Claire's Blacklight

Last time I was out at Claire's, I spied this purple with silver glitter polish that is labeled only as Blacklight, so I jumped on it.  The Zumba class I go to turns on the blacklights and party lights on Thursdays, so I was excited to try it out.


Okay, first disappointment, this polish was SUPER thick.  I didn't want to add any thinner in case I messed up the blacklight properties somehow, but I did add 3 ballz to help shake it all up.  I used a base of Seche Natural and it took me 3 coats of polish to just have an even surface to work with.  I did not use a top coat.  The formula was very messy (and thick) and it dried matte and very gritty.

Here's my semi-sunny picture.  The glitter looks silver/blue which is cool but you can see hot gritty it is.

Shade picture - more grit, more purple...


Okay the worst part?  Under the blacklight, this polish did nothing.  No glow, nada.  I was really disappointed.  :[


Claire's is available world-wide and online.  You can Like their Facebook page and Follow their Twitter pages.

Nicole by OPI Me + Blue vs Claire's Bright Skies

One thing about the Nicole by OPI's bottle shape - they don't photograph well for me, haha.  When I saw my bottle of Me + Blue, I thought "I own this!" and pulled out the Claire's Bright Skies that I purchased in mid-2010 but have never worn.


For Me + Blue, I had a base of OPI Natural Nail Base Coat, 3 coats of Me + Blue and a top of OPI Top Coat.  For Bright Skies, I had a base of Seche Natural, 3 coats of Bright Skies and a top of Seche Vite.

BOO - Blue Skies is quite sheer.  I don't like sheer colors - they just look like you have zombie hands to me. While it has more of the rainbow glitter, it seriously lacks in the opacity of the base color.

Same in the shade - you get the glitter but none of the opacity.  I did layer one coat of Blue Skies over Me + Blue which looked neat because you got the pretty glitter but it didn't want to photograph at all.


Disclosure: The product[s] in this post was [were] provided to me by the company for consideration.  For more information, please read this post.

Claire's Glitz and Glam Franken

Remember this "gem"?

Yeah.


Well I poured some out, added a few ballz, put in 10 drops of CND Blackjack, poured a bit of Cover Girl City Lights and went to town shaking that bad boy.


End result?

Sorry y'all, it's still a hot mess.

The CND Blackjack helped tone down the neon pink and shaking the polish definitely made the polish more opaque.  However, all the silver hexagon glitter got kinda mucked up.

This is going in my "2011 Zoya Polish Exchange" pile, providing they have one again.  :)

Claire's Mood Daring/Innocent

Oh back to Claire's.  This was another one of their Mood polishes that I didn't think I'd like all that much.  As you can plainly see in my bottle picture, It looks like "Daring" is a greyish color (and in the hot Texas sun, the bottle looked like it too), and the "Innocent" color looked like a whitish cream color.  Unlike "Calm/Wild", this was a creme polish, not a glitter.


I used a base coat of Seche Natural, 3 coats of Daring/Innocent, and a top coat of Seche Vite.  Imagine my surprise when I saw this.

Um what?  Now granted this is in the sun, but that's no creme, that's butter yellow.  The tips almost look greenish grey.  It reminded me a tiny bit of a banana, but I was going to roll with it.

In the indirect sun, you can start to see more of that butter yellow/olive green color again.  Now this was actually the next day (I applied it at night) and frankly, I had a bad day that day.  Lots of construction type work, so the polish was starting to chip and peel just a bit.


Now here's the fun part.  I went into my bathroom and ran the water.  First, I used super cold water to get the "Daring" color to show up.

That is totally a weird yellow green!  Not grey at ALL.  I'm so confused.


Next I used some hot water (ow) to get the "Innocent" color to show up.

This color is definitely a buttery yellow, not a white cream.


I turned off the water and was able to snap a slight wet but very true picture of how my nails looked most of the day.

Overall, I was pretty happy with this one.  I love my glitters, but sometimes I can love a creme too.  Again, this was $5 but they seem to constantly have the buy one, get one half off deal.


