Grace-full Blood Countess + a small comparison

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Apparently, I'm on flakie-palooza lately, so here's one more:

indoor, CF lighting
Grace-Full released a vampire-themed collection earlier this year, and the one that caught my eye  was this lovely red somewhere between berry and ox-blood named for Elizabeth Bathory, Blood Countess.

indoor, bright CF lighting
Blood Countess is an utterly lush fall color, packed with ultrachrome flakies that shift pink, gold, and green.  This applied wonderfully evenly for a jelly polish, and looked great at 2 coats, though 3 coats brought the flakie density and color richness up to how the bottle looks.

indoor, window-filtered daylight
After wearing it solo for a couple of days, I added a stamp in Emily de Molly Rose Gold using UR Beautiful 01.  I later mattified it, but though there was a definite difference IRL, the pics were utterly the same before & after.  Weird.

indoor, window-filtered daylight
This beauty really reminded me of something else...

indoor, CF lighting, Blood Countess on left and Elle's Spell on right for both pics
Barielle Elle's Spell is utterly classic for polish geeks and hands-down one of my all time fave reds.  It's a gorgeous berry shading toward candy-apple red jelly, thickly stuffed with the sort of iridescent fiery flakes in Essie Shine of the Times and her dupes.  3 coats are required for Elle to look good, but wowzers it's amazing once you're done.  My swatch sticks show 2 coats and no topcoat for both polishes.  They're definitely not dupes - Blood Countess is an ultrachrome flakie to Elle's iridescent translucent flakies, and BC is more saturated at 2 coats since the opacity of this type of flakies can still stand out from a slightly more opaque polish.  On the nail, it's a very similar feel... they're different enough and both gorgeous, so both keepers, but I wouldn't say you need both if you already love one of them.


Rating:  4 out of 5 stars for the flakie goodness of Blood Countess.

Where to buy:  direct from Grace-full.

~Michelle

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