Revlon Bubble Gum

I finally found a display of the Summer 2010 Scents of Summer Collection! I did it! I did it!!

Drug stores are so small around here so I rarely find cool polish displays, even when I'm actively looking for them. I found this display at the same Rite Aid I found my Maybelline Pie in the Sky. Their cosmetic section tends to look like a tornado hit it, but under all the mess and understocked shelves, this store is now 2-for-2 in my search for seasonal drug store polishes.

After a few happy days of sunshine, the rain rolled in. To counter the drizzles and brighten my day, I decided to try out Bubble Gum.

I tried to capture a really quick picture of Bubble Gum in the sunlight when the clouds briefly parted. Definitely not the best picture, but I wanted to show how how hot pink this polish can look.

In the sunlight, it's definitely a bright girly fuschia.

Inside, it's a bit mellower, but still bright pink:

(ooh, look how the CND Solar Oil soothes the cuticles, aah)

Bubble Gum is a bright medium pink creme. A slightly standard color, but these shades look good with my skintone and the color itself makes me feel happy. The formula was easy to use - slightly on the thin side. There was slight VNL at two coats, so I used three coats for my mani. For scent purposes, I decided to skip a top coat. This polish dried so glossy!  

You can smell the scent once the polish dries. This polish's bubble gum scent lasted about 2-1/2 days for me. I thought the scent was like Bazooka bubble gum. My husband thought it was like the bubble gum fluoride from his childhood dentist.

Since it's on my nails and not overwhelmingly strong, I'm really enjoying my scented nails. To be honest, I even tried talking with my hands more while I was wearing it to see how often I could smell the bubble gum. Ok, maybe I'm enjoying my scented nails a little too much!

China Glaze Blue Island Iced Tea

Some of my favorite blues are from the China Glaze Bahama Blues collection, so I decided to wear some of my others ones this week.  Here is Blue Island Iced Tea!

I like this polish in the sunlight... 

 but it's pretty cool in the shade, too.

Is this a bluish silver or a silvery blue?  Is this a metallic, a microglitter, a shimmer, or a foil? 

Blue Island Iced Tea is hard to describe because it changes in almost every lighting. This is my interpretation of its description: a silver-based light blue foil.  It's got the sparkle and bling of a glitter with the smooth finish of a fol.  It's on the sheer, thin side, so it needs 3 coats.

What I really like about this polish is that it's a great polish to wear all year.  It feels icy when there's snow outside, it feels like sun off the waves in when it's summer time, it brightens up a cloudy day, it blings out on a sunny day. It looks different whenever you look at it.  Is that a jelly base? Is that a hint of turquoise glitter? It just keeps on sparkling.

Zoya Gwin

Gwin is from the Zoya Spring 2010 Reverie Collection.  Zoya describes Gwin as a "sunny melon metallic." I describe Gwin as pink-toned orange with a strong gold shimmer.

This polish really has a lot of iridescent shimmer. There are flashes of gold, yellow, and even green shimmer running through it. This is a lot more apparent in sunlight. Here's a blurred picture to show off some of sheen. It's like you think you're looking at a bright juicy orange shade and... it's glowing! from inside!! the shimmer!!!

My husband bought me the Reverie set a few months ago and today he picked up Maybelline Sunset Prisms for me. Yay for bright colors with a shimmer flash! (By the way - Lacquer Laine has a full swatch of Maybelline Sunset Prisms and it looks like this is one of those polishes that has a different color batch out there. One is orange with a green flash. One is pink with a gold flash.)

Side by side in their bottles, I thought Sunset Prisms might be a possible dupe for Gwin. On the actual nail, Sunset Prisms is a lighter melon orange shade. It's the early spring cousin to Gwin.

Gwin's on my index and ring finger.
Sunset Prisms is on my middle and pinkie finger.

Gwin is a darker orange with a gold flash and pretty much opaque in two coats. Sunset Prisms took four coats to get opaque but the gold shimmer and green flash is more obvious in most lighting. They both had decent formulas. Even though, Sunset Prisms took twice as many coats to get rid of VNL, it actually dried faster than Gwin. Not bad! Sunset Prisms even had a good brush - and it's a Maybelline Express Finish!

Soooo... since both of these polishes were nice to work with and they are related but different colors, both are staying put in the stash. No dupes this time!

Zoya Indigo

I was intrigued to see if my stash had a navy blue creme because I know that I have navy blues but they tend to have shimmer finishes. Zoya Indigo isn't supposed to be one of navy blue shimmers, but on the nail, it looks like it is!

