First Impressions: Ciaté Paint Pots

Ciaté Ferris Wheel, 3 coats plus top coat

Even though I haven’t been blogging much, I have been swatching! Having more content than you have time to write is such a great problem to have. So, so much better than having a lack of inspiration. It does not matter that I actually did these swatches last year, right? I still have great notes and the particular polish I am featuring today happens to still be available! Ciaté is a brand that is famous for its polish-a-day advent calendars that come out every holiday, which I have to force myself NOT to buy. But when confronted with a selection of cute, bow-adorned Ciaté polishes while I was at the TK Maxx in Inverness, I had to take advantage of the wonderfully discounted price. They had a beautiful, light green and this lovely cotton candy blue, Ferris Wheel. I kind of wish I had gotten the green, too, because I cannot find anything resembling it on their website anymore (I think it was Apple and Custard). Sad times. Don’t let weighing your luggage down get in the way of a polish purchase, take this from the pro who regrets not buying MORE polish abroad (and I did buy quite a lot). I do not have to add this polish to my list of regrets, thankfully. Read on to see it in action.

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First Impressions: Collection Long Lasting Nail Effects

Collection Peacock, 2 coats plus Seche Vite

Hello friends, and welcome to another episode of how in the heckin’ heck do you hold this dadgam bottle. Seriously, do not pay attention to the way I am holding the bottle picture-to-picture because the inconsistency is truly astounding. I am not going to blame Collection for that, though, because this polish is stunning. This is my first (and only) Collection polish and I really wish I had picked up more. Maybe none of the other colors are this amazing. Definitely not true, Cosmic Stars and Touch of Glamour look b-e-a-utiful! I think this is the second blue-green polish called Peacock that I picked up while in the UK and it’s definitely my favorite of the two (no offense to Seventeen, I thoroughly enjoyed wearing that one). Pictures cannot accurately convey the beauty of this polish, but we’re going to look at some anyway.

First Impressions: YSL La Laque Couture

YSL Rouge d’Or, 2 coats plus top coat

I have this thing about spending money on nail polish… I just cannot bring myself to buy a polish that is over $10 a bottle. It doesn’t matter what size the bottle is, but $10 is my limit for a single vessel of polish. For this reason, I have very few higher-end polishes in my collection. Luckily, discount beauty stores exist and scrounging around in them landed me this bottle of YSL polish. Rouge d’Or is a delightful orangey, coral-y red filled with a fine gold shimmer. If you’ve been following me a while, you might know that orange + gold is one of my major weaknesses!

First Impressions: Maybelline Super Stay 7 Days Gel Nail Color

Maybelline Surreal, 2 coats plus Sally Hansen Insta-Dri (more like Insta-Bubble)

The only Maybelline nail polish I had ever seen before stepping out of the country was the Color Show line (which I have strangely never tried). I randomly saw this polish at Superdrug and decided I should grab it, even though there was a chance I would be able to find it at home in the US. Good job I got a bottle because I have not seen these anywhere, and believe me, I have been on the look out (did I sound too much like Trump there with the “believe me”? yikes…). Maybelline’s very long-named Super Stay 7 Days Gel Nail Color is, surprise, not an actual gel polish. It is one of those “gel-like” polishes every brand these days feels compelled to make. They claim seven days of no chips, as long as you do top coat touch ups. Hmmm, okay. I don’t do wear tests, so what you’re going to see is an application review. Not even concrete could last seven days on my nails!

First Impressions: Deborah Lippmann Hard Rock Base and Top Coat

When I first got into nail polish many years ago, I bought myself a bottle of Sally Hansen Double Duty Base & Top Coat. It worked okay for the first couple uses, but eventually it started to really suck as a top coat; the dry time was horrendous and I would often end up ditching a manicure the day after putting it on. That experience pretty much turned me off of two-in-one polish treatments forever. Flash forward to last Christmas, when I received the Deborah Lippmann Her Majesty gift set. It included a little bottle of their Hard Rock Base and Top Coat. I was surprised to see a primo brand like Deborah Lippmann carrying a two-in-one type product, especially for a $20 price tag for the full-size bottle. I have been both skeptical of and intrigued by this treatment that has been sitting on my desk for months. I finally decided I would give it a go and use it as intended, as a base and top coat for one of my manicures, with the hopes that it would change my opinion on two-in-one treatments.

