Much like around this time last year, it's my birthday, and so
much like last year, I pulled out something seriously special to celebrate: Cirque Coronation.
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| indoor, bright CF lighting |
Coronation was absolutely, hands-down, no questions asked, my hugest all-time lemming. I've bid a pretty penny on this purple potion at auction, and I've bought a literal dozen other things trying get close enough. When Cirque re-released it for the recently past holiday season, I went crazy and bought 2 bottles. I have hundreds of bottles of polish that I would still never use up even if I changed my nails daily, I don't need backups of anything but base & top coats, but common sense be damned, this is dragon-level hoarding and the only reason I stopped at 2 was there was a limit on purchase.
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| window-filtered daylight |
Coronation is a rich blue-leaning purple jelly base that's pulled over toward a warmer red purple by a wagonload of Clarins 230-type red-to-green "unicorn pee" shimmer, scattered with very fine gold holographic sparks. Lavishly photographed swatches of the original in 2013 show the sparks as vanishingly small microglitters, but even in low light and super macro, nope, this looks like gold dust rather than glitter to me.
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| window-filtered and shaded daylight |
The amazing shimmer is of course what makes this one a queen, effortlessly going from flaming scarlet:
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| outdoor, bright sunlight |
To a fiery bronze embers-glowing-from-within thing:
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| window-filtered bright sunlight |
And yes, over to that witchy flash of emerald that polish crazies swoon over:
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| indoor, bright CF lighting |
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| window-filtered bright daylight |
Coronation was a little streaky on the first very thin coat - no surprise at all for a jelly - then was lovely at 2 coats, and deepened to the bottle color at 3. I had no issues with the jelliness getting sticky or pulling, but my usual technique is to stop and do cleanup after 2 coats so that things are nicely dry before starting the third. If jellies drive you batty, give that a whirl. Also note that about half of these pics were taken on Monday after a party at my house - the cleanup that involved steel wool and various cleaning chemicals accelerated the edgewear a whole lot, but I loved the color so much I took it off and re-applied it a couple days later, then wore it for a whole week straight without major wear and no chipping.
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| indoor, bright CF lighting, blurry to catch all the sparkly bits |
There's been a lot of talk in polish-land lately about the similarity or difference between the original red-to-green pigment that's no longer available and the aurora pigment(s) currently on the market. The above macro tells you everything you need to know - the "OG" stuff is smooth and uniform, sparks amazingly in the light, and shifts all the way from scarlet true red to bronzed gold to emerald green, then tips over toward blue at extreme angles. There's a rainbow in that there bottle, and it's glorious.
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| window-filtered and shaded daylight |
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Rating: of course it's 5 out of 5 stars! Wearing something you'd given up on and squashing that lemming is a special kind of celebration in itself. The fact that the color and formula gave me no grief is simply icing on my birthday cake. Now only to someday get around to all the comparisons with those dozen bottles of almost-there I have...
Where to buy: Coronation sold out quickly for the second time on Cirque's site, but plenty of bottles made it out into the world and to stockists. If you missed this one again, you're back to stalking destashes, but the price is no longer hovering at over $100 a bottle. May all your lemmings be caught!
~Michelle
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