Hello Kittens & Mittens!
This is my first post for my first polish blog, you guys. I'm not gonna lie, I'm totally nervous and thinking that my pictures aren't good enough, and no one is going to read this, or if they do read it will be convinced I should just hang up my polish stamper and head the hell home. But...jokes on them; I am home! HA!
Anyway, now that that's all out of the way kittens, I do want to note that this blog is intended for polish reviews and mani designs only. I'll hopefully be sharing pictures, tutorials of my own making, as well as my honest and truthful opinion about polishes. It will only ever be my honest opinion, that I can promise. To start with, I'd like to share the last manicure I did.
This was just a very simple Dotticure using my new Formula X - The Twenty-Two Set (received for Christmas) using gray (Extraordinary), white (White Matter, Black (Dark Matter), and the purple (Haphazard).
Gorgeous, right? This was a super simple design, inspired by a dotticure I found on Pinterest. I prepared by buffing my nails and giving them a quick swipe with a cotton ball with a little bit of rubbing alcohol on it to get rid of any oils on my nails. Then, I painted a base of Duri - Rejuvacote, followed by a layer of ORLY - Bonder to help the polish really stick well. Then came the moment of truth.
Honestly, I'm not a fan of these bottles at all. They are wickedly gorgeous but as far as functionality goes, I'd give them a 2/5 stars. The lids are as large as the bottle itself which may work with a full size bottle, but paired with the mini size and the short by necessity brush does absolutely nothing for me in making it easier to apply polish where I wanted it to go.
The formula of Extraordinary was just that, extraordinary. Some streakiness on the first coat which I expected with the light gray color, but it was made completely opaque with the second coat. I used a quick coat of Seche Vite to dry up my layers and turned my attention to the dots. I knew I wanted to play with the black and white against the gray of Extraordinary but I also wanted to punch it up with a bright fun color. I almost went with Zap! which is billed as an electric limoncello; but in the end, my love affair with purple couldn't be contained. Haphazard called to me, and Haphazard was what I went with. This electric purple is shockingly bright in a good way!
I had no problems with White Matter, but as soon as I touched my dotting tools into Dark Matter I had a few problems. As a good polish girl, I had rolled all of my polishes before cracking them open to mix the contents as they've been sitting on my shelf for a few weeks. I spent about 5 minutes dotting with White Matter, and in that time, Dark Matter had already started to separate again. I closed it up again and rolled it once more and after that had no problems. Same thing with Haphazard. Once again, it separated very quickly and left me with the unpleasant oily ring of a lighter color around one of my dots. I rolled it again and it was lovely as well. I sealed it all up with a final topcoat of Seche and let them dry.
These nails wore surprisingly well. I had them on for 4 days before I had tip wear, and 5 before I had any actual chipping (although that could be attributed to washing dishes at Subway for 5 hours as well). I was so impressed with these colors, and despite the issues with the bottle and brush design and a few minor formula hiccups which were easily solved, I absolutely loved doing this manicure. I got a lot of compliments on it around campus, and town. I was even told I have too much time on my hands, and they didn't believe me when I said it only took about a half hour to do.
Kittens, this is definitely a fantastic start for the new Formula X line by Sephora and I can't wait to show you a mani I did using some of these polishes in an outer space theme a few weeks ago. I'll see you soon!
XO-
Jenn
