Happy Hallowe'en!!

Greek

Don't you just love Hallowe'en? I find it's the height of Autumn! Everybody feels festive and nature is at its most glorious!

I am not very experienced with using foils and they are a bit of a headache to be honest, but they are also the best way to achieve an iridescent result.

Breakdown:

1 coat of A-England - Camelot 

Foil in Iridescent Swirl
Bundle Monster stamp- white Κοnad polish

Drk stamp- Borghese - B475 Castello Blue. I really liked this one cause while it is visible in sunlightt, it's undetectable anywhere else, much like real spiderwebs.

Enjoy yourselves!

xXx

Elysse

Stargazer 317 Ultra Cover Nail Polishes

Last year I saw this polish here and really really liked it. Purple with a blue sheen, what's not to like! However, when I ordered it from the Stargazer shop, what I received was completely different. The one I received is a bright pink with a multichrome shimmer that shifts from pink to purple, the same kind of shimmer you find in Stargazer Ultra Cover Nail Polish 305. I looked around on line and in the end I found the version of 317 I was originally looking for, but no further details as to why or how they are different.

The odd thing is, even their barcodes are exactly the same. I thought I should point this out on a separate post in case someone is looking for the Stargazer Ultra Cover Nail Polish 317 and ends up having the same problems I did.

direct sunlight

direct sunlight

Natural light

Nubar Wildlife & Stargazer 234: Green and Pink in Las Vegas

Στα Ελληνικά

I haven't been using my duochrome/multichrome polishes much lately. They'd be wasted in such overcast weather as you really need natural light to appreciate their colour shifts. I was a bit tired of creme finish polishes though, which is why I decided to use a polish with a strong shift. Nubar - Wildlife is the polish I chose and it did not disappoint-quite the contrary. I decided to go all out and stamp it with Stargazer 234 (pink chrome) using a design from Konad plate m83.

This design somehow makes me think it belongs on the walls of a 70s hotel in Las Vegas where they would play Tom Jones-type songs. 

Take care!

xx

Edit: I had to add a video in the end. The post felt empty without it!

Comparison: W7 Metallic Mars, Nubar Iris Dust and Moon Eclipse (Moon Shadow)

Some time ago I found this pretty little multichrome, W7 - Metallic Mars. Lulled away by the beautiful colours I could see in the bottle, I took it to the counter straight away and failed to notice how similar it is to Nubar - Iris Dust. My dislike of having similar colours was not as fast as my 'pretty colours-must have' impulse, which was also assisted by the minimal price of £2. All that is of course to your benefit since I get to do this comparison so you don't have to be fall into the same trap I did. I added Moon Eclipse (former Moon Shadow) in the comparison just for reference. 

Open the pictures as a new tab if you want a closer look, all the pictures are taken under natural light. Let the madness begin! 

The verdict

Nubar Moon Eclipse is different enough, so I am going to focus on the other two. Consistency-wise Metallic Mars requires 3 layers while Iris Dust 4-5 for full opacity. Both colours have the same type of tiny shimmer particles I spoke about here, however, W7 Metallic Mars'base is a warmer tone than Nubar Iris Dust. When they are showing the pinkish colour, Iris Dust looks a tiny bit cooler than MM and when they are showing the golden colour, Metallic Mars looks bronzier. Frankly, even side by side you can see the differences are minimal, they are close enough to be considered dupes and I don't think you need both.

Have a nice day!

Nubar Duochromes Swatches Galore (picture heavy)

By now it is a well established fact: we all love the Duochrome colours by Nubar. They are beautiful and if anything, describing them as 'duochromes' undermines their beauty as there are more than two colours that they shift to and from. 

What I noticed when I saw them all together was how similar they all looked in their bottles. It was hard to tell them apart which was rather odd given that they look very different on the nail. Upon swatching them I realised why; most of them have the same multi-chrome shimmer in them that shifts from a light green to a bright pink and the only reason they look different on the nail is because they have a different base colour!

That of course is not true of all the duochromes, but of the ones I have the ones that have this green-yellow-pink shimmer are Indigo Illusion, Purple Beach, Moon Eclipse (new name for Moonshadow), Iris Dust and Wildlife. The only one that has a different kind of shimmer is Gold Leaf which has a kind of shimmer that doesn't shift so much but goes from gold to bronze.

I have swatched them on white paper first to make the difference of the base colours more apparent. It also lets the shimmer separate a bit from the base colour and it shows through a bit better that it does on the nail. After the paper swatches I swatched them on my nails. I thought it would be useful to anyone who might want to see them compared all together. It was a bit hard to make all five catch the light in the same way and therefore show a similar colour shift, but I made an honest effort! Also, I haven't included Gold Leaf in most of them since it is quite different. 

And now, the pictures! As always, the pictures are larger if you download them

The colours are:

Nubar - Gold Leaf (GL) 

Nubar - Moon Eclipse (Moon Shadow's new name) (ME) 

Nubar - Indigo Illusion (II) 

Nubar - Purple Beach (PB)

Nubar Iris Dust (ID)

Nubar - Wildlife (W)

The base colours (artificial light)

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(artificial light)

For the nail swatches, I did 3 coats of all of them apart from Iris Dust that needed 5 coats. 

 (natural light)

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Opalescence

I have been looking for a polish that would look opalescent, which in my mind means that it should be

• sheer, but buildable
• not too peachy, not too pink, not too yellow
• leaning towards white, but not too stark/contrasting to my skin colour 

and after a lot of disappointments I finally found what I was looking for in Color Club - Oh my Versailles! and how I adore it! I was drawn to it cause of the name since the Palace of Versailles is one of my favourite places to be, and I was so happy it was exactly what I was hoping it would be.

This is four layers of it with the flaky beauty of Nubar - 2010 on top.
Natural light

Fluorescent light

Along came my darling Manglaze - Matte-Astrophe to make everything perfect!!

And here's a couple of pictures from my visit in Versailles. One from behind the Belvedere and the statue of Eros in the garden near the Trianon.