Zoya describes Indigo as "navy blue with subtle multi-color micro glitter." In the bottle, I can totally see that. It's sparkly and full of rainbow glitter sparkles in a rich navy base. On the nail, it looks a navy blue shimmer. The glitter really gets swallowed up. Where does it go?! From some angles, a glitter piece will sparkle here and there, but in other lighting, they just look like bumps or bubbles.

Also, it looks almost black in some lighting. That gets under my skin so much because you shouldn't have to be in full sunlight to enjoy a polish. You might be able to appreciate it more in better lighting, but you should still be able to get the basic idea when you're inside or outside on a cloudy day.

So, instead of a navy blue with fantastic rainbow glitter, Indigo ends up looking like a standard almost-black navy shimmer that has odd bumps in it.

Good ponts - It is opaque in two coats. I didn't do any clean up above because I put it on, took the picture, and took it off, but you can still see that there's not any visible formula application issues. Indigo is from the Zoya Fall 2007 Downtown collection and still available for purchase if the look on the nail speaks to you - just don't go by how it looks in the bottle!

China Glaze Bermuda Breakaway

A tweet from Michèle from lacquerized. inspired me to wear this shade.  She wanted to wear a navy blue creme but couldn't find one, so I got to thinking about whether or not I had one.

Bermuda Breakaway is from China Glaze's Winter 2008 Bahama Blues collection. They describe it as a "Deep Navy Purple Creme."

I don't really think of this creme as a true blurple, but this blue does have a touch of purple in it. I tried to adjust the picture so I could represent the shade as accurately as possible. That's actually why my hands look so dry and winterized in this picture.

I had been avoiding this polish because of the horror stories with the Bahama Blues formula when this collection came out.  Maybe the formula's been tweaked a lot since then because this polish went on really easily! It was opaque in one coat, but I used two coats to even out and deepen the color. 

Some might think that navy is a bit darker than this shade, but I don't care for almost-black shades at all, so I wouldn't want it to be any darker. I think that Bermuda Breakaway fits the bill nicely my stash's navy blue creme. It's clearly blue in all lights and it's a breeze to put on. To think I was going to let this sit untried in my drawer - Thanks for the idea, Michèle!

Maybelline Pie in the Sky

I know the Maybelline Sweet Things collection has gotten a notorious reputation for its bad formula, bad brushes, etc, etc. Their Express polishes have found their way in and out of my collection because I can't make their formula work, but I'm in a blue polish mood right now and I *needed* Pie in the Sky.

After extensively searching all my local CVS, RiteAid, and Walgreens (checked the Duane Reades, too, just in case), I couldn't find any of the polishes from this collection except for the random pinks. BOO! Then I saw the Essie Resort comparisons from All Lacquered Up and happily decided I didn't *need* Pie in the Sky. I was going to get Lapis of Luxury and successfully have my cornflower blue polish. Take that, impossible-to-find drugstore polish!!

Then my husband randomly got sick to his stomach (he's never, ever, ever sick) and I had to rush to Rite Aid for meds. What did I find the same day I had declared to be done with my Pie in the Sky search? Frickin' Pie in the Sky. Last one of its shade on the display. With a coupon!

Now that Pie in the Sky's mine, I have to agree with the blogosphere. What's going on with this brush? Mine had stray hairs that did not want to get clipped in to shape. What's going on with this formula? Runny and chunks?!

After all of that, though, the polish did have some good qualities. It's opaque in two coats. This is probably because the first streaky coat self-leveled itself for me. Really. I think it did. The chunks and bubbles and streaks went on and a minute later it was dry, smoother, and decently shiny. After the second coat, there was still evidence of tiny bubbles or some kind of mess in the polish, but in very trace amounts. Overall, the color and end result made up for this polish's very funky first impression.

I've seen other pictures that show it as a bright sky blue like Zoya Yummy, OPI Just Groovy, or Misa Right Here Now, No More Later. It's not that kind of blue. This is a light cornflower or periwinkle blue shade - meaning light blue with purple undertones.  Not even my picture really captures the purple-ness. Even though my index is a little bit out of focus, it's getting closer to being more color-accurate than the other fingers. Imagine a little more purple, a smidge more gray, a little darker, and that's what it looks like!

I thought it was an excellent color to wear right before Easter. I wanted to have a calm color that helped me feel quiet. I was so glad that's exactly what this one did and in only two coats!