Barielle Holiday Hustle Collection for Winter/Holiday 2010

I was at Costco this week and noticed that they had already taken down the Halloween decoration aisle and put up the Christmas decoration aisle! It's September! I've never seen them do that before. I feel like I'm being rushed! Luckily that is not the case with Holiday polish collections... I'm the opposite with those- I want them in June! Ha!

Here's Barielle's Holiday offering:


Coaldest Day Of The Year. Yes, Coal-dest. I know. *groan* I think it wants to be OPI's Baby It's "Coal" Outside, from the looks of things. This is a black/charcoal with blue-toned silver large particle shimmer. It's not round shimmer, it's more like broken pieces of shimmer. Icy.



Elle's Spell. My favorite of the collection. This is a dark candy apple or light wine red sheer base with red/orange toned opal flakes, a la Nfu Oh. This is rather sheer and not quite as jelly like as I had thought from looking at it in the bottle so it may look better layered if you want a stronger flaky effect.


Get Me To The Party. A deep bronzy gold. Looks sort of duochrome, doesn't it? Has the lighter gold area in the center and the deeper more bronze color on the edges. A little frosty but more metallic than pure frost, but definitely not chrome.



Jess' Champagne Toast. This one is painful. Look how AMAZING it looks in the bottle! It's spectacular! I could barely believe what I was seeing when I held the bottle up in the sunlight. It's a periwinkle leaning toward light lilac frosty metallic base with lots of pink microglitter. Sadly, it doesn't translate on the nail. It looks lumpy and bubbly because the frost base is too, well, frosty? And the glitter is too delicate to be seen through the thick frost. It always makes me wonder when I see a polish like this.... Did they actually wear the color on the nail before they decided to release it? This totally could have been saved with a thinner, more sheer metallic base!


Snow Day. This one is more like a chrome. It's a super reflective metallic blue-toned silver. Very blue toned... Maybe it's actually a silvery blue! Ha! But yes, you will need to be careful with brushstrokes. Frosty.


Wrap Me In Ribbon. This does remind me of ribbon. Pretty. It's a mauve metallic frost, again not a plain frost but more of the China Glaze Romantique Chrome reflective type of frost. You can see how reflective it is in the picture but you can also see some brush strokes.

The formula on these was odd. Elle's Spell and Coaldest Day Of The Year were really thick and a little goopy but the rest of the colors were oddly... soft feeling? I can't even describe it. It's like they're oily or too soft or maybe airy? Know what I'm talking about? They feel strange going on. Maybe it's the too-soft brush. I'm really not digging Barielle's brush lately, it doesn't conform to my nail and I can never get a nice application with it. Drying time is long.


I don't know what to say about this collection. I like some of the colors like Elle's Spell and Get Me To The Party. It just seems like Barielle is making so many frosts lately. I miss the Barielle I fell in love with in 2008.

(These were sent to me for review.)

BB Couture For Nails Infamous Lovers Collection 2010: The Ladies

BB Couture once again creates some amazing unique green polishes. I'm thinking they have more greens in their line than any other brand I know... Am I right? Take a look at these:


Bonnie. Wow. Now THIS is a green. It's a midtone green jelly with BB Couture's signature tiny gold and green glitter. It is quite a bit like BB Couture Redwood Forest, but Bonnie seems brighter, a little lighter and has slightly more of a yellow tone. Here's a hideous mani I did with Bonnie as the base that shows the color a little truer because of the flash:

I know... My Funky French turned out to be more of a Fugly French... But, uh, try to ignore that part and you'll see what a great shade of green Bonnie is.



Carla. A super dark purple shimmer. How gorgeous is this? It's vampy purple and I love it. Lots of multicolored shimmer when the light hits it. More red-toned in real life. Great for fall. Amazing application, too.

Cleopatra. This one was really hard to photograph. This picture isn't quite true to life so I'll try to explain how it really looks. It's a blue-green base, you can see the green tone visible in the bottom of the photo, left hand side. But, instead of having just plain shimmer it has this crazy blue duochrome shimmer and lots of it. It sits on top of the color so you're seeing both the green and the blue fighting for attention. It's little bit like BB Couture For Men Pipe Bender in that aspect- the base and the shimmer fighting for attention, blue on green... Very cool effect.


Eve. Oh man, can you believe this? First Bonnie, now Eve? Can't get over how cool this is. It's a murky dark olive green base with red pearl duochrome and it's full of that pretty BB Couture tiny iridescent glitter. Reminds me of Nubar's Gem and Jewel, how there's that pearl duochrome base filled with glitter. Except this one is more iridescent green-gold than holographic like the Nubar ones.

