Illamasqua DWS

The weather here has grim. GRIM. It took me a week to photograph this mani because it's been raining non-stop. Indeed, it is still raining, which is why there are droplets of water on my nails. That's also why there's killer tip wear. I wore this during reading week and since it's been about 2 degrees C since then I've barely been outside. I seriously need a lightbox so that I can photograph manis from the lazy comfort of indoors. Fortunately I've had a massive pile of marking to keep me entertained...sigh...

DWS is what Piff would call a 'palette cleanser' polish. It's a neutral dark ish grey that's perfect in one coat (it's a touch less blue than it appears in the pictures). I love this with a holo silver glitter top coat over, but this time, I went plain and neutral. Who needs glitter when you've got rain?

One final thing I want to mention, since this is an Illamasqua polish: Illamasqua have been enthusiastic supporters of the S.O.P.H.I.E. foundation, an organisation set up by Sylvia Lancaster after her daughter Sophie was kicked to death in Bacup, a town in the north of England. She was picked on for defending her boyfriend, who had been attacked by a gang of thugs for dressing in black (Sophie herself had black and red dreadlocks). Today would have been her 25th birthday. If you feel, as I do, that prejudice has no place in a civilized society, and that something good should come out of tragedy, please do consider donating. Thank you.

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Vamps for October: Illamasqua Viridian

Okay, so probably not technically vampy, but a) it's dark, b) I was really sick of burgundy and navy and c) I love it! Viridian is one of my favourite polishes. It's amazing in two coats but can be applied in one, it's hardwearing, shiny, and a stunning colour. I feel badass when I wear this polish.

I think Temptalia described this as a dark teal, and that's probably not far off the mark. Except that overall hue is comprised of a subtle blue/green/black duochrome (trichrome?) shift that brings different facets of the polish out in different light. This looks amazing under flash (although I forgot to bring my flashgun when I took the shots. Oops). I really love this polish, it's in my desert island top ten and is one of the first shades I bought that got me really raving about Illamasqua.

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I got a lovely parcel in the post...

...Thank you, Illamasqua! :)

Well, I've always said good things about their customer service. I once returned a lipstick because I accidentally ordered two of them in one of their 30% off sales. I sent them a cheeky email asking if I could return or preferably exchange it (even though 'being a doofus' isn't one of their grounds for return) thinking they'd maybe grudgingly refund me since it was by then out of sale period, and it's a bit naughty me asking for a product at 30% off when there's no sale on.

But to my surprise, they shipped a replacement colour out via courier at their expense. And sent me an email to ask me which colour I wanted most, and to let me know their stock levels, since I put a random bunch down on the return form. (I felt I was probably taking advantage enough already to start getting picky). They are a really, really nice company.

Which is why it made my day to find that they read Polish or Perish. Hayley, their marketing manager, got in touch to chat about nail polish and take some contact details. And a couple of weeks ago a lovely parcel turned up with two of their new polishes for review, plus a lipgloss in Belladonna. (I mentioned I was really interested in the glosses from the new collection, so I was really touched that they popped one in - it's lovely, by the way!). Yeah, I am a total fangirl.

So these are the two polishes, Kink and Vice:

I wanted to wait a little while before giving a review, because for me the most significant thing about the A/W polishes is their 'rubber' finish, rather than the shades. So I've had Vice on for the last week, and here it is. This colour is lovely, a kind of purplish wine/berry shade, but it's the finish that makes it stand out from other similar polishes. I'd describe it as kind of satin-y. It's not quite as matte as I was expecting, but not fully glossy, either.

I've tended to stay away from matte finish polishes because they chip on me something rotten, so I wore Vice for a full 8 days before writing this (the pictures are from day 3). I have tremendously limited patience so I managed to scracth the finish a little even before it was fully dry (I am spoilt by seche vite). However, that cock up aside, it wore really well. Looking at them a week later, there is one chip (my right middle), a couple of teeny nicks on my thumbs, and a little tip wear. And I've been intentionally bloody hard on my hards this week - I've been washing up, I did gardening, and I've relaid the tiles on my hall floor, all without gloves. My hands feel like catcher's mitts, but the polish still looks very respectable.

(The only odd thing is that black line on my ring finger - I think it's a shed bristle? I've never had one of their brushes shed on me before, so it took me a while to work out what it was!).

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Vamps for October: Illamasqua Phallic

10.30am. I walk into my living room with this on my fingers to twirl at my significant other (he gets nail varnish twirls rather than dress twirls. Bit of a raw deal for him, but that's just how I roll).

'That's nice. Beautiful colour.' he says. 'How's the paper going?'

'Well. Really well. Yeah, I've done loads. Obviously.'

'You've just spent an hour and a half painting your nails and messing about on facebook, haven't you?'

'Yes'.

'Have you done any at all? The deadline's today, right?'

