Nine Realms by Crowstoes : Huginn and Muninn

Hello Ladies! Tonight I have a real treat of a polish to share with you, from a collection that is one of my absolute favourites of 2014 and in fact, ever.  There are two standout collections for me this year - the Picture Polish LE duochromes, and the 9 Realms collection by Crowstoes.  As a brand, Crowstoes stand head and shoulders above the rest for me.  The creativity behind each collection is just on a whole other level, so any new collection is something to get excited about, and boy did I get excited about this one!   Over the next few posts I'll be sharing with you all the polishes I picked up, and I'm starting with my favourite: Huginn and Muninn.

Art Credit: Jarnsaxe@DeviantArt

The 9 Realms collection is inspired by Norse mythology. In Norse legend, Huginn ('thought') and Muninn ('memory') are the raven avatars of the god Odin, they flew throughout the world and brought knowledge back to Odin.  The polish of the same name is a stunning multichrome in shades of royal purple, forest green and earthy brown:

Huginn and Muninn by Crowstoes - 9 Realms - natural light (shade)

Pictured here I'm wearing two thin coats over black, but from swatches I've seen you can achieve the same effect with three coats and no undies. The colour combination on this is strikingly beautiful, and quite unlike any other multichrome in my collection.  The green and purple complement each other beautifully, and the combination really drew to my mind the image of a mystical forest with dark green shade and purple autumn leaves, and the beady eye of a raven peering out from the canopy:

Art Credit: Ninjatic@DeviantArt

The multichrome effect is most apparent in natural light and shade.  Under artificial lighting one colour tends to dominate, depending on the direction of the light relative to the nail surface:

Upper Row and Lower Left: Artificial light, Lower right: natural light (shade)

In the swatch above you can see the gorgeous royal purple, the golden brown and green transitional shade, and the rich emerald.  In the lower right corner is a swatch taken in natural light and you can see the purple and green clearly together on the nail. In artificial lighting, at direct angles (ie most of the time) it's the purple shade that dominates, with the green appearing at higher angles/along the curved nail edge.

Huginn and Muninn by Crowstoes - 9 Realms - artificial light

This swatch captures the closeup detail of the two main colours at the opposing ends of the multichrome spectrum.  In the purple you can clearly see royal blue and magenta shimmer, and the green is a combination of forest green, teal and gold.  Quite how they managed to pack so much depth into one polish is a mystery to me.  I couldn't love this polish more, it's utter perfection.

Huginn and Muninn by Crowstoes - 9 Realms - natural light

I can confidently say that Huginn and Muninn will make it into my top 3 polishes for the year 2014. It has as sold out faster than any of the other 9 Realms shades but is not LE so keep your eyes peeled for restocks.  I picked mine up from Rainbow Connection for £10.25.

Briarwood - by A-England

Hello ladies! Tonight we have the second instalment of the A-England swatchathon (if three polishes can count as a 'thon ;) of anything). Tonight polish is the much belated post of Briarwood, collection mate to the fabulous Rose Bower and Briar Rose from the amazing 2013 Burne-Jones collection.  The collection takes its inspiration from the four paintings of The Briar Rose series created by Sir Edward Burne-Jones depicting the fairy tale of the Sleeping Beauty.

Briarwood - A-England - full sunlight

I'm wearing two easy coats here, with SV topcoat and NE base.  As ever the quality, application and finish are flawless from A-England.  This is a gorgeous complex shade, I'm going to call it reddened brown, and its perfect for Autumn.  I'm surprised it has taken me this long to blog this shade because it was definitely in my top 5 polishes for 2013.  I love love love it!

Briarwood - A-England - natural light

This is still one of my top pick polishes, it's really unusual and the holo finish is just so pretty with this shade.  I can't recommend it highly enough.  I loved this whole collection, but Briarwood is definitely the star of the bunch.

You can Buy direct from A-England at http://a-england.co.uk/  RRP is £9 but I got mine on offer for a bargain-a-licous £6, and P&P is free.  Keep an eye out for A-England offers, its a great way to stock your A-England stash :)

How Great is Your Dane? OPI Nordic Collection

Hello lovelies :) Today I have a polish from this year's "Nordic" Fall collection by OPI - How Great is Your Dane? Pictured here I'm wearing three coats with NE base and Essie Good to Go to top it off.  This would have been fine with an easy two coats, but I'm a spaz and made a mess that needed a second coat to fix.

This chocolaty beauty is a silky smooth crème with a colour that's tricky to describe, it is predominantly brown but with strong grey tones.  I'm not sure exactly what I'd call it, a cool-toned brown? Chocolate Clay? I'm not sure, so I'll stick with gorgeous. The tone is super flattering, and the overall effect is very elegant.

 

In the bottle this looks like a pale brown, close to the colour of the milk in your coco-pops, but on the nail is comes out darker and with more of a wet-clay effect.  It's definitely one of those polishes that looks a lot nicer on the nail than you'd guess from the bottle.  I'm in love. I'm still a relatively nude newbie, I had no idea that I would like shades like this so much on the nail.  I feel like such a grown up.

