Mystic Glacier Comparisons: Dreamland Shimmers & Shifty Topcoat

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There's nothing new under the sun, right?  And certainly the bigger my polish stash gets (ok, seriously, intervention is required), I really do have plenty of minutely similar things.  Since 230/Fantasy Fire shimmer is both a super fave of mine and super popular right now, surely someone somewhere has snuck into my hoard a near dupe to the stunner that is Ninja Polish Mystic Glacier, right?

Spoiler alert:  nope, not even close.

In all pics for this post, I've left 3 coats of Mystic Glacier on my middle finger, and put the watermark there for easy visual reference.  My index finger is Dreamland Lacquer You Saucy Minx (3 coats), ring is Dreamland A Wedding Dress That Isn't Bright Turquoise (3 coats), and pinky is one coat of Glitter Gal Tart Yourself Up + 2 coats of ILNP The Magician.  I've used my standard slightly milky-translucent basecoat (NailTek 2 Ridge Filling) and then ProFX topcoat for all swatches to try and minimize the apples-to-oranges thing we have going here.

indoor, bright CF lighting
indoor, window-filtered shady daylight
Both of the Dreamlands and Mystic Glacier are jellies, which really allows the shimmer to sparkle from within - it's just not at all visually the same as the shimmer topper over an opaque cream polish on my pinky.  Exactly like photographing Mystic Glacier alone, though 3 coats of each of these jellies was visually opaque IRL, the camera saw past the shimmer and made the nail line look more obvious.

You Saucy Minx is a richer, darker cobalt blue that makes the fiery RED of the shimmer pop in a way that doesn't happen with any of the others.

Wedding Dress with it's lighter, greener base shows the red even softer than on Mystic Glacier, but amps up the gold and the green in a very similar way.

Tart Yourself Up happens to be the blue in my stash with the closest color to the base of Mystic Glacier - it's a good bit darker than pastels like OPI I Believe in Manicures, but nowhere near the saturation of Revlon Royal.  It also has a very nice one-coat formula that makes it a pretty ideal undies polish.  ILNP The Magician happened to get roped into this experiment because it was the most recently arrived of my 230-FF clear-based toppers, and because it's supposed to be old stock of this shimmer recently unearthed in the lab - in theory, I'm comparing "old, real" 230/FF shimmers by using this rather than one of the "newer" versions (note my skepticism, since I think that many of these are too similar to tell apart without a microscope, so you should have equally good results with any similar topper).

Mystic Glacier vs Tart Yourself Up + ILNP The Magician
In every lighting condition or shift of my hand, a different polish appeared closer to Mystic Glacier.  When aiming for that emerald pop, Wedding Dress was a clear winner:

indoor, incandescent lighting
But in  more "normal" sort of lighting conditions, the topper over creme did a pretty good impersonation:

indoor, CF lighting
While there doesn't seem to be one single polish or combo that dupes Mystic Glacier, polish addicts have a few choices.  If you happened to have a cadet-blue jelly to use as undies for a 230/FF topper and sandwiched a layer of your topper under the last coat, I think you'd get closer than I did here.  Alternately, attempting to franken using a cadet blue creme into a clear topper might work out; doable since there are several clear-based 230/FF offerings available now to experiment with (Baroness X, Indigo Bananas, Starlight Polish).  Good luck!

~Michelle

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