Juliet. This is an odd one. It's somewhere between rose and nude, a creme base, but with speckles of black and silver microglitter. Very unique. One one hand it's cool because it looks like stone, like granite or even a little bit like a Corian countertop. On the other hand, the black glitter is so sparse that it almost looks like it's not supposed to be there- like you accidentally got ash or mascara flakes or Oreo crumbs on your nails while they were wet. I'm 50/50 on this one, cool but odd.


Pocahontas. Like Juliet, this is a creme base sprinkled with black and silver microglitter. The base color of this is the ever-present purple/grey combo, which, despite seeing 343907 polishes this color being released in the past four years, I'm still not sick of seeing. The speckles aren't as prominent in this one.


The formula on these was quite good. Easy application. I did three coats of each color and all but Carla seemed to need the third coat. No flaws in the brushes or bottles. Drying time was slightly longer than average.

There's supposed to be a set of BB Couture for Men polishes that go along with these, but I have not seen them. I kinda like that idea, though... A line of women for women, a line of men for men? Cute concept.

I'm digging this collection. Eve and Bonnie are my favorites and Carla is great too. But really, Eve and Bonnie... wow. Awesome. Keep making these awesome sparkly greens, BB Couture! We're happy that you do!

(These were sent to me for review.)

Essie Fall 2010 Collection

Fall is almost here... I'm getting excited! These colors are super appropriate for fall.


In Stitches. This is a medium rose mauve creme. Soft, muted, maybe even a little... dated. My mom had carpet and some decorations this color when I was growing up, so it brings back happy memories, but I can't say it's really modern looking! It's along the lines of Eyeko Tea Rose Polish or Diamond Cosmetics Smoky Rose to give you something to compare it to.

Limited Addiction. Super dramatic glossy sexy blue-based red creme. Wow. It is very rare for me to pick a red as my favorite color in a collection, but this is just too gorgeous. It's sort of a cherry red bordering on blood red. A little darker and deeper than the reds I tend to like, but it's so striking and bold that it was love at first sight. It's a creme, but it has that deep, glassy jelly look, though I can't call it a true jelly. My pictures don't do this justice, you have to see this one in person. Smoking hot.

Merino Cool. Purple-grey. This seems to be the new 'it' color and frankly, that's a-okay with me cause I love these types of colors. This isn't totally unique but it's still beautiful. It looks darker in my picture than it seems in real life and I'm not sure why because sunlight usually has the opposite effect on my pictures. It's a little like OPI Parlez-Vous OPI or Confetti Moonstruck.


Sew Psyched. Muted grey-green with very subtle silver shimmer. Almost a secret shimmer, lends a softened and almost dusty finish to the polish. This seems really similar to Rescue Beauty Lounge Diddy Mow, but I haven't taken out my bottle to compare. If you're looking for a cheaper alternative, though, this would do nicely.

Little Brown Dress. Deep, dark coffee brown creme. Glorious. Super dark and vampy. A little different than plain black- though this isn't quite as dark as pure black. It's not as dark as Lippmann Maneater but it's darker than Essie Chocolate Kisses. A little closer to Zoya Angelina but a bit lighter. I love this color for fall, dark chocolate goodness!


Velvet Voyeur. Very dark purple creme. This is almost what I'd consider to be eggplant, but it's a little redder than true eggplant. It's a dark purple wine or perhaps a brown-toned purple. Very dark at two coats but quite different looking at only one coat. If you can apply this carefully enough at one coat you'll get two totally different looks out of it. I was sloppy so I did two here and it's near-black but still purple. Mmm, vampy.

The formula on these was excellent. Lately Essie's formula seems to be getting thinner and thinner, almost too watery, but the texture of these is back to normal. Thin-medium. I find the thicker formula of these much easier to control, especially combined with the thin brushes (which are also back to normal, not super thin like last fall/winter). I had no problems applying these at all. The only one that wasn't perfect was Merino Cool which seemed runny and thinner than the others so I had to do three coats. All the rest are two coats, no basecoat, no topcoat. Very rich and pigmented.

I'm digging this collection. It is perfectly 'fall'. The only color I'm not in love with is In Stitches, but the rest are perfect. Not extremely exciting or super unique, but they're all colors I love wearing and they're all really pretty. I love the drama in this collection- lots of vampy and dramatic shades- blood red, eggplant, dark coffee... Then you have the ever-popular grey/purple shade and a muted green, seeing more and more of these lately but that's fine with me! No complaints here, formula and colors are both making me happy. In fact, I'm about to go put on Limited Addiction...

(These were sent to me for review.)