As is often the case when I need a starting point to select a polish, I check in with my partner, who helpfully suggests a base color. As he's done more often lately, though, he got awfully specific this time: "blue with green flakies."
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| indoor, bright CF lighting |
Illyrian Alfheim is a lovely cool cerulean blue - somewhere between sky and cobalt, but closer to the latter. It's a quite sheer jelly to allow the iridescent "ocean" type flakies - the sort from the old Nfu-oh polishes that shift from green to aqua to blue - to shine through.
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| window-filtered overcast daylight |
I'm wearing 3 coats here. The base color was a touch uneven until 3rd coat, but the sea of flakies distributed very evenly on each coat and actually looked best at the 2nd. The 3rd coat meant the flakies started to layer over top of each other, and look more like a full wall of shimmer rather than individual separate pigment elements.
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| window-filtered afternoon sunlight |
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| indoor, bright CF lighting |
After a couple of days, I thought this particular pool of cool water needed a little something more. Once more, Mr Man to the rescue when I was debating various geometric or negative space ideas: "why not fish, since that looks so much like a pond?"
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| indoor, CF lighting |
First, I stamped all nails with a loose, open pattern from KADS MIN 026 in MoYou London Electric Teal to create ripples on the water's surface. Next, I reverse-stamped the utterly gorgeous koi fish design from Creative Shop 47 in black, filled in with white and orange.
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| indoor, CF lighting |
I absolutely love Creative Shop stamping plates, since they're consistently flawlessly etched and very easy to work with. The designs tend to be very detailed, and are mostly quite a bit wider and longer than my nails - for example, the koi image was both of these two fish next to each other, plus water lilies on the edge. Fortunately, the details in the images mean that the motif is still clearly identifiable even when I use only part of the image.
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| window-filtered afternoon sunlight |
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars. Alfheim is very pretty, and a color well worth having in my stash. The 3 coats ended up being a little more than I wanted, so this may be nice to try as a topper over a deeper blue to really make those flakies pop. The brush was nice - a good size for my nails and no wonks. The formula dried a little slower than typical, meaning a pause between the 2nd and 3rd coat was absolutely necessary to prevent stickiness or dragging. This wore about like a jelly on me, with subtle edgewear by the 3rd day.
Where to buy: Unfortunately,
Illyrian's web store is only open intermittently, but you can also check out what's on offer at
one of her stockists.
~Michelle
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