Lippmann Glitter in the Air over Avon White French Tip

It has such promise in the bottle:

I don't know what's worse in the photo: my cuticles or the polish (either of them).

Lippmann Glitter in the Air over Avon White French Tip

First, the white avon: three coats, still not opaque. Grr. Second, GiTA: if I had a LOT of patience and the perfect milky blue, this would be beautiful. As it is... this was a terrible mani.

Today is going to be a "catch-up-on-blog-stuff" day. I'm going to finally have time to respond to comments. Finally going to have time to swatch. Finally going to put the Inque contest results up for a vote (probably to be posted tomorrow). My spring break hasn't technically started but the majority of the work I've had to do for the quarter is complete. It has been a REALLY rough quarter and I'm so grateful that it is nearly over.

(Also: Misa sent me their two spring collections and China Glaze sent me some Crackles... but not the pretty purple or turquoise ones! That's alright though: I went ahead and bought them off of Amazon...)

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Avon Olive Green and Jade

Urgh, the last half week has been terrible. I spent most of the July 4th weekend feeling sick to my stomach and literally spent 20 out of 24 hours of July 4th in bed, asleep. Still feeling under the weather but I have to pull it together this week, that's all there is to it...

Avon Jade

I just love Avon's Nailwear Pro line. They have some really nice colors, apply very well, dry relatively quickly and you can get some great wear out of them depending on the basecoat/topcoat combo you use. Also, they are inexpensive, especially if you catch one of the many Avon sales. This pretty minty green only needed two coats.

Avon Olive Green

I don't think olives are this color. I'd call this more of a forest green but what do I care? It's a great polish. If you apply one thick coat carefully, this could be a one-coat-wonder. It's that pigmented and smooth. But I did two coats here. Apparently, this is a dupe for RBL Orbis Non Sufficit... a much cheaper dupe too. :)

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Avon swatches: Nocturnal, Sunshine, Golden Wine and Golden Rose

Well, today's a special day for me: a double anniversary! It's my second anniversary with my SO: two years ago today, I decided to send the most flimsy Facebook message to this really interesting guy I had met walking out of the library the month before. And he sent me a FB message back asking me out... a very long message asking me out. It was like, "So... I'm not doing anything and all my friends are out of town and if you're not doing anything and have nothing better to do -- for instance, if your friends were out of town too -- maybe we could go get dinner... but only if you really want to. It's cool if you don't. But it's really cool if you do. Umm... here's my number." 

It's also been exactly three years since the day my advisor called me to tell me I had been (more or less) accepted by my current doctoral program. I missed the call and spent hours in agony after I looked up the area code and realized it came from this university's town. (She didn't leave a message the first time around.) 

So if this relationship and doctoral program goes well, it'll be my lucky day. If either or both bomb... it's gonna be the most depressing day ever. 

Anyway, enough yapping about various anniversaries... on to polish! Today, I have some Avon Nailwear Pro polishes for you. Avon is my biggest surprise of late. I always rejected the brand out of hand as boring and probably not of great quality. Yeah, I was wrong. (And now, I can't wait to see what else Avon has coming up in this line of polishes... good quality polishes for cheap, frequently with free shipping... you can't go too wrong with that!)

First up, dupe alert...! 

Avon Nocturnal and OPI You Don't Know Jacques! (L to R: OPI, Avon, OPI, Avon)

OPI YDKJ, a polish that I simply adored when I first got it, is maybe just a smidge darker and glossier than Nocturnal but they are very, very, very similar. I prefer Nocturnal because unlike YDKJ, Nocturnal only needed two coats to be opaque. There was still some VNL and uneven spots for YDKJ at three. 

Avon Sunshine

A basic yellow creme. Not incredibly special, either in color or in quality. This is three coats. It's not at all the worst yellow I've used but it's not the best either. (Still, this was easier to apply than quite a few of the yellows I've tried...)

Avon Golden Wine

The gold really shines (or rather, shimmers) in this wine red shimmer. I was afraid it was going to be like Golden Twilight, where the gold is just swallowed up by the base color. The gold here isn't totally present on the nail like it is in the bottle but it's definitely there. This was an NOTD some time ago: I used Diamont topcoat and the tipwear was after a day. Two coats. 

Avon Golden Rose

Well, Golden Wine and Golden Twilight were so great, I thought maybe Golden Rose would be similar... Nope! I found this frosty peach pink pretty unattractive on my nails and, surprisingly, it was somewhat difficult to apply. I found it very thick and brushstroke-y. Definitely not a fan of this one.

Overall, my experience with Avon polishes has been overwhelmingly positive. They're very pigmented, are often perfect in two coats, they dry quickly and they have good staying power. Cheap and good. Qualities I love in my polishes.

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Old NOTD: Avon Golden Twilight

For some reason, my camera has started taking incredibly crappy photos. Which is bad, because... umm... hello, nail polish swatching! Need good photos! But it's also good, because I've been looking for a reason to get a new camera besides, "I wanna new one." ("It's gone screwy and I can't have a screwy camera with a nail blog" seems to be a better excuse, don't you think?)

Anyway, I recently ordered a couple of Avon nail polishes on whim (3 for $8, free shipping -- how much could I lose?). I never thought I'd order from Avon; I kind of just have a weird mental block against it. But because of their great sales, I now own four huuuuge bubble bath bottles and a handful of polishes. All of which has probably cost me less than $20 total, even with shipping.

I wasn't expecting much from Avon so I wasn't sure what weird whim struck me when I needed to slather on a nail polish quick before running to school to do a presentation for my statistics course. It's probably the fact that they landed on my doorstep an hour before I had to be on campus. I took one look at Golden Twilight and wanted it on my tips. Lookit in the bottle!!

Deep chocolate brown, decked out with gold and bronze shimmer that reflects red and green. Yikes! That's just prettiness bottled. (Also, nice bottle: square and substantial. They just feel great to hold.)

Avon Golden Twilight

This nail polish just gliiiiided on. It took a moment to figure out how to hold the handle (the cap is square and brush is flat and wide but not as wide as the OPI Pro-Wides) but once I got the hang of it, it was the easiest thing to apply. Opaque in two coats. The only thing that was slightly disappointing was that the shimmer kinda disappeared when applied on the nail! Pretty shimmer, where did you go? Anyway, when I applied the cheapo Supply Source topcoat, it almost completely dried in less than ten minutes! ...though not dry enough because I could still dent it ten hours later. (Common problem I've been getting with this topcoat but that's a story for another post.)

You can be sure I'll be swatching more Avon polishes in the future. There's a yellow that's just calling my name...

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