Imagination In Colour UK Nail Polish Blog

Day 10 of the 30 Days of Untrieds Challenge: gradient nails. (I know, I know, I’m soo behind! I’ve been doing job interviews so at least I have an excuse!)

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After seeing the GOSH press release posted on Liloo’s lovely blog, I dashed out to my Superdrug on the off chance they were already stocking the beautiful looking new polishes. I was in luck – they already had four of the six new polishes – Galaxy, Spot On! Pink, Lazy Green and With A Twist. I picked up the first two – khaki greens and taupes don’t often grab me.

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Splish Splash is one of the recent Spring/Summer 2012 releases from GOSH, which are always Limited Edition but often tend to stick around for an extra season. I’ve been umm-ing and ahh-ing over this polish for a good few weeks now, every time I went into Superdrug I just wasn’t sure I was feeling ‘creme’ enough to buy it. Am I glad I did? YES! This is pretty much the green counterpart for Boots 17 Wave - Splish Splash is the most gorgeous vintage green colour, a very elegant polish which personally I think will look good on any skin tone.

Splish Splash is just so pretty, I really really love it. It has that elegance about it that makes it stand out in my collection of cremes, I’m a huge fan. I don’t really know what shade of green it is, somewhere between green and teal, not quite sure really.

Application:

Splish Splash was pretty much opaque at 1 coat, although the pictures are all 2 coats because I might have accidentally dented my index finger. It dried quickly, and dried to a nice high shine too. I pretty much have no complaints whatsoever about this one! The only thing I did notice was that the polish dries a shade darker than the bottle colour, so beware of that before you buy it! It’s not a huge difference, and like I said, I think this will go with pretty much all skin tones!

Have you tried any of the other GOSH SS12 polishes? I’m not totally sure about the other two – one is a orangey-brown colour with orange shimmer, and the other looks like a slightly lighter Oh My GOSH Nude Champagne packed with silver shimmer to me! I may well end up picking them up at some point, it’s nice to see that GOSH isn’t just jumping on the trendy shades bandwagon and is actually coming up with new and interesting shades. I did notice that there are only three special edition  polishes this time round, while in the past there have been four. Unless my Superdrugs are just rubbish at stocking up, which is equally possible!

Let me know if you’ve blogged about either of the other two, I’d love to see pictures!

x

Disclaimer: Everything mentioned in this blog post was either bought by myself with my own money, or given to me as a gift from friends/relatives. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Sooo… I’ve always been one of those ‘oglers-from-afar’ when it comes to American nail polish brands (purely because of the price), I usually pick out my favourites, put them on a wishlist then realise the wishlist total comes to £100+ and think “Oh my God, step away from the laptop Emma, put your debit card DOWN!”. So it’s quite rarely that I actually buy more than one polish from a collection, and if I do so, it’s usually long after I’ve seen the collection. But then OPI came up with the wonderful glitters of the Muppets Collection and I am on such a glitter kick that of course, I had to have them! That and the fact that ASOS had a 25% for students day meant that I simply couldn’t resist. I bought three of the six glitters in the collection, the first of these being Rainbow Connection.

I wanted to not only show you Rainbow Connection but also what it looks like layered over different polishes. So here we go lots of pics btw, hope I don’t crash your browsers!

Click on the pictures to enlarge!

1 coat of Rainbow Connection over 2 coats Ciaté My Fair Lady

2 coats Rainbow Connection over 2 coats My Fair Lady

So hopefully these pictures give you an idea of how the polish looks alone. As far as I can work out, there are 6 colours involved: orange, yellow, turquoisey-blue, green, red-violet, and silver. There are 2 types of glitter involved – small hexagonal glitter and large hexagonal glitter. It’s important to be aware that this larger glitter doesn’t always lie flat and can catch on things, which is why, every time I’ve worn this, I’ve worn a generous coat of topcoat.

Black: Rimmel Black Cab. White: Barry M Matt White.

Index and middle fingers are both 1 coat of Rainbow Connection over 2 coats of the base colour. Ring and pinkie fingers are both 2 coats of Rainbow Connection over 2 coats of the base colour.

I looooove how it looks on the middle finger!

The coloured glitter really ‘pops’ when layered over the bold black and white – I love this combination, particularly over black.

Thumb to pinkie finger (base colours): Boots 17 Fury, Barry M Spring Green, Barry M Yellow, Missguided Misstaken, Eyeko Saucy Polish.

All shown with 1 coat of Rainbow Connection over 2 coats of base colour.

Thumb to pinkie finger (base colours): Barry M Cyan Blue, GOSH Attitude, Barry M Bright Purple, Boots 17 Pink Grapefruit, Rimmel Your Majesty.

All shown with 1 coat of Rainbow Connection over 2 coats of base colour.

I don’t know about you guys, but I definitely prefer Rainbow Connection over black, white, dark blue, gold, or silver. Somehow the rest just don’t do it for me, but I hope I’ve helped someone in doing this I did notice, just by the way, that Rainbow Connection does look a lot better over shimmer polishes than it does over cremes, so maybe I’ll do another post on that soon!

I have to say… there’s something about this one that makes me think ‘treasure trove’! I’m not so keen on Fury on its own as it clashes with my skin a bit, but paired with Rainbow Connection it looks ah-may-zing!

