collection were like so I didn't try that.





Safari Sunset is a peachy color with strong golden shimmer. I used two coats for my swatch; three might have been better. This has a tendency to show brushstrokes but I've definitely seen way worse. I don't find this color flattering on me but can see it looking great on my darker completed friends.



I do like the glow Safari Sunset shows in lower light:



In De-Nile is a light baby blue creme. I'm not sure what it has to do with the Nile but it sure is pretty. I found the formula on this one particularly nice; two coats was all I needed for full coverage. Departing from normal practice, I did add topcoat to my swatch for this one, as I hadn't use base coat and felt like my nail ridges were detracting too much from this lovely color; topcoat smoothed over those issues.



I was curious to see how In De-Nile compared to another pale blue, Essie Find Me an Oasis from this year's Resort collection. Here they are at two coats each; left to right it's Color Club, Essie, Color Club, Essie. The Essie is lighter and also looks a touch more yellow. I prefer the Color Club.



Another angle on these two blues:



While I was in comparison mode, I grabbed another color from Essie Resort 2014, Under the Twilight, to see how close it was to Nail-robi from this Color Club collection. Left to right below: Color Club, Essie, Color Club, Essie. I used only one coat of each, and tried to go very thin on my ring and pinky fingers to highlight the differences. These are both in the blue violet part of the spectrum, but the Color Club leans more blue and the Essie more violet. The Essie also has a touch of dustiness to it, while the Color Club is more clear-toned. Still, in a lot of lights, these will look very similar.



My attention span for swatching cremes was running low at this point, so I alternated Nail-robi, the dark indigo shown above, with Tribe and True, a vibrant olive green. I used two coats of both, then decided they needed dots of the opposite color to tie the look together, which meant I needed to add topcoat to meld the dots with the background.







All the shiny from the topcoat was distracting my camera from seeing the colors, so I mattified (with Wet 'n' Wild). Ah, that's better (though adding the matte made the drag from the dot on my pinky more obvious—I really need to learn to be more patient).



I haven't seen this particular collection in stores by me, which isn't too surprising since there are only a few of places on my usual routes that carry the brand and they aren't always timely with putting out new stuff. The collection is available on the Color Club website for $8 a bottle; there's also a mini set of four of the colors for $10.

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.