Enchanted Polish Seven Nation Army

Here's a cool one from indie brand Enchanted Polish.  It's a polish made up of multiple sizes of matte black and white glitter, with some holographic microshimmer in between to fill in the gaps.  You can wear it alone as a topcoat:

Enchanted Polish Seven Nation Army, one coat

...but it looks even more amazing worn solo (three coats):

Enchanted Polish Seven Nation Army

(Looks like granite, right?  I think so at least.  I think it's awesome. And bonus points cause Jack White. Mmm hmm.)

The formula on it is good.  I didn't have any noticeable texture or application issues.  One thing to be aware of is that it is a sparse glitter polish, likely intended to be worn as a topcoat.  The coverage isn't so heavy that the base polish won't show through.  That's a good thing.  However, if you want to wear it by itself (and you will, cause look at that!), it's a three coat minimum (I'm wearing three coats here).  It's not particularly rough or gritty when it dries, but you'll still want to use topcoat for shine.

This has been sold out for ages, but I'm hoping it'll be back in stock at some point.  You can see it here on Enchanted Polish's website: Seven Nation Army.

(sample provided for review.)

China Glaze Tranzitions Color-Changing Nail Lacquer Collection Spring 2013 Swatches and Review

China Glaze's Tranzitions collection is a set of six very interesting polishes.  They're not like ordinary polish.  They're one color when you apply them, but adding a coat of topcoat changes them into a different color.  Hence the name Tranzitions. 

China Glaze recommends their Fast Forward topcoat (which is what I'm using in these swatches), but any topcoat will trigger the color-change effect.

China Glaze Tranzitions in Altered Reality.  This is a frosty, metallic and slightly duochrome medium teal.  The main color is a blue-teal and it flashes a deeper green-teal at the edges. 

China Glaze Tranzitions in Altered Reality with topcoat.  With topcoat, it becomes a darker, more blue type of teal.  This one had the least dramatic color change effect for me. 

China Glaze Tranzitions in Duplicity.  This one's a very pretty light teal-ish turquoise, almost more of a mint green. 

China Glaze Tranzitions in Duplicity with topcoat.  With topcoat it becomes darker and more blue.

China Glaze Tranzitions in Metallic Metamorphosis.  A dark smoky charcoal-silver metallic.  The shimmer particles look a bit rough and it dries nearly matte.  This might be my favorite one pre-topcoat.

China Glaze Tranzitions in Metallic Metamorphosis with topcoat.  With topcoat, it darkens significantly and takes on a blue-green tint.

China Glaze Tranzitions in Modify Me.  A bright periwinkle...

China Glaze Tranzitions in Modify Me with topcoat.  ...becomes bright violet after topcoat.  This is my favorite post-topcoat color.

 China Glaze Tranzitions in Shape Shifter.  This starts out as a frosty, muted navy with purple tones.

China Glaze Tranzitions in Shape Shifter with topcoat.  With topcoat, it becomes a gorgeous dark blue-toned purple shimmer. 

China Glaze Tranzitions in Split Perso-nail-ity.  A medium mauve pink creme.

China Glaze Tranzitions in Split Perso-nail-ity with topcoat.  This is a pretty dramatic change.  It becomes a saturated berry color!

I found the formula on these to be problematic.  The texture reminds me more of acrylic paint than it does of nail polish.  It goes on with a slight drag and has a tendency to leave bald spots and make little lumps if I'm not careful.  Three coats evens out the color, and that's what I used here.  A little tricky, but manageable.  I found the dry time to be long on all the colors.  But let me tell you about what really bothered me about the formula: applying the topcoat.

These polishes have little speckles of pigment in them (it's visible in a lot of the colors if you look closely), and they bleed when you apply topcoat.  That's what gives them the color change.  However, it doesn't just bleed on the nail.  It bleeds into your topcoat and onto the brush.  I would highly, highly recommend keeping a paper towel handy and wiping the brush before putting it back into your topcoat bottle each time.  You will end up with tinted topcoat if you don't.

The other problem with topcoat application is that it streaks.  If you get the nail wet enough with topcoat, the streaks tend to disappear after a while.  If your coat is too thin and dries too fast, the streaks will stay.

Neither of those will be an issue if you use topcoat strictly for creating designs, which is what the intended use is.  Streaks aren't visible when creating dots, for example, and you won't have tinted topcoat from using a dotting tool. 

So... These are a cool idea, for sure.  Can't recall seeing any other polishes like these.  If you take a thin nail art brush, or a dotting tool, or even a toothpick, you can draw cool designs with topcoat.  The color change isn't as obvious on the darker colors, but it's dramatic on the lighter ones.

If I was better at freehand nail art, I think I'd like these more.  But, my hands are too shaky to have much success with freehand designs, and since I found the formula so strange and the topcoat bleeding problem annoying, I wasn't thrilled by these.  I could use them for an easy funky french, and I tried out some dots which looked cool, but otherwise they're just a novelty for me and I don't see myself wanting to reach for them often.

(This was sent for review.)

Picture Polish Flakie Cover Flake Topcoats in Hypnotic and Splendour

I previously posted about Picture Polish's brand new Festival Flakie Cover topcoat, and since then they've released two others: Hypnotic and Splendour. They're the same concept as Festival: fine multicolor flakes suspended in a clear base.

