More from BB Couture For Nails!

BB Couture is another brand that is new to me but has been consistently shocking me with their unique and creative shades.

I remember that when I reviewed my first BB Couture Polishes, I was under the impression that the line was 'boring pinks and reds with a few awesome colors' tossed in. I was totally wrong. After viewing an actual color chart of all the BB Shades, it's clear that the awesome colors strongly outnumber the boring pinks and reds.

Here are a few of their amazing new shades (and a couple older but still new to me ones!)


Hermosa Surfer Girl. A deep pink jelly with multicolored glitter. This is a berry-pink, maybe a fuchsia? It's fairly bright bright but also mellow and rich. The glitter in this is hard to describe- it seems multicolored or at least iridescent as I can see gold silver and green clearly. I'm not sure if it's one type of glitter flashing different colors or a bunch of different colors of glitter.

Laguna Lagoon. Light mint green creme. This color reminds me a little bit of mint chocolate chip ice cream, but maybe a little lighter. Very pretty. This shade also had a particularly smooth formula, which is very rare for opaque milky pastels.


Midnight Malibu. Deep ink blue with multicolored glitter. This looks a lot more purple to me in the bottle, but when I apply it it's definitely a deep blue. Maybe a touch of purple. This has the same multicolored glitter as Hermosa Surfer Girl, but it has a touch of bar glitter thrown in as well. The bar glitter, although I love it, doesn't do much in this polish as it rarely makes it from the bottle onto your nail.

Moon Over Manhattan. Faded blue with subtle glitter. This is a really unique shade. I don't think I've seen anything like it. The shade of blue is really soft and faded looking, almost like it has a grey haze. It's more of a medium blue bordering on dark. The glitter in this is really subtle. It doesn't really sparkle much and it's not immediately noticeable but it adds a little depth and interest to the blue creme base.


Pink Champagne. Light pink shimmer with slight green flash. This has a shimmery, frosty almost metallic finish. It's a delicate light pink but to keep it from being too plain it has a touch of green flash that's noticeable at extreme angles. The green flash is more prominent in the bottle than on the nails.


Raspberry Cosmo. Hot pink with blue flash. Ooh, this picture didn't turn out so good. Anyway, this is another almost-metallic finish, and the hot pink base is accented with a subtle blue/purple flash.

Venice Party. Cornflower blue shimmer with silver glitter. This is another faded-looking blue. Quite pretty. This one is also very subtly duochrome, but only if you're looking closely. It is sprinkled with silver glitter. I have to be honest with you, I don't think this particular formula works. I've mentioned before the issue that arises when you add glitter to a thin metallic base. Instead of seeing a lot of sparkles on top of the polish, you get a weird bumpy texture that looks a little like bubbles. I like the color and that it has glitter, but I think the glitter needs to be bigger in order to break through the base color.

Venom. Frosty green. Venom is a medium green shade with silvery frost. I like the base color but I can't say I'm wild about the frosty finish. It tends to show brushtrokes so you must be very careful to apply it evenly. You can see in the picture where some of my strokes are more diagonal and some are vertical... Be mindful of your strokes when applying so you don't end up with that.


Balboa Beach Bunny. Rich purple with glitter. This one, like Midnight Malibu, contains bar glitter in addition to regular glitter. I love bar glitter. Unfortunately, this one does the same as Midnight Malibu- it has pretty bar glitter in the bottle but only one or two pieces actually end up on your nail. I'd love it even more if it had more bar glitter!

Blind Love. Green-gold metallic shimmer. This one is spectacular. It's bright and reflective but also has a fiery sparkle to it. It's an almost dead-on duplicate of Chanel Kaleidoscope. The difference between this and Kaleidoscope is one of them is a touch more green, but it's not noticable.


Dark Knight. Black with heavy gold shimmer. Oooh, this one is cool. It's a little bit like some of the other black-with-gold polishes that give the illusion of being a rich olive green. Dark Knight is extremely hot, very interesting to look at and I love the name as well.


Green Goblin. Forest green creme. I know I've posted this already, but it's so good I need to post it again. This time we get a rich, foresty, mossy dark green instead of all of the nearly-impossible to pull off and quite unappealing light yellow-greens we always see. I love this color so much, I might need twenty-seven backups.

Iced Olive. Shimmery olive. Another unique green! This one is a medium olive green, more on the deep green side than the yellow-green side with lots of gold shimmer. It's like the gold shimmer in Dark Knight. The cool thing about this kind of gold shimmer is that it gives it that bright in the middle/dark on the edges sort of look indoors. Like the center of the polish is glowing. Super cool.


