Lippmann Collection Summer 2009

Two new beauties from Lippmann Collection for summer 2009!

It's Raining Men. A super-bright red creme. This is one very flamboyant red. It's bright and flashy. I'm not sure if my picture captures the brightness of this color. It's a retro, sexy pinup girl red creme and I'm sure you could see this color from a mile away. I love it. I'm picturing it as a matching manicure, pedicure and lipstick with one of those hot retro red and white polka dot bathing suits.

Call Me Irresponsible. Rich purple jelly. Finally, a true purple jelly! This is an amazing polish. It is sheer but not the least bit streaky. It actually looks good with one coat. It builds opacity with each coat and reaches full opacity at four coats. Another interesting quality of this polish is that it seems to change color with each coat. First coat is reddish purple, second coat has more blue added, third coat it reaches a true purple shade and fourth coat it matches the bottle color. Very cool. This is the perfect shade of purple. It is bright enough to always look purple (not blue or black) and the jelly texture makes it really fascinating to look at.

The formula on these is perfect, as usual. I've never had a Lippmann polish with iffy formula, they are always nice and smooth. These also dry very quickly and have a shiny finish even without topcoat. No complaints on the formula.

Did you know that Lippmann Collection polishes contain Biotin and green tea? They do! I'm not sure how effective they are in such a small topical dose, but it's really cool to know that there are little extras in the formula. It also contains Aucoumea Klaineana resin extract, which is supposed to be a good nail strengthener and an alternative to formaldehyde. Here's a really interesting bit of information about the use of Okume resin in cosmetics.

Great colors, great formula, I only wish there were more of them! If I recall correctly, Lippmann Collection used to do sets of four for seasonal collections but now they seem to have switched to sets of two. Ah, well, I can't complain. They do manage to give us great colors every season and I think Call Me Irresponsible has satisfied a purple craving that no one else so far has.

Lippmann Collection Call Me Irresponsible and It's Raining Men are available now and can be purchased directly from their website and retail for $15 each.

Jessica Summer 2009 Life's A Beach Collection

This is the second collection I've tried from Jessica and I love it even more than the first!

The Life's A Beach collection is a collection of brights and a few have a very jelly-like finish!


Bikini Bottoms. A bright fuchsia creme. This isn't really as jelly-like as the other shades in this collection. It's a nice, bright pink but it's not neon. It also looks good against my skintone, which is rare for pink!






Diva On The Dunes. Bright orange creme. This one is a lot more jelly-like, but doing three coats covered up the squishy look. It's a very bright but not quite neon orange.



Loving The Lifeguard. Rich red-purple creme. This looks a lot like some of the neon purples in my collection but with the 'neon' removed! It's not really bright but it is bold.



My Cabana Boy. Near-neon coral-orange creme. This color is hot! It was also impossible to photograph. This is as close as I was able to get to the real life shade. It's much brighter and more saturated. I don't think it's a true neon, it doesn't dry matte, but it is bright enough to be seen from across the room! I think this is my favorite one so far!



No Tan Lines. Bright bubblegum pink creme. Your standard girly pink.




Under My Umbrella. Near neon hot pink creme. This has the most obvious jelly finish out of all the polishes in this collection. It's also super bright but not a true neon. It's right on the edge of bright/neon! Bold and bright, perfect for a summer pedicure.


I didn't think Jessica did a whole lot of brights or neon-like colors, so this collection was another surprise for me. The more and more I experience this brand, the more I like it.

I especially love the name of this collection. Life's A Beach. Ha!

The polishes all have a great texture, not too thin, not too thick. They don't seem to have three-free syndrome. They all apply evenly with no streaking, running or pooling. They dry very quickly and the wear on them is really quite good. The bottles and brushes are also of a very high quality, and that helps a lot when applying polish.


I love these colors. Like I said, they're bright but not neon. Brighter than the colors in China Glaze Kicks but not as bright as the colors in Zoya La-Di-Da. Every shade is flattering and could be worn by a wide variety of skin tones and still look perfect. I was especially shocked that the pinks looked good on me. Pinks usually make my fingers look dirty or burnt. Bonus!


Overall, hot colors, perfect for summer. Great formula. Not the most exciting or unique collection, but at least there aren't any ugly colors. Perfect for someone who's not brave enough to venture into neons but wants to wear bright color.

I don't have an exact release date for these, but they're available at the end of April and can be purchased from Jessica's website.

China Glaze Summer 2009 Kicks Collection

Like past China Glaze collections, Kicks is broken up into two parts. Usually it's a warm and a cool palette, but this time I don't understand the distinction between set 1 and set 2. Colors and nearly-identical pinks and oranges? Meh, who knows.




B-Girlz. Pink shimmer.




Breakin'. Light orange shimmer.




Custom Kicks. Teal with gold shimmer. WARNING: This picture is not accurate. In my picture it looks like an electric blue, but in real life it is a darker, less neon-looking teal with rich gold shimmer. I tried my best, but my camera wouldn't pick it up.




Entourage. Light green shimmer.





Fly. Purple shimmer.




It's Poppin'. Pink shimmer.





Laced-Up. Pink creme.




Oh How Street It Is. Red-orange creme.




Paper Chasing. Sheer green shimmer.




Sky High Top. Blue shimmer.