Claire's is available world wide or online [official website].

Claire's Glitz and Glam

Can you see my sarcastic face?  Just wanted to make sure you knew I was wearing it.  I picked up this bottle at the same time as Claire's Technopop.  At the time, the pink layer wasn't bleeding into the top or the bottom, that happened after my manicure.  The top layer LOOKED like little beads.  It's not.  It's hexagonal flat silver glitter. The middle layer is the same pink neon glitter from Technopop, and that bottom layer is a beautiful silver rainbow mix.


I used a base of Seche Natural, 3 coats of Glitz and Glam, and a top coat of Seche Vite.  Ready for this one?

LAME.  Three coats didn't even barely get rid of my VNL, and in fact, it just kept dragging the hexagon glitter to the top of my nail.  I was getting frustrated fast.

It's almost a Pepto Bismol pink... This may be nice for your 5 year old daughter but not for me.  I'm not happy with this one either.


Claire's is available world wide or online [official website]

Claire's Technopop

Every time I go to Claire's, I get all excited by their layered nail polish mostly, because I don't "get" it.  What color comes out? Why don't they mix?  Questions!  Normally, all the bottles have been shaken like crazy by the teenieboppers and kids that wander in there, but I saw this (and another) and was all kinds of excited.  It's a little hard to tell, but each layer is not just a neon but also has glitter in it!  SOLD.  I paid $5 but they were having buy one, get one half off at the time.


I used a coat of Seche Retain, 3 coats of Technopop, and a top coat of Seche Vite.  The brush wasn't too bad, but the smell wasn't the most pleasant despite them being big 3 free.  The polish didn't pool in my cuticles but it wasn't very thick either.  I NEEDED 3 coats to get ... well, this.

Blech.  What IS this?  The first two layers were definitely pea soup puke vomit green with sparkles.  In my 3rd layer, I started pulling some of the pink, which you see in the middle of my index, middle and pinkie fingers.

The shade picture isn't much better.  Overall I'm VERY disappointed with this polish, and have half a mind to shake it out of spite.  Not a happy camper here.


Claire's is available world wide or online [official website].

Claire's Mood Calm/Wild

I can't remember when I picked up this bottle of claire's Mood "Calm/Wild" polish but I did it after seeing it on various blogs, and thought it looked just awesome.  It's a glitter color changing polish that reacts to your body heat and doesn't work too well on nubbins, hah.


I actually wore this polish for 3 days, took it off, and then put it back on again to blog about it.  I really enjoyed this polish a lot!  The first time I used a base coat of Seche Retain (I couldn't find my Natural), but the second time I used Seche Natural, 3 coats of Calm/Wild, and because this was drying matte on me, I went with a top coat of Seche Vite.  Thankfully, the Seche Vite did not alter the color changing process.  Clean up was typical glitter like - either scrub with felt or just let the remover sit on the nail for a few minutes (yes, minutes) to remove the polish in one sweep.


The "cold" color is the purple - so basically if your hands were freezing, you'd only see the purple.  I ended up running my hands under cold water to get a picture of that for you.

However, normally, my hands specifically are pretty warm, and in general, the part of your nail that is attached  to your finger, is warm.  While photographing this polish in my 100 degree heat weather, you could REALLY see the "warm" color which was the pink.

However, while I was inside (hah, which is most of the day), you get a nice "french manicure" look with the cold and warm colors.

I also got 2 in some indirect sun - you can see the purple starts to fade to the pink a bit.

Overall, I was actually thrilled with this polish, which is quite different from the "pre-glued nails" review I did last time with Claire's.  The glitter was a silver microglitter that didn't distract from either the purple or pink color.  Actually, I was so pleased that I went back and bought 3 more from the same line but they are all matte/cremes.  More on those later.

I paid $5 for this bottle but they were having a big "buy 1, get 1 half off" sale.

Claire's is available world wide or online [official website].