'No. Yes. I'll be going now...'

Bloody worth it, though. This is three coats of very sexy blue polish. It's very deep, like a midnight jelly, but with tonnes of purply blue flaky sparkles that peek out in the sunlight. It's all twinkly! Sooo gorgeous. I love it. It's very very pigmented though and my fingers were smurf city when I did clean up! Slightly dreading trying to remove it, I might just leave it on until it falls off.

(I did get the paper finished in the end, by the way. Conference in Vienna, here I come.)

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Illamasqua Load

Load and I have history. The first time I applied this was on the train on the way to a gig (Innerpartysystem's last London show, in case you're interested. Probably not.) In retrospect, I was a little ambitious thinking I could get away with applying a pastel in a moving vehicle. The result was pretty predictable: it went everywhere and I looked like I had advanced stage leprosy. I wore gloves to the gig. So I cursed it, and filed it away in my drawer.

Giving it another go, I think I was much too hasty to dismiss this. Yes, it requires a lot of care to apply. It's thick and a bit gloppy and messy like most pastels, and takes three coats to opacity. It's obvious if the coats don't quite line up, because you get thick, semi-opaque tidemarks around the edges, which irks me a bit. I don't like having to work to get my polish perfect, since it's usually one of my 'kick back with a beer and bad TV*' activities. It also takes a bit of a while to dry.

And yet...I LOVE the colour! And in the pictures, it looks so perfect, so the work is definitely worth it. (Though I say so myself). It's such a gorgeously versatile shade, cream being one of my favourite colours, and it looks lovely on. Definitely worth the extra effort. This even works as a stamping or overlay colour because it's thick, which is unusual for such a pale colour.

As an aside, I can't help being reminded of buttercreme. Honestly, Illamasqua try their hearts out to come up filthy names, and all I can think of is food. Mmm...cake.

*Not so bad, lately - I'm totally hooked on both Forbrydelsen and The Killing and have been watching them simultaneously. Really great, both of them!

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Five colours I can't wait to wear for Autumn

From thumb to pinkie: H&M Envy Me, Illamasqua Scarab, China Glaze First Class Ticket, China Glaze Ick-A-Bod-Y, OPI Ski Teal We Drop

Illamasqua Scarab doesn't look great here, but it is a beautiful polish. This is one coat. It dries without too much lustre, so looks much prettier with a top coat (which I didn't use here) - it's a beautiful browned ruby colour that really glows. Ease of application and opacity is amazing. I love this for fall.

First Class Ticket looks a bit blah in the bottle, but is gorgeous on - the purple really pops, and it's got flashes of silver microglitter. It's a dark blurple but it never looks black. A very glamorous polish.

Ick-a-bod-y is a crazy name for an excellent polish - thick orange glitter in a dark olive jelly base. With three coats the base practically disappears, but this is two over white, so you can just about make out the tone of the jelly. Very chunky so top coat is non-negotiable, but it wears like teflon and looks so spicy and yummy.

Ski teal we drop is one of my favourite teals - and I have a lot. It's dark, very glossy and very sophisticated. This is two coats.

Saving the best 'til last, on my thumb is H&M Envy Me, the perfect ivy green. Two coats to complete opacity, this practically glows. It's similar to Illamasqua Viridian, but less blue and without the duochrome. This is my favourite dark green. I even prefer it to Emerald Sparkle - praise indeed, no?

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illamasqua Shrapnel

Illamasqua shrapnel, one of the colours from the design competition from last winter. This is easily my favourite of the bunch. It's a metallic pink-copper (flinty, you'll love this) with tiny silver microshimmer flecks. It's a very cool toned metallic and definitely unique amongst my collection. It's opaque in one coat, but I refuse to do one coat (what if I come under REALLY BRIGHT LIGHT and I can see VNL if I look very closely?!) so this is two.











The colour is described as 'the colour of a new penny'. Just to be really pedantic I decided to test this claim - think of this as the nail polish Mythbusters. So, 2010 English penny in hand, I can confirm that...it's not the same colour. It's considerably pinker. Still really pretty, though!

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Illamasqua force - a 'WTF?' polish

(Ho ho ho, a Star Wars joke, bet you didn't see that coming!)

Since we've had a rare few days of sunshine, and since I now have a car, I took the opportunity to go to some of the National Trust properties nearby. They're basically rural stately homes that are preserved by a charity and they're generally speaking lovely - Packwood House, where we went last week, is a favourite. It's a Tudor manor house, originally erected in 1480, which was much restored in the 1920s and 1930s by a chap called Graham Baron Ash, who was a deeply enthusiastic restorer and spent an enormous amount of money doing up this house and others nearby.



