Orly Color Amp’d Two-Part Nail Color

March 27, 2015Sophia Ravenna

Nail color and top coat.

Ok, so here’s the deal. I wrote a long, detailed post about this product and then WordPress ate it. It’s already 1pm on a Friday and I don’t have time to re-write everything I wrote, so you get the short and not very sweet version instead.

Orly Color Amp’d is a gel-style nail system only available at Target. It claims to last for up to a week but starts chipping within days. The first time I tried it, I had significant chipping in less than 24 hours, and I hadn’t done anything ridiculous to my nails, I just dared to take a shower.

The one thing it has going for it is a very fast dry time. It claims to dry in 8 minutes and both times that I tried it, I found that 8 minutes after applying the “flexible sealcoat”, my nails felt completely dry and did not get smudged or dented as I went around the house doing normal stuff. I found that my manicure was more reliably dry and damage-proof than it is when I follow my normal routine of applying drying drops and waiting 10 minutes before doing anything.

Color Amp’d seems very over-priced for what it is. A regular bottle of Orly brand polish is .6 fluid ounces and costs $8 at Ulta. This stuff is $9.99 for only .37 fluid ounces. Wouldn’t you expect a product that they’re selling at Target to be cheaper than what they sell at Ulta? It’s more expensive than Sally Hansen’s similar system, which Target also carries. It’s like they’re expecting chumps like me who like Orly’s regular polish to be suckered in by the fact that one of their favorite brands is finally available at Target, and that we’ll ignore the price tag and the weird smell of the top coat and the fact that you can’t actually see what color the polish is because it’s in an opaque bottle with a colored wrapper around it that doesn’t properly display the color you’re buying.

I’m seriously disappointed by this stuff, guys. They claim that it lasts 88% longer than a normal manicure, but my nails look just as bad as they would have looked if I had used normal polish on Monday night and wore it until Friday morning. They might even look worse. Add to that the fact that I am really not excited about the color selection, as it’s mainly a bunch of plain cream colors and not the cool iridescent glittery shimmery shades I usually buy from Orly.

Hall of Fame.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is a pretty cool orangey gold/pink duochrome, but the only reason I have it is that I opened the bottle in the store and saw that it was not the simple metallic coppery color it appeared to be.

I don’t know what Orly was thinking when they came up with this product line, but I can’t help but feel that they knew it was a dud, and that’s why they’re only selling it at Target instead of offering it alongside their regular line.

Nail Polish WIN from Literary Lacquers

February 6, 2015Sophia Ravenna

Annabel Lee

Way back in April, I ordered a bottle of Annabel Lee by Literary Lacquers. I was really excited by it because I was in a grey phase and I also like Edgar Allen Poe. However, I felt like it wasn’t the best color for the brighter clothes I was wearing in Spring-Summer, so I set it aside for Winter. A few weeks ago I came across it again and I was like OH YEAH GREY GLITTER MANICURE TIME. The first coat seemed a little sheer, but I knew it was a jelly color so I wasn’t worried… But after three coats it was the barest hint of sheer grey still and I was way disappointed. However, since I had good experiences with Literary Lacquers in the past, I figured this was just a bad color but not indicative of the brand. I was prepared to stick it back in my nail polish hoard and not think about it again, like numerous other colors that looked great in the bottle and meh on my fingers.

However, a friend of mine is friends with Amy over at Literary Lacquers and she thought something was not right, so she contacted Amy who agreed that the color should be opaque after three coats, as shown in the Etsy listing. So I got in touch with her and she offered to replace my clearly faulty bottle with a brand new one. She mailed it off promptly and a few days after it I sat down and painted my nails again… so much better! One coat was more opaque than three from the bad bottle, and the above image shows three coats. The color is a beautiful jelly grey with small holographic glitter and even smaller black glitter. It reminds me of black labradorite!

See? It matches!

Annabel Lee wore really well for a few days, until bead show set-up day, where I did things to my hands that hands should not endure. No manicure could survive that, and sure enough, there were huge chips all over the place. I feel like I could have easily gotten 5-7 days of wear in a normal week, though, especially with a good base and top coat (I’m currently having issues on that front as my usual base coat got goopy). Obviously this isn’t the sort of color that you would wear on stage a lot, but for a Gothic belly dancer looking for an alternative to black, this would be a great choice… Especially if you’re doing a ghosty performance. It reminds me of gravestones (appropriate for a color inspired by Poe).

So the point of this is that not only is this a beautiful nail color, but Literary Lacquers is a nice business to work with! It’s always refreshing to work with a company that cares about its customers and is willing to fix problems. I’m sure I would not have received such a prompt response from a big cosmetics company.

Nail Polish Round-Up!

December 12, 2014Sophia Ravenna

British Racing Green.

You guys know I love nail polish. I’m fortunate enough to have really long, strong natural nails, and it seems a shame not to decorate them as often as I can. So in the interest of not having my beauty blogs be all nails, all the time, I’m going to try to just do a round-up of all the new brands and products I’ve tried once a month or so.

