ILNP Masquerade & Comparison

Every time I Love Nail Polish releases another batch of their multichromes, my wallet is going to take a little hit.  Their formula is always great, but the colors.  OMG, I die with these super shifters.  From the most recent release, my first pick was Masquerade.  Ginormously pic-heavy post in 3...2...1...

Masquerade is a very sheer charcoal grey base packed with magically light-bending pigment that goes from a rich magenta-wine color, through a lighter pink, then bronze, on its way to a vibrantly saturated emerald green.  It took 3 coats to get it to visible opacity, of the sort where it can look sheer if you hold your fingernails up to the light.  Though it's most often a metallic to slightly brush-strokey chrome, in the sunlight, a sparkly shimmer peeks out.

outdoor, bright sunlight

The color range can be soft and muted:

ok, "muted" for something like this, anyway.  outdoor, overcast/cloudy day

It can be mostly wine:

outdoor, overcast daylight

Or crazily emerald:

But it's always super shifty, of the sort where you can see multiple colors on your nails with barely a tilt.

rainy, overcast days for both - we've been getting a lot of those days lately.

And the color change certainly doesn't need bright outdoor light to be there:

indoor, office fluorescents

That last pic especially, where a lot of the bronze tints to the colors come out, reminded me a whole lot of ILNP's own Nostalgia, so a comparison was in order.

L = Nostalgia, R = Masquerade

The bottle shots tell you most everything you need to know about this experiment (and sorry they're kinda blurry):  while at first glance the center of Nostalgia is a much paler rose-gold to Masquerade's magenta-wine, with a little tilt Nostalgia is indeed able to hit that richer shade of pink, just to a lesser extent.  The bronze and emerald ringing outward from the center of the bottle look very similar.

For all the following pics, ring finger = 2 coats of Nostalgia, middle = the 3 coats of Masquerade I'd been wearing as a mani for the previous couple of days, and index = 2 coats of Masquerade over black crème.

The green is dead on:

L-to-R:  Nostalgia, Masquerade alone, Masquerade on black

The softer, bronze-toned shades are quite similar:

same order as for the green shot

In direct lighting (not looking at angles), where the pink shades show strongest, the differences start to come out more clearly.  

L-to-R:  Masquerade on black, Masquerade, Nostalgia, Masquerade

L-to-R:  Nostalgia, Masquerade alone, Masquerade on black

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.  Those colors are gorgeous...and yet, I can't help but be a little disappointed.  ILNP didn't exactly dupe themselves, but I definitely think of Masquerade as a more intense version of Nostalgia, not really a totally separate color.  The trade off is that Nostalgia wears better for me, and is more opaque (the 2 are likely connected).

Where to buy:  ILNP's web store.

~Michelle