Tattoos Avenged: berry

Showing posts with label berry. Show all posts

Friday, March 25, 2011

Zoya Summertime Collection Summer 2011 Swatches and Review

Here's part two of the big Zoya summer collection. It's called Summertime and it's six creme shades.

Areej. This one's a deep pink / fuchsia creme. Very smooth and creamy looking, slight muted quality to it.

Breezi. A teal-blue shade. More blue than teal, but has a definite teal tone to it on the nails. My picture makes it seem brighter than it is; in real life it has a soft dustiness/murkiness to it that just doesn't come across in my picture.

Kieko. A red-purple creme. Much more red toned in real life, more of a berry than a true purple. Think Jessica Feather Boa from the Burlesque collection to give you an idea of the shade, it's similar to that but with a little more blue to it.

Mira. A medium purple creme. Again, my picture makes this purple pull too blue toned, it's much more red toned in real life. It's actually really similar to those China Glaze Grape Pop / Rescue Beauty Lounge Mismas type purple cremes that came out in the past few years. It's just a touch lighter and warmer toned, but still very similar.

Sooki. Bright cherry red creme. This is my favorite of the collection. It is loud and obnoxious and AWESOME. It's one of those flashy bright reds that you can see from a mile away. It seems to have a less dense creme finish, like it's almost a jelly, but not quite squishy enough looking. Very hot.

Tamsen. My second favorite in the collection! Can you believe it? A collection with two purples and a blue and my favorite colors are the red cremes... But I'm totally serious. This is a great red. I took two pictures to try to convey the warm orange tone that's in this compared to the coolness of Sooki. This is like a brick red, or even a red-orange. It's muted and a bit dusty looking like some of the other shades in this set. This one changes in different lighting, too... In artificial light it looks more pure red to me, but in sunlight it looks almost entirely orange. Really like the warmth and softness of this particular red.

The formula on these was great. Smooth and consistent, not too thick or thin and no difference in formula across the whole set. Opacity was great, too. They only needed two coats, but I did three just to see how it looked. These do not suffer from the extremely long dry time that the Sunshine shades have, these have a normal/average dry time.

Overall, I can't say I think this is a super exciting collection. I do like the shades, but I feel like I've seen them all too many times before- medium pink creme, purple-berry, dusty teal, medium warm purple, red creme... Nothing really unique or new. Sooki and Tamsen really stand out to me. The vivid brightness of Sooki and the warm rustiness of Tamsen make them very visually appealing compared to the muted pinks and purples in this set. Breezi is a really nice interesting shade, too, but it doesn't excite me the way Tamsen and Sooki do.

Nice formula, though!

(These were sent to me for review.)

Saturday, February 5, 2011

OPI Ulta Exclusives Holiday 2010

Every year around Christmas, OPI does a set of three holiday-themed polishes exclusively for Ulta. Last year's collection raised the bar so high, that I was super excited to see what they did this year.... But I was sadly disappointed, after hearing from a very reliable source, that no one knew anything about them and there probably wouldn't be any this year.

Then, imagine my surprise, when everyone on Twitter was, well, atwitter with excitement over this new OPI Ulta exclusive gold glitter polish. I immediately drove to Ulta and returned home with these safely in tow.

All The Berry Best. A medium berry toned red shimmer. It's rather washed out here because of the lighting; it's a couple shades darker in real life. Regardless, it's my least favorite of the collection. It has some really great gold duochrome in the bottle, but on the nail it's just an average looking red shimmer. It does have a really nice velvety looking finish, though.

Gift of Gold. Now THIS is a glitter. Amazing. It's so ridiculously sparkly. It's a lighter gold mixed with some darker gold and even a bit of what looks like copper or bronze glitter. It's very opaque, too, needing only one to two coats depending on how thick or even you do your coats. It's still rough and hard to remove like other glitters, but it's just soooooo pretty. The best one in the collection for sure. OPI really knows how to do glitter and I'm really glad they've been doing a lot of it lately.

Plum Full Of Cheer. The flash picture shows the base color of the polish and also shows the pretty multi-colored shimmer, but in real life it looks more like the top picture. This is not a bad color at all, it's extremely pretty, one of my favorite types of purples, but it's just so common lately that it doesn't feel special to me. Shimmery, glowy, red-based dark purples are great, I think I'm just a little burned out on them. I had hoped for something really special like last year's Visions of Sugarplum.

Wait a minute... Wasn't last year's Ulta Exclusive holiday collection a gold, a berry-red and a dark purple? What was the year before that? I only remember the gorgeous pink microglitter one.

The formula was good, so no complaints there. The Gift of Gold shade was really thick, but that's part of what makes it so opaque and dense. I only needed two coats of each color (and that's what I'm wearing in these pictures) and the drying time was very good. They were a little dull without topcoat, so I am also wearing topcoat for these pictures.

They're nice, and Gift of Gold is very nice, but they didn't knock me over with awesome like last year's set. Maybe they'll do something more unique this year!