Formula is the usual high quality you'd expect from OPI, no issues to report there.  The brush seemed shorter to me than I expect from OPI - have they changed that? I haven't heard any word on the grapevine about a change to the pro-wide.  Perhaps I'm imagining things, sometimes the fumes get to me...

Revlon Parfumerie - Autumn Spice

Hello Ladies! This week's nail news - The Revlon 'Parfumerie' collection of scented nail polishes is now available in the UK!  They were released at the end of last month, and are available in Boots and at larger Revlon counters.  Today's post is the one I've been most excited to get - Autumn Spice.  Pictured here I'm wearing two coats atop NE base, and with two coats of HK girl top coat.

Revlon Autumn Spice - artificial light

Autumn Spice is a toasty warm brown foil finish packed with gold and russet toned flecks and a hint of pink.  It's an interesting shade all on its own, so the fact that it's also scented just adds to the fun.  I was really intrigued by the idea of scented polish, these have been around before, and its definitely a gimmick that won't last, but I do love a good nail polish gimmick...

So what's with the smell thing? In the bottle, there is no evidence of any smell other than the usual nail polish smell.  On the nail, when it dries, this polish smelled exactly like a Starbucks Gingerbread Latte.  A sweet, yummy, spicy smell that suits the colour perfectly and made me fancy a coffee the whole damn day.  It smelled just as strongly underneath two layers of topcoat (I used two because the foil finish meant I didn't get quite the gloss I liked with just one coat).  The strength of the smell was about at the level of a scented hand cream - I could smell it faintly all the time, and strongly whenever my hands were near my face.  After a few hours that got annoying.  BUT within 24 hours the smell was very faint, and unrecognisable.  It had a vaguely floral, plasticine smell that wasn't spicy at all.

Revlon Autumn Spice - artificial light

So, the smell is a bit annoying, and doesn't last long at all.  I also had massive tip-wear and small chips within 24 hours, so I think that the wear time and smell time are probably comparable.  The biggest problem I had with this polish was on removal.  The gritty foil took a bit of scrubbing to remove, but the polish stained my nails a gross nicotine brown when I removed it.  It took a lot of scrubbing with a nail brush to sort that one out.

The bottles look cute, and Revlon have gone for a vintage feel that I really like, but the brush is very annoying.  That bulb shaped top isn't easy to grip, but the brush head itself is really thin which makes application fiddly.  The formula was fine, a bit dry like all foils tend to be, but nice and opaque in two coats.  I loved the colour when it was on, it's perfect for Autumn.  Even though the smell element to this polish is a bit of a gimmick the shade is interesting enough all on its own to be worth a look.



Revlon Autumn Spice - artificial light

The polishes retail for £6.49, and Boots has them on 3 for 2 at the moment.  Given that you can get OPI online for that kind of money I'm not overly impressed.  This is a really pretty shade, but the brush was a pain, the smell was a bit annoying (and short lived) and it was icky on removal.  So overall I'm not very impressed.  I have another two of these (Wintergreen and Bordeaux) so I'll reserve judgement until I've tried those too.

Have you tried these? What did you think?

Picture Polish Solar Flare

Hello Ladies! I've got something very special to share with you today..."Solar Flare" by Picture Polish.  This is one of the recent Limited Editions that Picture Polish released in a frenzy of smart marketing. They generated so much hype in the build up to their release that these sold out almost immediately.  Luckily I managed to get my hands on most of them so I'll be sharing them with you over the next few posts...

Picture Polish Solar Flare - artificial light

Solar Flare is a Russet-Gold duochrome polish with a dusty holo finish and scattered shards of sparkly holo particles.  It's astonishingly beautiful. As a duochrome the shift is quite subtle, the polish does have a dramatic colour range, from a russet brown through to an olive gold, but the colours don't appear on the nail simultaneously - it looks one colour all of the time, but that colour changes.  Most of the time the dominant colour is the russet brown seen in the top left picture above.  Each of the three colours are absolutely gorgeous and the scatter holo and dusty finish is stunning. 



Solar Flare - this russet brown shade is the dominant colour on nail 

In these pictures I'm wearing two coats of Solar Flare on top of two coats of 'Just Black' by No7.  Using a black undercoat on any duochrome polish really makes the colour shift pop.  I also have NE base and HK Girl topcoat to finish this off.


Solar Flare - the gold shade pops at more extreme angles relative to the light source

I'm absolutely in love with this polish.  Application is flawless, and the finish is just incredible.  It dries naturally as glossy looking as the HK topcoat you see here, but I added topcoat to extend the wear time.

The finish really reminds me of an A-England polish with extra scatter holo shards I did a quick in-bottle comparison of Solar Flare with a couple of my favourite A-England polishes; Briar Rose and Briarwood.



top (l-r): A-England Briar Rose, Picture Polish Solar Flare, A-England Briarwood
bottom (l-r): Picture Polish Solar Flare, A-England Briarwood

The dominant shade in the Solar Flare looks to me like a cross between Briar Rose and Briarwood, although of the two I think it's most similar to Briarwood.  The A-Englands are two of my favourite polishes, so having Solar Flare embody them both, PLUS be a duochrome, PLUS have the big sparkly scatter chrome particles is almost too much excitement for me to handle.