Claire's Pre-Glued Nails

I went to a Claire's in what I'd consider an upscale shopping center about 3 hours away from me a few weeks ago, and found these.  I absolutely hate the idea of putting glue on my nails, but these "pre-glued" nails caught my eye.  The cashier said they had JUST come in, so I grabbed two packages (it was buy one, get one half off) and was waiting for nubbins to try this out.  The package of 24 nails cost $5.00 US, which was pretty awesome considering that a manicure of fake nails can be up to $30 around here.

This seemed like a simple design - a white tip French with pink and blue stamped flowers and a blue shimmer top coat over it.

First complaint.  You can see my nails underneath.  I went ahead and pointed out the painfully obvious to you with arrows.  Granted, it probably wouldn't be seen by the average person, but it annoyed me to no end.


Well, not even 10 minutes in having these nails, and I decided (not so smartly) to run my hands through my hair.  I nearly died as my nails got STUCK in my hair - the hair wrapped UNDER the nails at the cuticles and got stuck in the glue on several of them.  I wanted to die. 


At this point I wanted to rip every single one of them off, but I decided to wait and sleep on it so I could get some sun pictures.

Left Hand - This is after around 12 hours of wear (or so).  As you can see in the light, my original nails are showing, which again, irritating to me!

Right Hand - More annoying - do you see that the glue almost made a "bubble" on my middle finger?  My pointer finger cuticle is all messed up from when I had a wart removed as a kid, so that wasn't fun.  But also check out the ring finger.  I originally put that nail on my pointer finger before realizing it was WAY too big, so I tried to peel it off and put it on the ring finger.  Instead I got all those weird gross bubbles.

CHECK OUT THAT LIFT.  No wonder my hair got caught under there.  OW.

I mean seriously, this was just plain painful.

It even lifted from the sides of my nail.  The "pre-glued nails" don't have glue all the way out to the edges, so the result is that the nail is lifted on the sides.  The insert says to slightly "buff" your nails with a file to maximize adhesion, but no way was I scoring my nails with a file.


Removal wasn't too fun either.  I totally misread the instructions - you're supposed to soak your hands in warm water for 10-15 minutes and peel the nails off from the side.  Instead, I put my hands under hot water for 15 SECONDS and peeled these suckers off.  I was left with some glue because of it, but my Zoya Remove+ got rid of any excess glue.


Verdict?  If you're in a super rush for a photo shoot, totally use these.  If you're planning on keeping them more than an hour, no freaking way.  I don't feel like it was a TOTAL waste of $5, but it was close.


Claire's is available world wide or online [official website].

Claire's Magic with Nfu-Oh 40

On Tuesday, I stopped at Claire's and found some crazy Jolly Rancher scented nail polish and the manager told me that all cosmetics were buy one, get the second one half off - so I started looking at the 3-1 Color Polishes but some jerk had shaken up the bottles, and then I found this.

Claire's Magic is a beautiful dark purple with a dusty rose shimmer to it.  I thought it was originally a duochrome, but especially on the nail I saw that it was really a shimmer.  Because of the half off sale for this, I paid a whole $2 (instead of the normal retail of $4).  Sadly, I didn't get any pictures of just the Magic because I was way too excited for this.

Nfu-Oh 40!!!!  This is a green and blue flakie suspended in a clear polish.  Flakies are awesome - it's not glitter, it's not a shimmer... it reminds me of mica flakes.  Depending on the light, you either see a deep royal blue or a emerald green.  This is definitely more expensive at $12.50 a bottle, but I received free shipping so that helped.

Here's a couple of sunlight pictures and you can tell the Magic has the red shimmer, and you can see a strong blue flakie.

A couple of pictures in the shade - now you can see the deep purple shade with the green flakie.  This was a seriously fun manicure to wear.  I originally called this my stepchild to Scrangie from Rescue Beauty Lounge, but especially with it on, there's no comparison - it's pretty but it's no Scrangie :)


Claire's is available world wide or online [official website] and I purchased Nfu-Oh at Fabuloustreet.com [official website].