Starlight and Sparkles Duochrome Toppers, Part One

Today I have another installment of the polishes which Starlight and Sparkles sent for review. Originally, this was going to be the final installment, covering all of the duochrome top coats Issa sent, but when I started going through the photos I took and trying to winnow them down, I realized that to do justice to these polishes I'd need more shots than usual for each one, so I'm going to split them up into two posts.

For this post, I have the Mythological trio, consisting of Dragon, Phoenix, and Unicorn. I love that the stars on the labels are color-coordinated with how the pigment in them shifts.



Dragon shifts from green to antique gold; I layered it over Wet 'n' Wild Black Creme to show it off. Below, you can see that just a slight variation in the angle of my fingers brings out the different sides of Dragon.







The above three shots were all in the indirect illumination of my lightbox; look below how wonderfully the colors pop in direct room light.



Then I took Dragon outside into the sun and got to see even more colors show up. Sometimes it looked very similar to how it had indoors, shading from olive green to antique gold.



Sometimes I'd see the gold shade into a rich brown:



Sometimes there'd be lots of pops of color:



Most surprising, sometimes Dragon would turn entirely green, not olive at all, just straight up green. I have no idea what the neighbors must have thought if any of them saw me out in my yard, waving my hand around, moving it up and down, tilting my fingers this way and that as I enjoyed seeing all Dragon had to show me.



Next up is Phoenix, which shifts from orangey red to golden green. I layered this over the black creme as well. Here it is in the lightbox, where it seemed to want to show mostly its red side.





And here's Phoenix in direct room light:



Once again, intersting things happened in the sunshine. I'd hold my hand one way, I had an olive green mani.



I'd tilt my hand another way, my nails turned coppery brown.



Another shift, and I had a festival of fall color going on. So much variety from one polish!



Wrapping up, we have Unicorn, which shifts from green to blue. As with the other two, I used a black creme base to show off the shift. In the lightbox, it liked being green, mostly.






In direct room light, the blue started to come out to play, too.



Unfortunately the best indoor shot I got showing the range from blue to green is very blurry; I move my hands around so much when I'm swatching a duochrome that this tends to happen a lot.



Of course I had to go outside into the sun to see what Unicorn would do (and amazingly the sun was still playing nice, not hiding behind clouds as it seems to like to do on days when I'm swatching). Here's Unicorn looking mostly blue:



And mostly green:



And blue and green at the same time:





I was really impressed with these toppers. They applied very nicely, with no dragging or leveling issues, and were so fascinating to look at. I want to try them over different base colors at some point, as I can see some interesting things happening.

You can buy this trio as a set of full-size 15ml bottles for $27 at the Starlight and Sparkles etsy shop. The trio in a set of minis is $12, which is a bargain as far as I'm concerned. Individual bottles are available, too.

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.