Aren't those colors fantastic?! BB Couture For Nails is really surprising me lately. Almost every single color they've released since the first time I tried them as been edgy, unique and fun. Rock on!!

The formula on this is good, but inconsistent. Some are thick, some are thin, some are somewhere in between. The formula of these is much better than the first BB Coutures I tried, which had Three-Free Syndrome. These are a lot more smooth and less drippy/runny/gooey. I had trouble applying the frosty ones, but the cremes and glitters were perfect. Drying time is average.

I'm really happy that BB Couture is doing all of these unconventional colors. This is definitely a brand to keep your eye on. Lots of fun surprises. I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes next. So much potential! Potential and also proof that they're willing to do exciting colors!

BB Couture retails for $8.00 and can be purchased from Overall Beauty (I highly recommend and I can personally vouch for their great customer service) or directly from the manufacturer's website (but it doesn't appear to have all the shades).

Sephora by OPI Revisited

I have two new Sephora by OPI polishes that I want to swatch, but my nails are in no condition for swatching right now. I always break them doing stupid things! Opening cabinets, car doors, doing laundry... Ugh.


So, instead, let's revisit the Sephora by OPI line. When it was originally released, I did a bunch of swatches with all the polishes I bought. The formula was so thick and awful that the swatches suffered. Now I've added some thinner to them and they've come out quite a bit better.




Beauty Junkie. I admit that I only bought this for the name. It's kind of a vampy-brown-red-plum creme, too red to be chocolate.



Brainiac. One of the biggest disappointments. It was described as spiced pumpkin, but does this look like spiced pumpkin to you? No! It's kind of a weird burnt-salmon...



Cab Fare. Yellow with shimmer. It's pretty sheer in addition to being thick, stringy and goopy. All yellows are streaky and thick to some extent, but this one seems worse than others. The color is pretty nice and I like the sparkles.



Call Your Mother. Very pretty muted taupe-purple creme.


Charge It. Metallic gold. This one is pretty similar to Chanel Gold Fiction. I haven't done a side by side to see if they're exact dupes, but they have a very similar shade and texture.



Domestic Goddess. Bright candy grape purple creme.




Don't Go There. Another nice muted purple creme.



Metro Chic. Hard to describe... Mousy, grey taupe creme? I do love this color. It's the only Sephora by OPI polish I've worn since doing my original swatches...



Never Enough Shoes. Black with multicolored glitter. The glitter in this is small and subtle.



Queen Of Everything. Gorgeous metallic platinum-silver.



Run With It. Warm grey with coppery speckles. Reminds me of wet cement. Sort of similar to Zoya Harley.


Like I said before, I was not impressed with the formula of these. It's not consistent with OPI's formula, it seems like a completely different brand. Not all of the polishes were bad- some were a normal texture. The rest were insanely thick and gooey. I added thinner to them and it helped tremendously. Also, a lot of them have streaks of unmixed pigment that never mix back in no matter how hard you shake it. The streaks will occasionally transfer to the nail.

I don't like the way the bottles look, either. They look cheap and strange. The plastic they use to seal the bottles is also difficult to remove.

Nice colors, but I feel like they need to to a little quality control on these before they sell them.

Hopefully my nails will grow back soon so I can swatch my new ones!

Summer Colors from Sephora by OPI!

Someone directed my attention to these beauties just added to Sephora.com:




They look incredible! Green! Blue! Silver! I am SO happy this blue/green polish trend is catching on.

Mermaid To Order
(shimmering deep green blue)

Blue Grotto
(deep ocean)

Just a Fairy-tail
(silver and iridescent shimmer)

Underwater Fantasy
(shimmering light cornflower blue)

Water Baby
(opaque molten silver)

Lagoon-a Beach
(shimmering pale blue)

As soon as I can get my hands on these I'll do swatches, but for now they're out of stock!

Here's the link from Sephora's website.

Jessica Botanicals Collection Spring 2009

I think this may be the first time I've ever reviewed Jessica products on my blog! I don't have very much experience at all with this brand, but I've been doing a little more research and I found out some cool facts.

In 1969, the founder of Jessica Cosmetics, Jessica Vartoughian, opened a salon just for natural nails called Jessica Nail Clinic. The salon was the first of it's kind: the main focus of Jessica Nail Clinic is to care for and 'cultivate' the natural nail instead of covering them with enhancements. This is interesting because most nail salons don't seem to care about the health of the natural nail and almost all of their services involve applying or maintaining artificial nails.

Since I'm a natural nail girl myself, this seems like a brand that I can really get into.

Anyway, Jessica does a color line as well as natural nail treatments, and I've been playing with their beautiful spring collection, Botanicals.




