BB Couture for Nails, Dark Knight

I've been a bit lazy blogger lately but excuse me. The summer weather has finally arrived and I've spent lots of time outside. Well, actually I photographed two summer manicures, but did both shoots in such a haste that pictures turned out to be too crappy to publish.

This is one of my older pictures: BB Couture for Nails Dark Knight. A must have for all black lovers - rich black infused with tons of gold & platinum microglitter. The overall impression is softer than regular black and I get even a slight hint of olive in this in some lights. Beautiful!

Application was flawless and two coats enough for my short nails.

Nubar Orange Crème

Orange Crème is definitely the brightest of the Nubar pastel colors I own. In some lights there is even a flash of neon type glow in it. But don't be fooled by this image, this color has the chalky pastel side, too. Neat and quite unusual color.

Application is three coats, beginning with terrible streaks and improving gradually. This polish dried crazy fast, I almost felt that there was no need for Seche (but I used it still).

Essie Pound Cake

I've found my favorite neutral! This is Essie Pound Cake, a super flattering pale beige with slight gray and pink tinge. It gives my hands super fresh and clean look, is much more interesting than plain white and more classy than pale pink.

The color is from Essie's basic selection and I found it accidentally from Polishaddicts blog. Her images are always top quality and her picture of Pound Cake is definitely worth a look, it gives the better impression about the pink and gray tones of this pale but intriquing shade. Essie is not available at this side of the world, so I'm totally dependent of polish pics and descriptions when picking Essie colors.

The consistency is little bit on the sheer side. My manicure is three layers (+ top coat) and I could use fourth for perfect cover. Application was bit streaky, but not anything that could not be handled with some patience. It dries bit slowly, even with Seche.

Essie Sag Harbor

I have coveted this color for a while - and now I have it. Beautiful! The color is grayed out light blue, grayed so far that in some lighting you don't get the blue at all. In a bottle there seems to be a fair amount of silverish shimmer, but it magically disappears on the nail and the color looks very creamy.

This is truly unique color and very approachable at the same time. I think that if you are not used to any unconventional polish colours but would like to try one, this is a good candidate for your first adventure in the world of color.

The shade is quite flattering against my tan, but I guess that it might be even better with pale skin.

I had no application issues, this is two layers and fast dry top coat.

Essie Punchy Pink

Protect your eyes, Essie's Punchy Pink is definitely the brightest highlighter neon pink polish I have seen!


Color-wise this is everything I expected - I was not in search of shy and demure pink. Although I managed to capture the neonness of this color somehow, you really have ro see this IRL to understand how blindingly bright it truly is. And please see the original of the previous picture (*click*!) - for some reason the Blogger image resizing algorithm did very bad things for the quality of this particular image.

But quality-wise I'm extremely disappointed. I've read mixed reviews about the quality of Essie 2009 neon colors and unfortunately I can't join to those who praise it. The consistency was thin, which is totally ok - but also awfully sheer. This is four layers. The first layer was probably streakiest I've ever seen - and layers 2 and 3 gave me worst cuticle drag issues ever. It might work better with base coat, but I don't own any so I can't really tell.

I used my best trick to tackle these problems. After coat three one coat of fast dry topcoat (Seche) stopped the cuticle drag issues, after that just one additional coat was needed for full cover. And another coat of Seche for shiny surface - Punchy Pink dries almost matte as many real neon colors do.

Comparing to my Color Club neons CC wins hands down in quality. This experience left me wanting to try for example Misa's Lather, Rinse, Repeat - it seems to be a neon pink with similar brightness and I don't have any bad things to say about any Misa quality.

Nubar Baby Blue

This is Nubar Baby Blue, two coats (actually some nails in my other hand have up to five coats, but I just messed up my manicure). I photographed this in late evening light to emphasize the weird, glowing shade of pale blue. This shade really pops even the slightest tan and looks very clean and sober in a futuristic way... ...a great summer shade!

The application was not nice, the consistency was very runny and the first coat really streaky. Somehow the second coat attaches really well on top of the first one and at least the color gets even relatively easy. But cleaning the cuticles was a huge job, the thin polish just runs around the whole rim of the nail bed. I'm definitely getting some vaseline just for protecting the cuticles.

*****

Nubar Cuticle Oil is excellent stuff! It smoothed my dried out cuticles after this pastel bleed project in a snap. Sweet Almond scent is quite bad though, pick one of the fruity ones instead.