Sneaker Head. Light reddish creme.



Style Wars. Jelly-ish orange creme.



This is a collection of shades that are bright without being neon. They're not terribly bright, actually... They're more colorful and vibrant than bright. These are fun shades but they're not notice-me-from-a-mile-away shades.

I'm really happy to see some oranges! The thought never crosses my mind until I see an orange polish, but we really don't see a whole lot of orange polish being released. I love orange, and these are really great oranges.

I'm also extremely happy to see two greens and two blues in this collection, but I am a bit disappointed that the greens aren't very unique. Entourage is pretty similar to Tree Hugger (they're not exact matches) and Paper Chasing is almost identical to Piggy Polish Lily's Pad. Lily's Pad seems slightly lighter, Paper Chasing a little deeper.

My favorites are Breakin', Entourage, Style Wars, Custom Kicks and Sky High Top. I would have put Paper Chasing in my top five if it hadn't been so sheer! It's a fantastic color, but China Glaze formula and multiple coats don't mix- it would take days to dry!

The formula on these is all over the place. Some are very sheer, like Paper Chasing (five coats in that picture) and Style Wars, and some are very opaque (Custom Kicks, Sky High Top). Some are thick, some are thin, a little bit unpredictable. The best formula was on the creme oranges and the blues. The worst was the pinks, especially Laced-Up- thick and stringy but runny at the same time. Drying time seemed better on these shades than on previous collections.

Overall, not a bad collection but not terribly unique. You can't go wrong with brights, especially for summer, but I would have liked to see more variation in the shades. The pinks and oranges are only a couple shades off from each other. The greens were nice, but I also would have liked Paper Chasing more if it was less sheer.

One thing's for sure- China Glaze is not afraid of color! When was the last time you saw China Glaze release a collection of boring sheers and nudes? A long time ago. They've been blessing us with amazing colors for years and I hope that doesn't change!

While this collection may not rank up there with the awesomeness of collections like Ink, Rodeo Diva, Bahama Blues, OMG, Kaleidoscope or Ski, it's still colorful, un-intimidating, fun and totally wearable.

Lippmann Collection Spring 2009

Lippmann Collection's new colors for spring, inspired by high-end designers and fashion photographers.



Purple Rain, designed for Zac Posen's spring collection at New York Fashion Week. A light, delicate metallic lilac/violet shade. This seems like a polish that would show strong brushstrokes, but they're really not bad at all. It looks very "stripey" when you apply it, but once it's fully dried, the brushstrokes are only barely there. Really nice shade, very spring-like. I wonder if this would work well with Konad...?


PYT: Pretty Young Thing. A soft pinky coral JELLY!! I love this! I almost want to call this peach, it seems too interesting to just call it pink, and too light to call it coral. You guys know that this is not my type of color at all, but I'm in love with this one. It's very sheer, but once you get to three coats (this picture is three coats) it has that squishy-shiny-translucent jelly finish. Awesome. The color is really flattering, surprisingly. Usually pinks make my hands look dirty, this one just looks fresh and pretty. And squishy.


The formula on these is perfect. I can't find anything wrong with it. It's smooth, it dries very quickly, it's not runny or gooey despite the three-free formulation. When your polish costs $15, your formula better be perfect, and Lippmann Collection doesn't disappoint.

Overall, very pretty, very springy, very feminine. Not my typical choice for polish, but they're just so pretty I can't not like them! Someone take my temperature.... I must be sick...

Swatches: Lippmann Collection Winter 2008

Wow! These are gorgeous!

I apologize for the poor quality of these swatches. I'm having camera problems today! I think my battery is going bad- I charged it to full and on the second picture of each set it gave me a low battery warning and refused to focus! :(

Anyway, here they are:


Maneater. Beautiful reddish brown creme, or dare I say, jelly? It's dark but still looks brown and not black.


Holiday. Ooooooh! A bright pinkish-red with tons of sparkle- same vein as Shut Up And Drive and Lady Marmalade. I'm thinking this is a re-release because the name sounds familiar and I could have sworn I saw this in a holiday set at Nordstrom or something. I would totally wear this.


SUPERSTAR! Brown and gold glitter! It's a brown jelly base with golden brown glitter. I'm in LOVE with this! I don't own a single color that looks even remotely like this. A winner in my eyes.


Icing On The Cake. A pretty, delicate yet super streaky metallic silvery whitish pink. Very 'dainty'. Super streaky, though. This reminds me a ton of those old Sally Hansen Crystal Chrome polishes they used to have- I'll have to dig a few out to compare- could be a dupe of Petal Chrome?


And the Party Like A Rockstar set:



Comes in an adorable black/blue shimmery snakeskin bag. I love it, I can't stop admiring it.




Devil In A Blue Dress. Deep, dark navy blue creme. Looks almost black on the nail.


Good Girl Gone Bad. Stunning mellow burgundy glitter. I think I need nine or ten backups of this. I could wear this every day. It's so beautiful! And it was super easy to remove- rare for a glitter polish!

Overall, these ROCK! The formula is magical- applies so smooth and even, it's almost as nice as Rescue Beauty Lounge. The bottles themselves are great to look at, they're some if the prettiest bottles around. I would 100% recommend these for anyone looking for a more interesting glitter shade or a unique creme polish. Love them all. Great job, Lippmann!!