China Glaze Capitol Colors - Smoke and Ashes

Hi there! First of all, my name is Kat and I am one of Andi's friends and a fellow nail enthusiast! Andi has been a bit of a polish mentor and over the past year I've grown a collection of colors that started with about 8 and has now blossomed, enough to fill a two foot high Tupperware rolling drawer chest. I will hopefully be editing my profile soon and I can tell you more about myself there.

So, China Glaze Capitol Colors is a totally exciting new line based off of the Hunger Games books and further boosted interest with the release of the movie coming soon on March 23rd. I have to tell you - the excitement for the movie made the trip to Ulta to find Capitol Colors feel like Christmas. I sat in the aisle for about 15 minutes trying to decide which two I wanted the most. The blue/green micro glitter in Smoke and Ashes really caught my eye.

The formula on this one was highly pigmented black/navy and it only took one coat. However, when I got a little on my skin, it made clean up a little difficult, because it would stain my cuticle, so I would say you definitely don't want to "willy nilly" paint with this one. In my indoor picture you can't really see the super cool glitter in the polish, regardless, the glitter does add to the overall awesome shine I achieved on this one and the fact that it's not really a straight/flat black made it reflect nicely with my skin tone for such a dark polish. (Don't mind my cuticles, I'm from Wisconsin... one day it's sixty degrees, the next day it's twenty and it's ALWAYS dry.)

I took the polish outside hoping I could catch the glitter for you and I think it was a little more noticeable in the sunlight.

You can definitely see some glitter shine in the pointer finger.  

Alright, so even though I was a little disappointed with the visibility of the glitter in this polish, I still love it! I do believe the glitter and the shade add a special "glimmer" to this polish that make it really morph to most skin tones and for some reason, although it's basically "black" to a quick glance, it has a certain luminosity to it that makes it multifaceted in a very enigmatic way. The application was great and I'm always a fan of a one coat wonder. If you're a fan of Hunger Games and China Glaze, I would suggest you go and pick up one of these unique polishes from the Capitol Colors line. I also picked up "Harvest Moon" and "Luxe and Lush" (which looks like an Essie/Nubar dupe). Perhaps I'll critique those in the near future, but I will be playing around with magnetic polish next! Can't wait to tell you all about it!

Thank you for reading my FIRST polish blog entry, I'd also like to do a polish giveaway... I'm such a shopping ninja, I have an almost complete set on Wet n Wild Color Icon Ice Baby glitters to give away when we reach 200 followers! Psst... tell your friends :)