Illamasqua Perseid

Hey everyone 🙂 how are you enjoying Blogmas? I’m definitely enjoying it more than I thought I would – forgot how good it feels to be blogging regularly! 😀

Illamasqua recently released quite an exciting limited edition collection: two nail polishes and two lipglosses, created by bloggers! The collection is called ‘#Creators‘. It was launched to celebrate 5 years of Illamasqua – Happy Birthday! 🙂

I was excited to see a very unique polish called ‘Perseid’, which means ‘an explosion of meteor showers’, created by StyleSuzi. I snapped it up as soon as I saw the bottle shot – in the bottle, it’s gorgeous…

This polish *is* very pretty. It’s a blackish-purple base, filled with green-blue shimmer, as well as tonnes of holo microglitter, and larger holographic lavender hexes. It appears very dark in most lights; the green shimmer is only really visible in direct light or sunlight. In theory, this is a pretty gorgeous polish. Unfortunately, its formula really, really lets it down. The polish is just too thick, occluding the glitter and just making it lumpy. After two attempts of Perseid alone that I just couldn’t photograph, I decided to layer one coat over another colour. In this instance I used one coat of Barry M Espresso Matte (a plain black matte polish), and then painted one THIN coat of Perseid over the top. So it didn’t come out toooo bad, certainly not as bad as a few layers of Perseid on it’s own, but I’m not really sold on this polish.

Application:

As far as the actual painting of the polish goes, it’s not too bad. Just make sure you paint quickly and in thin layers, and don’t go over the same place twice as it may drag. The polish isn’t too easy to control but nothing that can’t be sorted with cleanup. I would absolutely recommend layering over another colour instead of doing 2-3 layers of Perseid alone. It is virtually opaque at 1 coat but as soon as you start doing 2nd and 3rd layers the polish just hides the glitter and you end up with a very lumpy, not very sparkly polish. Dry time is average, however it does dry very rough and somewhat dull. The dullness will go away with 1 coat of topcoat, but the bumpyness does persevere – the photos show 3 coats of topcoat, and it’s still not totally smooth. If you do use this polish, I strongly recommend using a thick topcoat such as Gelous, as Revlon Quick Dry just can’t cope with it.

Despite all this, it is a very pretty polish, but I think next time I wear it will be as an accent nail, or something similar! I am sad to write a negative review, but I know I’m not the only person who’s had these issues and I’d rather write an honest one than anybody go out and buy it on my say-so only to hate it! I do like having the bottle to look at though 😉

Perseid is available from Illamasqua for £14.50 – they have free shipping worldwide 🙂