Color Club Blossoming Collection

Blossoming is the spring 2012 offering from Color Club. It's five cremes and one shredded glitter top coat.



I tried Blushing Rose first. It's a light candy pink creme. I needed 3 coats to get reasonably even coverage, and added a top coat to further settle things out.



It's a fine pink, with maybe just a touch of purple in it, which is always a good thing to my eyes. I'm not really into just pink right now, so I had to amp things up somehow and decided to do a half moon mani. I slapped on some hole reinforcers and alternated the medium purple creme, Lavendarling, and the purpley rose creme, Sweetpea, adding two coats of those over the pink then followed with topcoat.





I used the remaining three colors together, painting most of my nails with Hydrangea Kiss, the periwinkle-leaning blue creme, and using Blue-ming, the light teal creme (not blue), as an accent. They were both two coaters. Over that, I added two coats of Diamond Drops, which has silver holographic glitter shards in a clear base. Like a lot of chunky glitters, it required some fiddling to get the glitter bits to not clump on the nail. I put on a layer of topcoat over it to smooth things out.





Not so long ago, the irregular shapes in Diamonds Drops would have really bothered me, but I've gotten to place where I rather enjoy the randomness. It helps a lot that the colors shift with the light; I love a polish that entertains me.



It's quite possible I have dupes or close enoughs in my stash to match all the cremes in this collection, but the same cannot be said of Diamond Drops. It's the one I bought my own bottle of after I swatched these (the set shown will be going to live with Lucy).

The polishes shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider.

Recent NOTD: Putting the Ugh in Fugly

I don't like all the manicures I do equally well, but it's rare that I hate one. Today is one of those exceptions, an old Maybelline Express Finish I got at Dollar Tree because the name sounded good: Silver Lilac. Two of my favorite colors, what could be bad about that? Answer: brushstrokes galore, plus gloppiness and bubbling. It was so awful that I almost stopped after the first coat of color but decided to push on in case it would settle out as it dried. As you can see from the photos below, it did not settle. (Nor did it look especially lilac-y, even when I turned my tips this way and that searching for a hidden duochrome side of it.)







The only thing I could think of to try and salvage this was covering it up with something else, so I tried a half moon mani. I couldn't find the round hole reinforcing stickers in my office at home so cut gentle curves out of pieces of cellophane tape to use instead. I chose Sally Hansen Complete Salon in Perfect Match for the non-moon color, since red and silver is a classic combination.







Perfect Match was a little bit of a pain to clean up, though that's mostly my fault as I slopped it all over my skin to make sure I was covering up all the silver I could. My moon curves were a little too gentle, and a few were crooked on the nail, but overall it was loads better than the silver on its own.

Adding thinner would likely help the gloppiness and bubbling of Silver Lilac, but I don't think there's any solution to the brushstrokes. I'm not even sure I want to try frankening with this one, and I definitely don't want to foist it off onto an unsuspecting swap partner, so I think this one might just have to get disposed of. I don't mind the bottle, so I'll probably pour it into the jar where I collect such misfits and wait for the next hazardous waste collection day.

*****

On a happier note, congratulations to Erin, whose number came up on random.org when I drew the winner of the Apothica gift card giveaway!