Anyway, I promise I am going somewhere with this tangential history lesson. Aside from the fact that it's an interesting and beautiful place to visit, it also has some lovely interiors and a stunning garden. The colours gave me lots of ideas for manicures I wanted to try (nail varnish being my artistic medium, and all...). This is the first 'NT-inspired' manicure - I wanted to take the colours from the French tiling in the bathroom:





I decided my best bet for a match would probably be Illamasqua Force, a dusky mid blue, with white crackle layered over the top. However, I forgot that Force is an...idiosyncratic polish. Basically, it doesn't behave itself. The Swatchaholic has already commented on how it changes colour with Seche Vite. In my experiments today it behaved even more weirdly. Here it is on its own, with no top coat. This is a very colour accurate shot, IMHO. It has an unusual grey-violet undertone to it that makes it unique amongst my (large) collection of blues.









Fugly pic time! This shot shows what happens when you layer white crackle over the top. You can see a) the bits I didn't clean up (intentionally, to show you - sorry for the fug) where white crackle is not on top of Force, and is white; b) where it went over Force and turned pale blue; and c) how they've both deepened considerably to a royal blue/lavender combo with the addition of top coat (Lumos, since you ask). What a weeeeeeird polish.







Here's some proper pictures:

So that...uh...totally didn't work. The final effect is nothing like the tiles! Just to show that CG white crackle doesn't normally change over blue, here it is over Orly La Playa. (I know, I know, claw-hands and an iphone picture, I'm spoiling you today). Force is...odd.

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Holy magenta! Illamasqua obsess

I'm totally going back on my adult aversion to pink, because this is a knock out. It's a good job this polish didn't exist when I was 15 because I had my hair the same colour and would have drained bottle after pricey bottle.



Three coats of opaque, neon blue-pink fabulousness. It's much more purple than barbie pink - more magenta - but it's very bright. I'm guessing it would glow under UV. The neon pigments mean it dries a bit satiny so I have a coat of lumos over the top. Winner in my book.

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Illamasqua Radium

I love this polish. Love love love.

Love love love love.

Illamasqua Radium

I wore this for four or so days? I believe this was taken on Day 3: just a bit of tipwear in evidence. It's such a great green polish: it's between lime and grass and is full of yellow and light green shimmer. This was three coats.

Closeup of Radium

So bright, so green! So up my alley. I wore this in May -- yes, it's a very long backlog of NOTDs I've got -- and it was such a great pick-me-up spring color. :)

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Two poorly applied pinks

1. Illamasqua Lament




Excuse the shocking iNOTD phone picture. Bought this thinking it was coral, but on me it reads very pink. This turned into a horrible mani because a) I mixed up the lumos base and top coat (WHY are the bottles the same?!), so this chipped within twelve hours, and b) I gave in to my mothers demands to help me apply it. She was trying to help. She'd had two glasses of wine. I had a conference* to go to the next day and no remover to tidy it up. (This, fortunately, is the hand I managed to wrest control of the brush for). Bit of a nightmare, although no fault of the polish! That aside, this is two coats (but a bit bald with two, could have done with three) and a nice juicy watermelon colour. I must try this again.

*The conference went well, although one of the biggest names in my field turned up to watch my paper, which was a terrible cut-and-shut job put together in an afternoon. After spending half an hour sitting through the other papers wondering if I could hold my breath long enough to simulate a blackout and thus miss the questions, it went fine, and Prof Awesome was really nice.






2. China Glaze Diva Bride

A manicure applied for the purposes of protecting my nails while I repainted my hall. Two coats, a little streaky but not too bad. Very sheer, and didn't cover a teabag patch I have protecting my index, so stuck a badly photoshopped picture of my cat over the top to shield your eyes. You're welcome.

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Illamasqua Elope

Illamasqua Elope, one of my favourite greens. I did four coats but three would have been absolutely fine to eliminate VNL if I hadn't been trying to do other things (like make tea) while polishing...needless to say coat four was mostly to cover up the mess that I made of coat three. Like most of these bright polishes it dries to a satin finish (it's not a proper matte, so I think it's kind of half way between a neon and a jelly in formulation) and the coats are quite liquidy, but dry fast. I love these kind of slightly squishy polishes.



Man, photographing polish with neon pigments in is such a PITA. It's impossible to capture the fact that this is simultaneously *bright*! and rich. If you imagine an emerald green amped up to the max, this is it. Kind of the green version of (blue) Nfu.Oh 497. I also award this points because I frankened a really awesome palm green from a 50:50 mix of this and rampage - I was trying to match Bunny's polish in the Big Lebowski and that franken was spot on. It's just a really fantastic polish, and always draws compliments. It was responsible for me getting a free doughnut in Krispy Kreme the last time I wore it, so a definite winner in my book.



TL/DR: this polish is responsible for doughnuts and geeky film frankens. Buy it.




Looks good under Barry M black crackle too. Anyone else thinking of teenage mutant ninja turtles?

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