Birds of Paradise. A pearly, glowy purple. This color was completely unexpected and it has me absolutely THRILLED. It's one of the most beautiful purples I've ever seen. It's bright and shimmery but it also has a soft, pearly, glowy quality that keeps it from being too loud. It looks less blue and more purple in real life.



Butterfly Kisses. A metallic blue. This is another unexpected color and also ridiculously cool! It's a foily metallic blue with lots of shimmery silver particles. It's not a shiny chrome finish metallic, more of a foil like Zoya Trixie, but blue.



Color Me Calla Lily. A soft pink-purple creme. My camera can't do this color justice. It's extremely soft and pretty like petals of a beautiful flower. It's more purple than pink like this picture shows and has a muted, dusty quality to it.



Coral Reef Daisies. A metallic coral. This is another foil metallic, but in a soft coral shade. Same texture as Butterfly Kisses.




Loving The Lilacs. Pale, shimmery lilac. Another muted lilac shade for spring. This one's not quite as colorful as the other shades in this collection. It has more of a dense shimmer finish as opposed to the foil metallic finish the other polishes in this collection have.





Rosy Romance. Rose pink metallic. This is another foil-finish metallic shade like the others. The color of this seems a lot more pale and dusty indoors, but in the sunlight it becomes a cleaner, brighter rose pink.


The formula on these polishes is great. I have not tried very many Jessica polishes so I'm not sure how they compare to each other, but based on these I'm quite impressed with the quality. The polish is on the thin side and very smooth. The drying time is average. The wear on these is really good- I wore a few of these before I photographed them and didn't experience any major tipwear and there was no chipping.


This collection was a surprise for me. For the most part, these shades all look pretty bland and uninteresting in the bottle, but when you apply them they come to life. Birds of Paradise is especially amazing, and I'd highly recommend it for purple lovers like me. The metallics are smooth and sparkly and the shades are not what you'd typically find when looking for metallic polishes. My least favorite shade is Loving The Lilacs- it seems lifeless to me compared to the other spring-like shades in the collection. Overall, a little mainstream but still a beautiful, enjoyable spring collection.

Jessica can be purchased directly from their website, but I have also seen a limited selection at Target.

Quick post: Nicole by OPI Spring Shades

I'm still sick, but I ventured out of bed to do a little fishing on the Selbina boat... Unfortunately the Sea Horror had other ideas, so I figured I'd pop in with a little post while I'm waiting for it to leave.


I've had these swatched for a while now and have really just forgotten to post them, but better late than never I suppose.

These are new shades from Nicole by OPI. I don't know much about them other than that! I'm not really sure if Nicole does traditional 'collections' like OPI, but they usually have new colors a few times a year.




Do Good... Feel Good. A soft, delicate petal pink. Semi-sheer, an almost jelly-like texture.



Dream Maker. An opalescent pink with crystalline shimmer. Not quite iridescent, but flashes hints of white, silver and gold.



Find Your Passion. A hot pink jelly.



Imagine If... A sheer silver holographic polish. Almost too dense to be a topcoat, but sheer enough that it needs at least three coats for opacity. This is four coats.


It's Possible. Pretty, shiny bronzy metallic chrome. Dries without brushstrokes.




No Limits. Very dark, inky blue-purple creme. Not obviously blue unless you're in bright light.


Light A Candle. A silvery chrome with a purple tint. Almost gunmetal.





Play Fair. A soft lilac shimmer. It's not as warm as the first picture suggests- it's closest to the second picture.


Positive Energy. Bright, gleaming silver chrome.




Reach Out. A candy-like medium pink jelly. Almost seems to appear coral colored in certain lights.


You're A Star. A sparkly and surprisingly opaque shimmering white. This is only two coats! It's extremely sparkly and it has hints of silver and blue.

Also worth noting: The chromes in this 'collection' work extremely well with Konad! Here's a demonstration:


No Limits topped with Imagine If... and Positive Energy stamp.


The chromes make such a crisp, clear Konad design, it's like they were made for each other.

The formula on all of these was excellent. I have no complaints. The only potential issue is the sheerness of a couple shades- Imagine If... and Do Good... Feel Good were definite three coaters, but this isn't really too much of an issue because these Nicole shades dry very quickly even without a quick dry topcoat. They are also very shiny and durable without topcoat. I kept my Valentine's Day Nicole manicure on for at least four days with no topcoat and there was no tipwear or chipping by the time I removed it.


Pretty, springy, versatile. A little bit of everything in this collection- sheers, pastel, vampy blue, holo, chrome, brights... Very cool. Now all we need is some green and some glitter and we'll have something for everyone!