This polish is utter amazeballs.  I can't recommend it highly enough.  And if you think this is swatch porn just wait till you see collection-mate Aurora....

I bought my bottle of Solar Flare from the lovely Sally Magpies for £13.50 (link to the shop is on my suppliers page).  These shades should be getting a restock soon, so keep an eye out.....


Muir Muir by OPI

Hello ladies :) Today's mani post is 'Muir Muir' by OPI from their San Francisco Fall 2013 collection.  This is another polish that made it onto a lot of bloggers 'Best Of 2013' lists so I was eager to try it.  I don't actually own this one, my mum does, so I painted my nails at her house and grabbed a pic on my camera phone so apologies for the crappy quality...

Pictured here are two coats with NE base and SV topper.  Photographed in natural indirect lighting - which is important because I think most people's swatches are in artificial lighting which as we all know can make a polish look fancier than it will look on nail 90% of the time.

Muir Muir by OPI - natural indirect lighting

This polish was an overwhelming 'meh' for me.  As this swatch shows, most of the time this just looked brown - and although brown can be fabulous (hello 'Germanicure') this one is just a dusty forgettable brown for me.  In some lighting you can see the evidence of that warm burgundy undertone that made me think of the likes of Germanicure/Every Month is Oktoberfest when I first saw the swatches, but I can say that this polish is nowhere near as exciting as either of those.

All in all I'm glad I didn't splash out on this one.  In fact I don't own any of the SF collection yet, a lot of them looked like a case of the same ol' same ol' from OPI.  Perhaps they used up all their Fall mojo on the incredible 2012 Germany collection?

Comparison: OPI Germanicure, Every Month is Oktoberfest and Chanel Malice

Today's post is a comparison of some of my absolute favourite polishes from 2012, and actually these might be some of my favourites ever: Chanel Malice, and two from OPI - Germanicure and Every Month is Oktoberfest.  I've been meaning to dupe test these for a while, and you can see from this bottle shot why I thought they'd be pretty similar....

L:R - Chanel Malice, OPI Every Month Is Oktoberfest, OPI Germanicure - sunlight

Malice was the limited edition Christmas release for 2012 from Chanel.  The OPI polishes - Every Month is Oktoberfest (EMIO) and Germanicure are part of the Fall 2012 'Germany' collection.  The Germany collection is my favourite OPI collection since the legendary Russia Fall collection in 2007.  I'm definately a Fall/Winter shades kind of girl, I much prefer vampy juicy Fall colours to insipid Spring pastels and these three polishes are right up my alley.

There is significant debate online about the similarity between the two OPI shades.  Germanicure has also been touted as a dupe for the HTF Malice.  So...on with the comparison!



Chanel Malice (index finger), OPI Every Month Is Oktoberfest (middle), OPI Germanicure (ring finger) - sunlight

Immediately you can see that these couldn't be more different.  Malice is a lush blackened burgandy with incredible shimmer, EMOI has an inky violet base with golden fiery shimmer and Germanicure has a dusky brown base with golden fiery shimmer.  The in-bottle similarity of the OPI's I think is because the shimmer particles look the same to me, and its the base colour that differs.

Chanel Malice (index), OPI Every Month Is Oktoberfest (middle), OPI Germanicure (ring) - articifial light

Pictured here I'm wearing one coat of Nail Envy as base, and two coats of each colour, with no top coat.  These polishes are beautifully glossy on their own.  The formula on the Chanel is incredible, this is pretty much a one-coater its so pigmented, but I'm a habitual two coater regardless.  No streaks, perfect leveling, top marks.  The OPI's are both pretty streaky on the first coat, but the second sorts that out completely for a smooth finish.

For giggles I then layered these with another firm favourite from 2012 - Fantasy Fire by Max Factor.  This is the ultimate layering polish - its too sheer to be much use on its own (it took 5 coats to get the in-bottle colour on my nails).  It's a violet base with pink, purple and gold shimmer particles.  So it layers brilliantly with any colour that has any of those three colours as a base....

Chanel Malice (index), OPI Every Month Is Oktoberfest (middle), OPI Germanicure (ring) - all layered with one coat of Max Factor Fantasy Fire - sunlight

Phwoar! As if any of these shades needed something extra, the Fantasy Fire just gives these an extra edge of sparkle. 

For my manicure this week I picked my favourite and painted the rest to match: OPI EMOI with Fantasy Fire...love it! This is the fourth time I've used EMOI since I got it, which makes it officially my most used 2012 polish.  It's like they designed this one with me in mind.  Can't wait to see what OPI brings out this Fall!

Nail Envy (1 coat), OPI EMOI (2 coats), Max Factor Fantasy Fire (1 coat) and Seche Vite (1 coat)

OPI Every Month Is Oktoberfest - layered with Fantasy Fire - sunlight

OPI Every Month Is Oktoberfest - layered with Fantasy Fire - indirect sunlight

What were your favourite polishes of 2012? Do you wear Fall shades all year round or are you a seasonal girl?