Raindrops for a Hurricane

This was going to be posted yesterday, but we lost power AGAIN. Anyway... Only fitting that the day after a hurricane I finally wear Illamasqua Raindrops. I snagged this on Illamasqua’s website on clearance for £5 (which works out to just over $8). The unfortunately thing was shipping was still high. But still, this was a polish I never thought I’d own because it was a UK exclusive and the regular cost of polish and shipping was OUTRAGEOUS. I totally fell in love with this as I watched the progression of the winners of this collection. The promo pic and description totally drew me in, but I got a little nervous when swatch photos started appearing and reviews said Shrapnel and Eclipse (the other two in the collection) were not really like the promo pics had shown. Seems Raindrops eluded that. It was just as gorgeous as I imagined from the initial promo photo.













Closeups




3 coats Illamasqua Raindrops
1 coat Poshe

This is a blue-based light grey JELLY with the most interesting white/clear irregular pieces/flecks of… glitter? But it doesn’t sparkle, so I can’t quite call it glitter, that seems wrong. Illamasqua describes it as “sheer silver sparkle”. Eh. I guess. Lol.

The formula was that of a jelly. Squishy, took 3 coats to be opaque - sheer but buildable - but easy to apply. Wish I could talk more about the application, but I also want to mention that I applied this 4 days ago and haven’t had the technology to write my mini review (thank you, hurricane), and was too preoccupied whining about having no power to just write it on paper.





Direct Sunlight steals away the jelly-ness of it and makes it look more crème.

You might see little tinges of green on the sides of one or two nails. No, that isn’t mold or dirt or other nastiness. That was Zoya Shawn from this HORRIBLE fail the day before:


Don’t worry. I never wore this in public. I’m never that messy with painting, either. I think I knew it was going bad so I just said screw it and slapped the polish where ev with no regard.

Pink Syrup

So maybe you wanna call this a gradient, but I'm calling it syrup because of the method I used, but mainly because this was the STICKIEST thing ever!! I don't know if it was the polish, or that I have 10 freakin' coats of polish on my nails but holy crap!! Legit like I was painting syrup on my nails.

So I had heard mention of syrup nails and started to search around to see what this was all about. Seemed very interesting. I used the method similar to this post by Nihrida. Had my jelly been as sheer as Butter LONDON Stroppy from this post by Polish Insomniac, I think the process would have been much better.
*For the record, my cuticles aren't actually dry and gross. They look a little icky because of all the polish that kinda got on 'em.







Total of 10 layers (two nails have more because they needed one more coat at the tip to make it fade better).
Started with Essie Mademoiselle and then with Revlon Take Two in Wild Garnet, alternating the two down the nail. I'd do complete coats of mademoiselle, but kept doing shorter coats of Wild Garnet.

Every 10 minutes I repeated the process. For example, at 11:30 I painted a layer. It takes me 3 minutes to paint both hands. Then I wait 7 minutes until 11:40 and do the process again. Ultimately topped with 1 coat Poshe.

What a terribly tedious process!! Worst part about it? I'm just not that happy with the way it came out. It bothers me that the lines are visible. It looks more apparent in the photos, but it unfortunately is still noticeable when you look at my nails closely in real life. I need to practice this a bit more. Looking on the bright side, since I don't like it, I won't mind taking it off despite the fact that it took over an hour and a half to do!!

Edit 8/16
I decided to add glitter to the tips to see if that helped at all. I used an absolutely ancient Sally Hansen Hard As Nails called Glisten. I actually think it did make it look a little better. I figure if you're going to have nails like this, you might as well slap some glitter on it!! Haha.







The problem is you can really see that there is WAY too much polish on my middle finger. Look how it is so raised and kinda distorted. My middle nail is already a little different shaped than my other nails, but wow does 10-12 layers of polish accentuate that!!

Orly Royal Navy

I've been working marathon weekends the past two weekends, which severely limits my capability to post. Because I can't wear nail polish to work, my nails stay naked for the weekend. So no posts.

