KBShimmer Vicious Circles

Press Sample

Today, the KBShimmer 2013 Fall Collection was officially announced!  Head over to Christy's blog to view the full announcement.  The new line won't be released until September 1st, but here are some swatches of one of the new polishes, Vicious Circles, which Christy was nice enough to send to me to preview for everyone.

Vicious Circles is described as "a blood red jelly loaded with silver holographic circles in two sizes, silver holographic hex glitters and holographic silver micro slices."  All pictures show three coats, which I followed by applying one coat of Gelous and one coat of Seche Vite.

I love the way the holographic circles look suspended in the jelly polish.  You will love this even if you're not a fan of bar glitter.  The micro slices are a very subtle touch to the overall look.  There is a generous amount of glitter in the polish, which was super easy to apply and the glitter spread evenly over the nail.  This shade, along with the rest of the new fall line will be available for purchase starting September 1st at the KBShimmer site.

*Polish sent for honest review.  Review contains only my personal opinions.*

KBShimmer Celebration Duo: The Grape Beyond and Would Jubilee It?

Press Sample

This month, KBShimmer is celebrating its 5th year in business!  In honor of this accomplishment, Christy has released 2 new polishes, The Grape Beyond and Would Jubilee It?, plus everything on the site is 20% until August 14th.  So not only are all the great polishes on sale, but so are the other great KBShimmer products like Christy's handmade soaps, bath bombs, sugar scrubs and more.  Christy sent along a few samples of her polishes for me to show everyone throughout the month of August.  Included was the Celebration Duo, which I'll be showing you today!  These two polishes are sold separately, but are meant to be paired together.  First up is The Grape Beyond, a matte purple polish with a slight turquoise shimmer.

It took only 2 coats for full coverage.  This is a really great shade of purple.  I don't find myself wearing matte polishes very often, but I really do love the matte look of this polish.  After I finished swatching the other samples Christy had sent, I found myself reaching for this to put back on.  I got several compliments this morning when I walked into work wearing it, even from friends who don't usually gravitate to matte finishes.

The turquoise shimmer is very strong in the bottle.  It is much more subtle on the nail, but you can still see it at close range.  And if you decide to top coat the polish, it brings out the shimmer even more, as you can see below.

The second polish is Would Jubilee It?, a great glitter topper that Christy describes as containing all of her favorite glitters: "circle glitters in fuchsia, aqua and silver, hex glitters in sapphire and turquoise, and micro slices in fuchsia, aqua and silver."  I layered one coat of Would You Jubilee It? over The Grape Beyond.  This is definitely loaded with glitter, so I applied a generous coat of Gelous before finishing it off with one coat of Seche Vite top coat.

This glitter would work great over a number of colors, like a bright turquoise or maybe a baby blue cream.  It really does compliment The Grape Beyond perfectly though.

You have until the 14th to take advantage of the anniversary sale on the KBShimmer site.  For international customers, check out the KBShimmer page at Harlow & Co., where KBShimmer is also on sale!  I'll have swatches of a few other KBShimmer polishes throughout the the week.  In the meantime, you can check out some posts from last year of a few KBShimmer polishes I purchased myself, Berry Patch and Orange-A-Peel.

*Polish sent for honest review.  Review contains only my personal opinions.*

Animal Print and Liquid Sand

I've been wanting to try some stamping onto texture polishes for a while now.  I see it online quite a bit and the texture always makes the stamped designs looks so interesting.  A few of the polishes from the OPI Bond Girls collection were still in my untried pile and they ended up being great bases for some designs I don't really do often...animal print.

I decided to start by wearing OPI Solitaire.  Once I had it on, zebra print immediately popped into my head.  The design used is off of one of the large Cheeky plates, Jumbo Plate 12, and I stamped using Konad Special Polish in black.  Solitaire went on very smoothly.  I used three coats total.  It took a little while to finish all three coats, but that's only because I waited as long as I could stand to wait between coats, to make sure the polish had dried as much as possible and that the texture was really set in.

Not only did the texture of the polish make the zebra print look pretty damn cool, I think the color was perfect for this.  Solitaire is white but not so in-your-face as a pure white polish.  It seemed to make the zebra print look more realistic.

I wore this mani for a week and then I decided to follow it up with leopard print, of course.  This time, the base color was OPI Honey Ryder.  3 coats total for Honey Ryder as well, but it dried much faster for me than Solitaire did.  The leopard print was from Konad plate m57.  I did a few test stamps first and thought stamping with black polish looked like too much of a contrast, and not really the look I was going for.  The Konad Special Polish in brown, however, stamped way too light over Honey Ryder and I didn't have any other brown polishes that would have worked well to stamp with.  I ended up experimenting and plopped a blob of brown Konad polish down next to the leopard design and then, mixing it with a toothpick, I added just a tiny drop of the black Konad polish.  Once they were mixed well, I used my scraper to push the polish to the edge of the leopard design and then scraped across like normal.  To finish the look, I filled in about half of the leopard spots with a little bit of OPI San Tan-Tonio.

It sounds a little time consuming...ok, really time consuming...but it honestly didn't add much time at all to my normal stamping routine.  And it was completely worth, because it was turned out exactly the way I had pictured it in my head.

I can't believe it took me so long to try zebra and leopard nails.  Actually, I did attempt leopard print nails once before, but it was this awkward combination of a sage green polish and black and brown leopard print that looked more camouflage than leopard in the end and...ya, let's just not go there.  This gold leopard print totally kicked that green leopard's ass.  ;)