This month’s big winner is Butter London’s British Racing Green. This is an expensive brand, so I waited a long time to try it. A couple of months ago Ulta had a sale so I picked up two colors, and this was one of them. Although it’s inspired by that classic car paint color, I think it’s also a really nice choice for the holidays! You could dress it up even more with some silver or gold glitter, a festive accent nail, or some other nail art. The above photo shows two coats, and you can see it’s a nice opaque color with a bit of shimmer to it. I think I got about a week or so of wear on my hands, and several weeks on my toes. Even then, my toes were only a little chipped and I was changing my color more out of boredom than necessity. I’d say this brand is probably worth the splurge, especially if you catch it on sale or use some reward points on it. If you’re looking for holiday gifts for someone, they have some cute steampunk themed nail polish sets right now, too.

There is one drawback to British Racing Green, however. Because it’s a dark color, it will stain. I used a base coat, so my nails were fine, but there were some spots where there was stubborn bits of green in my cuticles or under my nails. Plus it left green residue all over my skin! Let’s take a look at my feet after I decided to replace the Butter nail polish with some Lime Basil Parfumerie polish…

I’m bad at pedicures!

See the green stain on my index toe? I even tried using a makeup remover wipe on it. That color did not want to go away. Luckily a shower soaked it off. As for the Lime Basil polish, it’s a fun bright opaque green and was perfectly opaque after two coats. I can’t report back about the scent though, since I’m not about to try to smell my own toenails.

Now for a color that is beautiful, but really high-maintenance.

Formula X, when will I learn?

I don’t know why I keep buying Sephora Formula X colors, I never end up being quite happy with them, and they’re not cheap. But the colors themselves are so gorgeous, I always tell myself this time it will be different! So here we are with the Brushed Metallics, a line that is matte and iridescent and downright beautiful. I was in a weird mood when I was at Sephora, so I bought the weirdest color they had. Determined is a matte taupe brown with blue iridescence. It’s really cool and weird and a great choice for winter. It would look beautiful with a blue and brown costume… and yet… It was almost impossible to apply. It went on streaky, and attempts to smooth it out just made it worse, resulting in big blank swathes on my nails. And because it’s a matte color, I can’t put a top coat over it. So when I took a shower the next morning, it started chipping, and just kept flaking away for the next day or two. I painted my nails Monday night, repaired the chips Wednesday afternoon, and I’m sitting here on Friday morning with nails that look awful. In fact, as soon as I get done with this blog, I’m taking this polish off. I can’t look at these huge naked spots any longer! This is definitely the sort of color that you’re only going to get one or two days of wear from.

Oh, and speaking of removers, a quick shout-out for the Formula X Delete nail polish remover. It works really well, and comes in a cool pump bottle, and isn’t too stinky. A nice upgrade from the cheap drugstore brand polishes I’ve used in the past.

Matte Manicure Mishap

October 10, 2014Sophia Ravenna

A little messy.

Don’t worry, I promise I’m done with nail polish reviews for a little while!

I’ve had Yuna from Zoya’s new Fall collection for a little while, and I kept wanting to try it out but it was a little dark for the summer clothes I was still wearing because it was still hot in AZ. Finally, I decided that it was October, so I was going to wear dark nails no matter how hot it was. I took off that blood red I reviewed last week and replaced it with Yuna and I was happy. What a gorgeous grey with bronzey greeny shimmery micro-glitter! So beautiful, so unusual.

The very next day I got my hands on the new Matte Velvet topcoat from Zoya and I had a thought… Wouldn’t it be cool if I did sweet matte tips and then I would have an awesome, edgy Fall manicure? Surely my meager nail art skills were up to the task!

I’d read that you could use normal stationary tape for masking your nails to do your tips like this, so I grabbed some Scotch tape and went to town with my matte topcoat. It was so easy! It was going to be so cool!

Well, it didn’t go quite as well as I had planned. The tape pulled up from my nails in spots. In some cases this allowed the top coat to leak under the tape and extend the effect farther than I wanted to. In other spots, when the tape moved it also lifted the top coat with it, so that parts of the tip stayed shiny. And in one spot, the tape took some of the nail color with it, leaving a blank white spot on my nail!

I have a couple thoughts for how to make this manicure idea more successful for next time:

Fit the tape to my nail instead of wrapping all the way around my finger.
Try masking tape instead.
Apply to a fresh manicure instead of a day-old one that already has a top coat.
Try it with a different color. Yuna’s charm comes from the bronze glitter, and the matte dulls that effect, which makes it look like a completely different color and made for a less attractive matte tip. I think a simpler color would be better suited to the matte tip treatment.

This just goes to show that it’s really good to experiment with makeup ideas when you have nothing else going on. I didn’t have any performances last weekend so it didn’t matter that I had wacky nails. If I had done this right before a gig I would have had to remove it right away and try to do something else attractive with my nails on a short time frame! It also goes to show that maybe I shouldn’t try a new-to-me nail technique at 11pm, because what seems like a good idea late at night might seem like a mistake in the morning.