For swatching purposes, I've layered each of these over black. It's a lot easier to see the different colors of the flakes that way. You can wear them over any color you'd like, or even on their own.


Picture Polish Hypnotic. This one is a mixture of the teal/green/blue type of flakes and a sprinkling of the red/orange flakes and blue/purple flakes. The flakes are very fine and sparse in this one.

Picture Polish Splendour. This one is mostly red/orange flakes, but also has some green/blue flakes in there as well. This one's funny because it seems like they're all the same flakes (they shift between all the same colors), but they start at different points. Some of the flakes start red and shift from there, others start at gold and come back around. Kinda cool, actually.


Here's Hypnotic in two coats over L'Oreal VIP Status. Odd... it seems to have clouded the base color quite a bit!


And this is Splendour in two coats, layered over an orange polish that I can't remember. Looks like fire over reds and oranges.

The formula on these is, sadly, only so-so. It's thick, the flakes are very sparse, and it takes a long time to dry. I did three coats of each in the swatches over black, and I think these are a little too subtle at only one or two coats over most colors. I wish the flakes were bigger or that there were more of them in the polish so I didn't have to do as many coats.

These Flakie Cover topcoats from Picture Polish are very pretty, but they have very light coverage. I prefer more of a dense coating of flakies when I wear them, so these aren't my first choice, but if you want a flake polish that can provide a more subtle look than all the rest, these might be what you're looking for.

You can get these for $11.90 AUD directly from Picture Polish. They do ship internationally, so be sure to check out their rates and restrictions based on location.

(This was sent for review.)

Finger Paints Special Effects Flake Glitter Topcoat Collection Swatches and Review

There's an epidemic spreading throughout the nail polish world. Flaky fever. It's highly contagious. And if you have flaky fever, the only cure is more cowbell flakes.

Flake glitter polishes (known colloquially as "flakies") are sprouting up everywhere lately, and that's a good thing. Flake glitter polishes are not all that common; most brands only have one or two, if they even have any at all. For a while, the only flaky polishes we could get were Nfu Oh, and those are pretty pricey. Despite being relatively rare/uncommon, they're incredibly popular and loved by polish fans everywhere. Now it seems that a lot of brands are realizing that we really love our flakies and we want more of them, so they're slowly adding more flake polishes to their lines. This most recent release, the Finger Paints Special Effects collection, is the créme de la créme of flakies.

I've swatched each of these over black because it's easier to see the different types of flakes that way. Each swatch is two coats of polish.

Finger Paints Asylum. Asylum is a clear base with red and blue flakes that shift to orange, yellow, green and purple. The flakes are all different shapes and sizes.



Finger Paints Flashy. Flashy is one of those red-orange-yellow-green types of flake polishes. It's not all that different from Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure/Essie Shine of the Times/Nubar 2010/et cetera, but it does seem to have brighter colors in the flakes. I haven't compared this side-by-side with any of those other polishes, but the red in this one just seems redder somehow.



Finger Paints Flecked. Flecked is the bright green-blue type of flake, but it has an extra strong color shift.


Finger Paints Motley. Motley is a little bit different. It's a mixture of green-blue flakes and blue-purple flakes. Some of the flakes even look purple on their own without changing colors. It's hard to see the purple color from these pictures, but it's obvious in real life. The blue flakes in this one are a lot bigger than most blue flake polishes I own so you get more blue tone than green in this polish, which I appreciate.



Finger Paints Twisted. The very best one. It's a mix of all the flakes. It has every color of the rainbow visible at all times and the shapes and sizes of the flakes are all really different. If I had to choose only one polish from this collection, this would be it. It rocks.

The formula on these was good. Like most flake polishes, they have a thick-textured base. These aren't as bad as most I've used, but they're still thicker than I'd like. Other than the texture of the base, the application was perfect. Great coverage. Reasonable dry time, but still longer than regular polish.

Honestly, this is the best collection of flakes I've seen to date. They're by far the most interesting ones I've used, but they also have the advantage of not being too sparse or having flakes that are too small.

Usually the type of flake glitters we see are the single-type ones, like Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure, where we only get one kind of flake in a clear or tinted base. They're either the red-orange-yellow-green ones (Hidden Treasure, Shine of the Times), the blue-green ones (Nails Inc. The Wyndham, Nfu Oh 56), and rarely, but still out there, the blue-purple ones (Nails Inc. The Old Vic). It's not as common to see the types of flakes mixed, but those are the ones I like the most. That's why I like these Finger Paints ones so much. Most of them are mixes of two or more flake types.

Another reason I like the Finger Paints Special Effects is that the flakes are large and there's a lot of them in the polish. I don't like flaky polishes that barely have any flakes and you have to do too many coats to get good coverage. These look good at one coat, but even more amazing at two. I haven't done three coats of any of these yet, but I can only imagine how cool that would look.

The only thing I don't like about this collection is that it's limited edition and only available in-store at Sally Beauty. Flake glitters this good need to be permanent and accessible to everyone! They got the price right, but they should have at least made them available online.

The Finger Paints Special Effects collection is available only at Sally Beauty stores through the month of January. They are limited edition and retail for $5.49 each.