Moon Shine Mani The Boy Who Lived

Wow, I am just all about grabbing the new sparklies lately, or else everything recently arrived is somehow super good at jumping to the front of the line...

indoor, bright CF lighting

I do not remember for the life of me where I saw Moon Shine Mani's gorgeous peacock-teal aurora bomb The Boy Who Lived.  I mean, certainly on facebook, but that just goes to show you that if you're trying to stick to a no-buy, you gotta stay off the internet, because just look at this. 

outdoor, shady/overcast daylight

I'm wearing 3 coats of this absolutely shimmer-packed jelly, which wore well (especially considering I loved it so much I wore it all week... hence some of these pics showing my mani rather grown out). 

indoor, CF lighting

The best quality of aurora pigment comes very close indeed to matching the shimmer OOMPH of true Clarins 230-type stuff, and this is no exception.  Oh yes, check out the rainbow around the rounded corners of the bottle shot above - all of that was very much in evidence here.

window-filtered direct sunlight

All of my pics utterly fail to capture the ruby RED flash of the shimmer in direct light, showing at best a hint of pink.  No idea why my camera gave up here, but any place you see a spark or two of red was more a blazing stripe.  The gold and green seen in these shots were very much in evidence IRL.  Just like you'd hope for with these types of shifters, I often had a red band on one side of my nail, and green on the other side of the curve.

mentally dial up that thin red band into more POW

Official swatch photos of both this and the 2.0 version currently on sale show this as definitively blue.  NOPE.  My bottle is absolutely peacock teal when I hold a swatch stick up and view light through it (thereby negating the shimmer's effect).  No complaints from me, though, and if you wanted super blue, this is plenty sheer enough to go with 2 coats over a cobalt or navy undie.

indoor, bright CF lighting

But why would you?  Sweet baby octopus, are you looking at that devastating green flash up there?  Because that's no camera trickery, that's really how shimmery and shifty The Boy Who Lived is.

outdoor, overcast daylight

My plans to stamp this got chucked to the wayside, though in hindsight I think it'd be gorgeous used under a negative-space image done in a very neutral grey.

once more with that ring-around-the-rainbow

Rating:  a rock solid 5 out of 5 stars.  I'm even giving a pass to the (grumble grumble) wide flat brush and beautiful but awkward to use bottle shape.  This color is absolutely in my wheelhouse of faves.

Where to buy:  as mentioned upstream, looks like once this sold out, it was replaced with a 2.0 version, which you can get at Moon Shine Mani's store here.

~Michelle