You're going to want to settle in and get comfortable for this entry because I loved this polish so much that I took eleventy billion photos of it and had a very hard time cutting down that number when trying to decide which ones to include here. The polish in question is Jessica Disco Diva, which I got a heads up about thanks to Rachel of
Rachel Marie's Nails. I don't run across Jessica in my usual travels, so didn't know they were doing a silver holo. It comes in a set called Hologram Chic along with a base coat named Retro Revival. (The bottles I got say "Hologram Top Coat" on them, rather than "Hologram Chic" as shown on the
Jessica Cosmetics site, but I'm not fussed about that since it's the right stuff in the bottles.)
Doesn't look like much in the bottle, does it? Once it's dry on the nail, the rainbows start to peek out, even in indirect light:
This is two coats of Disco Diva. I put Instant Artificials on my nails first, then the Retro Revival base, then Disco Diva.
Take it outside into the sunlight and blam! Full on linear holo rainbow goodness!
Sunlight coming in through a window works, too:
No sunlight? No problem. It made pretty, pretty rainbows in my windowless laundry room lit just by the two-bulb ceiling fixture:
I was having such fun looking at this that I didn't want to take it off, but I did want to see how it looked compared to two other silver holos in my collection, GOSH Holographic and China Glaze OMG.
For the non-Jessica holos, I used Instant Artificials followed by Nfu Oh Aqua Base, then two coats of color. OMG didn't seem to like that base coat combination and got a little lumpy. Here's what they looked like in indirect light:
Top to bottom: Disco Diva, Holographic, Disco Diva, OMG.In regular room light:
Top to bottom: Holographic, Disco Diva, OMG.In sunlight through a window:
Left to right: OMG, Disco Diva, Holographic, Disco Diva.As you can see, both Disco Diva and Holographic have bigger holo particles than OMG, and I think Disco Diva's might be slightly larger than Holographic's. Much as I love Holographic, and I do—it was on my Top 20 list last year—Disco Diva has taken over as my favorite silver holo. It seems to throw off more rainbow-y rainbows. Holographic is a very close second to it, though, and I'm not letting it go.
Holographic (top), Disco Diva (bottom).My plan the day I put on Disco Diva was to swatch it, do a comp, then take it off and do a holiday-themed mani. Once I had it on, though, I just couldn't face removing it right away, so I painted the rest of my nails with it and turned it into a full mani. (I did leave the two fingers that already had Holographic and OMG as they were and wore it out that way—let's call it holo skittles.) Because I was going to wear this a while, I decided to try adding topcoat. I used my trusty Sally Hansen Insta Dri in the red bottle, and at first I thought I'd made a mistake, as the holo turned plain silver where the topcoat went on. Once it was dry, though, the rainbows were back! I did leave one nail un-topcoated to see what would happen and if I could notice any difference. After a couple days, the nail without topcoat definitely showed more wear, and the ones with topcoat had just as pretty rainbows, so I'll be using topcoat with this in future.
Disco Diva without topcoat (top), with topcoat (bottom).The set of Disco Diva and Retro Revival retails for $24, which puts it in the OPI DS range per bottle, but this holo is way, way better than any of the recent OPI DS polishes. I'm hoping Jessica does more holos like this, in more colors. I like this one so much that I broke my "no more backups" rule for it. I don't think I'll run out, but I did seriously consider putting it right back on after I took it off, and that hasn't happened to me in a long time, so I decided it was worth it to have a backup just to keep my anxiety levels down.
