Bear Pawlish Untamed

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Bear Pawlish is a new-to-me indie that sucked me in with a couple of gorgeous duochromes (green + shifty = kryptonite).  The first one I snagged is Untamed.

indoor, bright CF lighting
Untamed is a rather sheer yellow-green jelly packed with finely-milled shimmer that can make the whole thing look radically different in any lighting.  It was honestly a borderline scary disappointment on the first 2 coats: that yellowy tinge to my cuticle edges was what the whole thing looked like, only streaky and thin, and not at all the rich forest green of the bottle.  Fortunately, continued application (4 coats here, folks!) had the color becoming more and more rich until it got to what the bottle promised.

window-filtered late afternoon daylight
In soft, low lighting, the shimmer vanished, and Untamed had a smoothly pearlescent shine.  In bright light, though, that shimmer would sparkle like sun on water or ground glass.  Weirdly, though the manufacturer says this is a linear holo, I didn't see so much as a scattered flash of rainbow - this has never happened to me before, so, dud?  No idea.  Fortunately, the amazing shimmer shift is enough to capture my attention.

outdoor, direct sunlight
outdoor, direct sunlight
The rich, luscious emerald green gave way to yellow-bronze and then red with only a little tilt or change in the lighting.

outdoor, direct sunlight
indoor, CF lighting
While I have a few other things I've thought of as "autumn in a bottle," this one gets the distinction of instead being Christmas in a bottle.  The shift from emerald to candy-apple red is gorgeous, and I'm still not sure if it's a 230/Fantasy Fire pigment over a totally different shade of green, or some other alchemy.

outdoor, bright sunlight.  DAT SHIFT.
indoor, CF lighting, MOAR shift!

Rating:  4 out of 5 stars.  This is easily a 5 star color, but AAACK the formula.  Thin and sheer, and don't get that green too stuck on your cuticles, but it did dry very quickly so 4 coats didn't take tooooo long... but it was still a jelly finish that needed 4 coats, so of course it started chipping in less than 24h.

Where to buy:  direct from Bear Pawlish.

~Michelle

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