Application:  Rainbow Connection itself is those six different colours of glitter (and 2 different sizes) suspended in a clear base. The glitter is rather sparse, but in my opinion, that makes for a rather good layering glitter it was quite easy to push the glitter into place if you’re that way inclined, but it does give a fairly even spread of glitter. I have no idea how many coats it would take to make it opaque  It did require quite a thick coat of topcoat to ensure that the larger pieces of glitter weren’t semi-attached and ready to cling onto any loose material it could get hold of. The polish dried quickly so the topcoat requirement wasn’t a problem. I did notice that without the top coat, the clear base seemed to dull the glitter almost, and the topcoat certainly brought it to life!

Now I know that this is VERY similar to Deborah Lippmann’s Happy Birthday, some bloggers go so far as to say they are dupes, but after careful research on Google I discovered this wonderful Happy Birthday vs Rainbow Connection comparison. So for those of you who are wondering, the general consensus is that they are not dupes – the hexagonal glitter in Happy Birthday is considerably smaller than in Rainbow Connection.

This one will be PERFECT for the party season! I personally loooooooove this polish to bits, and I have had so many compliments on it at university. People have started paying attention to the fact that my nails are different practically every day – haha! Sorry this is a bit of a long, wordy post, I just seem to have so much to say!

Also, kudos to ASOS Customer Services – at the checkout I was only given 20% off but they refunded me the extra 5% off within 2 days of my order!

Hope you are all doing well my lovelies, give me your thoughts on Rainbow Connection!

Emma x

Disclaimer: Everything mentioned in this blog post was either bought by myself with my own money, or given to me as a gift from friends/relatives. All opinions expressed here are my own.

So everyone knows that GOSH Holographic can be a pain for never lasting more than a day. I want to first make you all aware that this wasn’t true inspiration on my part – I read a wonderful blog post here by the Polish Insomniac – she did a topcoat sandwich which is slightly different to my technique but may well have the very same effect so yeah 99% credit due to the Polish Insomniac!

So basically, here we have 4 coats of GOSH Holographic sandwiched between 4 coats of basecoat and 1 coat of topcoat, making 9 whole coats total. You may read this and think it’s a complete waste of time but if you want the lovely holo polish to last a couple of days it’s worth it!!

The reason I decided to use basecoat rather than topcoat (as the Polish Insomniac did) was because I’ve always heard that basecoat tends to help to stick polish down to the nail, I don’t know how true this is but it seems to make sense.

Here is what I used:

First, I put 1 coat of basecoat on my bare nail. This brand of basecoat dries super fast so I didn’t have to wait long to put on my first coat of Holographic. At 1 coat, it was very patchy. Once that was dry, I put on another coat of basecoat, then Holographic, then basecoat and so on, until my nail was opaque. I then put 1 coat of topcoat over the final coat of Holographic, to finish off.

I have two things to flag up with this polish and this technique.

The first is that GOSH Holographic drags like no other polish… even when the coats beneath are totally dry. I found the best technique was to literally just slap it on and don’t go over any point on the nail twice because that will cause a drag. I also found that while this caused a few undesirable lumps and bumps, the coats of basecoat and topcoat evened out the nail so it was totally flat, so that was good See on this hideous picture of my thumb nail at 3 coats of Holographic, I still had drag marks:

The second issue is that when I’d put the topcoat on all my fingernails at the very end (I didn’t put topcoat on my thumb nail for the sake of comparing), I noticed that while it gave a weird and quite lovely dimension to each nail (almost like it had a layer of water over it) it did kind of take away from the holographic effect of the polish, and in some lights the polish just looked like a cloudy blue-silver colour. This picture doesn’t really demonstrate this but you can see that the thumb nail reflects a lot more holographic-ness than my fingernails:

I mean it’s not too bad and the nails still have the holographic effect, and I presume that the topcoat increases staying-power on the nails, but I didn’t notice any difference between the lasting-power of my finger nails and thumb nail so… up to you guys

So I really hope this helps someone, I don’t tend to wear my polish for more than 2 days usually but I know a lot of people do, so hopefully this will be of use. I also wanted to mention that the whole process is quite quick because the basecoat I use (Rimmel Stronger Double Duty) dries very quickly, as does GOSH Holographic and indeed the topcoat I used. So all in all I think it took me 45mins to 1hr, including drying-time.

Another thing you could try is tip-wrapping, but I’ve never mastered the art of this so I’ll leave you with this link on how to do it!

GOSH Holographic is a fabulous polish, it’s such a shame it was discontinued but I managed to find mine a few months back in a little Superdrug in my town, so keep looking for it I don’t quite know why it’s so ‘desirable’ that people spend £20+ on it on eBay as a fair few other polish brands (Nubar, China Glaze, Nfu-Oh, among others) do silver holos that are more or less the same as far as I can see but there we go!

Hope you are all doing well chickies, I went for a wonderful manicure yesterday and my nails look fabulous, but I will do a blog post on that soon

Emma x

Disclaimer: Everything mentioned in this blog post was either bought by myself with my own money, or given to me as a gift from friends/relatives. All opinions expressed here are my own.