As I was driving around with my partner at work yesterday, I saw a royal blue van that made me completely decide I'd wear Orly Royal Navy today. As we approached it (we were on the highway), I thought maybe I'd avoid blue because I wear it SO much. As we passed the van, he had a US Navy bumper sticker. That had me sold! Royal Navy it is.

Shade






Closeup in Shade


Direct Sunlight




Closeup in Sunlight


2 coats Royal Navy
1 coat Poshe

This polish is wicked gorgeous, very, very unique. It's a royal blue jelly packed with a green based turquoise shimmer/microglitter. I hate wearing darker colors in the summer, and not that this is NOT a summer color, but you can see how pale it makes my hands look especially in the not direct sunlight photos. If you compare it to my last post, you can see the HUGE difference. But it's still so pretty. I have a warm/neutral skintone, but I have olive/yellow undertones. This polish brings out some random pink-ness in my skintone, so I have no idea how those with a cool skintone/pink undertones would fair with this polish.

The formula is interesting is a good way. Because it's a jelly, it's a thin, almost watery consistency, however it is very pigmented. It goes on even, and if you don't mind VNL, you could probably get away with 1 generous coat. I went with 2 because I didn't want the color to be too rich, and even though you can see VNL in the photos, it's not nearly that noticeable in real life. But it's so easy to work with it's amazing. Reminds me of the old, non-B3F polishes.
My biggest annoyance with this polish is the microglitter settles at the bottom of the bottle and you haveta shake the crap out of it to get the particles to suspend in the polish. I'm assuming this is due to the jelly, thin consistency. But because it's a jelly, you can shake it for 10 minutes and put it on immediately, and you won't have any problems with bubbles.

Wet 'n' Wild Starry Night French

Sorry for the boring nails today. When I wear a polish I've never worn before, I typically like to wear it once on it's own (unless I have a REALLY good idea for nail art/Konad/french/etc.) and then do something to it the next day. I hadn't realized I was doing that until a few weeks ago when I did it with a Tronica polish. Anyway, obviously yesterday was the first time I wore this polish. I didn't want to hide it with Konad because the polish is gorgeous and I didn't want to take away from that. So I added silver tips instead.



2 coats Wet 'n' Wild Starry Night
1 coat SV
Pure Ice Silver Mercedes for the tips
1 more coat SV

Kinda bummed because there is no sun today... it SNOWED last night... so the photos aren't as gorgeous as yesterday without the tips, but it still looks just as jelly and beautiful.

So I ordered my BOGO Zoya's! I picked Faye and Pheobe. I knew immediately after seeing swatches that I wanted Pheobe and didn't want any of the Summertime collection because to me, they're just dupe-able cremes. After significant debating between Kimmy, Reva, Rica, and Faye, I went with Faye. What'd you get?

Wet 'n' Wild Starry Night

I was in a Christmas Tree Shop a few weeks ago and I saw they had these random packs of super old drugstore nail polish. They were in these clear zipper makeup bags shut with zip ties and each contained 10 polishes for $3.99 I believe (coulda been $4.99). The polishes were all random in the packs, so I dug through probably about 100 of them before I found one that had a good deal of colors I liked. I thought about undoing the zip ties and making my own, but I just couldn't do it.

I picked up one that contained these polishes:



The one that really stood out to me was that Wet 'n' Wild blue jelly with silver and blue microglitter. Sound familiar to anyone? *cough*Essie Starry Starry Night*cough*.
Upon getting home, I was able to read the name (I couldn't see the name in the pack). It's called Starry Night. How ironic.

Here's a nice close up of the bottle:



Now, I don't have SSN to compare it to, but from the photos I've seen of it, it's pretty close. It looks like SSN has more glitter, and I think the blue might be a little different. Some of my photos look just like certain SSN photos, but others are a little different. I'd say while it can't be an exact dupe, if you have a CTS near you and you don't have SSN and want it, you need to buy this immediately.

I want to mention that I have yet to have a polish photograph as insanely well as this polish. I literally wanted to use every single photo I took of it!! But I limited it to 6.

So what do you think of my knock-off SSN? This is 3 coats and 1 coat SV.













This photo shows a nice close-up of the jelly-ness and the blue and silver glitter.