First Impressions: Miss Sporty Clubbing Color

Miss Sporty 160, 2 coats plus Seche Vite

I am still catching up with all the polish I bought last July in the UK! But I’m sure you are okay with that, as it spreads out the first impressions blog posts; I would not want to end up in a situation where I have five of these in a row, especially because I have SO MANY other blog posts planned for you guys! But I will admit, this is my favorite little series here because it gives me an excuse to keep trying out new nail polishes :] Today I am going to talk about a cute little bottle of Miss Sporty Clubbing Color nail polish that I grabbed a Superdrug. These teeny bottles of polishes came in a variety of fun, summery colors and of course I chose the one that was the most green. They claim a high-shine finish and and dry time of less than a minute!

First Impressions: Tsum Tsum Nail Polish

Tsum Tsum #friendship, 3 coats plus top coat

Marketers probably love me. I am a huge sucker for all the little things that have to do with my interests and favorite stories and characters. Present me with a Star Trek mug, Cheshire Cat stuffed animal, Loki bobble head, portrait of Richard III on a magnet, or a candle inspired by Outlander, and my money is gone faster than Usain Bolt. There is nothing I can say, no good excuse I can make, for the purchase of a super cheap little set of polishes adorned with Tsum Tsum-ified Disney characters except for the fact that I am a huge, self-aware sucker for Disney and nail polish. When you combine the two, I just cannot resist. I am choosing to share my experience with one of these polishes sort of as a cautionary tale and sort of so you know just the kind of person I am (which is the kind of person who knowingly buys nail polish made for kids that is certain to be lacking in quality). Anyway. I hope you enjoy a few minutes of judging me for my stupid decisions.

First Impressions: Seventeen Quicker Slicker Colour

Seventeen Quicker Slicker Colour Ruby Gem, two coats plus Seche Vite

I am still getting through all of the polishes that I got from my trip to the UK last year. I’m sure you are sick of hearing me mention that trip, as quite of few of my first impressions polishes were purchased during it, but you will have to get used to it because there will be a lot more coming! I stopped in at multiple Superdrugs and Boots (how do you pluralize the word “Boots?” Bootses?) and picked at least one polish from every brand I saw that I had not seen before in the US. My mother actually spotted this lovely red from Seventeen for me and decided I was getting it, because thus far in the trip I had grabbed greens, teals, blues, purples, and one orange. Clearly I need to branch out more. Anyway, this juicy berry color is just my type of red. It has a little pink and a lot of richness. Yum. This polish line claims that it is “single coat,” “high shine,” and “touch dry in less than 50 seconds.” I will be giving you my experience and then noting whether it lives up to those claims!

First Impressions: Sonia Kashuk Nail Colour

Sonia Kashuk Grey Matter, 2 coats plus Seche Vite

Hi everyone! It’s time for me to share my first experience with a polish that has been sitting in my stash for way too long. I have definitely had this one since last year, probably the first half of last year. Woops. ManiGeek raved about Sonia Kashuk polishes sometime ago. The post was so memorable to me that when I accidentally stumbled across the display in Target, I had to pick up a couple bottles. Grey Matter is the first polish that caught my eye, a beautiful dark grey with a lot of purple tones. Naturally, it had to be the first Sonia Kashuk polish that I tried!

First Impressions: Whim Nail Lacquer

Whim Midnight Wink, 3 coats plus Seche Vite

One time I had to write an essay about photography and I was asked to defend one of two positions: that photography is biased or that photography represents the world as it truly is. I went with the former because any time you put a human being into the equation, any chance of something being unbiased goes out the window. People pick and choose their subjects, yadda yadda yadda, so forth and so on, you probably are not looking for a rehash of one of my subpar high school essays. My point here is this: photography is not always 100% accurate. I bring this up because all the photos you are going to see in this post make this polish by Whim Nail Lacquer look better than it actually was. In this case, I was not trying to mislead you, but my lighting set-up really liked this guy and my perhaps more pessimistic-inclined naked eye was seeing things that it did not like which the camera rendered non-existent. That’s a great note to begin on, isn’t it?