Glisten & Glow Monster Mash

By -

 With a stamped design planned out, I needed the right base color, and remembered to snap a few photos of this new-to-me polish before layering it under the stamping...

indoor, CF lighting for all photos

Glisten & Glow is my fave topcoat, hands-down, long-term, but I have a scant few of their polish offerings.  Monster Mash was released with last year's Halloween-themed PPU, and is a deep smoked-amethyst purple loaded with subtly shifting gold microflake shimmer.


Monster Mash was nearly opaque on the first coat, and I'm showing two as per usual.  I loved the way this looks - all the shimmer and mystery of OPI First Class Desires or a England Incense Burner, but definitively purple and not near-black. 


Rating:  4 out of 5 stars.  Frankly, I was only looking for just the right purple for my planned mani, then unexpectedly fell absolutely in love.  This color is vampy without being outright goth, very flattering on my skintone, and had a lovely formula.  It did show some noticeable edgewear after 2d, as typical for super darks, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Where to buy:  as per usual with PPU shades, these are one-and-done

~Michelle

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ILNP Masquerade & Comparison

By -
Image
Every time I Love Nail Polish releases another batch of their multichromes, my wallet is going to take a little hit.  Their formula is always great, but the colors .  OMG, I die with these super shifters.  From the most recent release, my first pick was Masquerade.  Ginormously pic-heavy post in 3...2...1... Masquerade is a very sheer charcoal grey base packed with magically light-bending pigment that goes from a rich magenta-wine color, through a lighter pink, then bronze, on its way to a vibrantly saturated emerald green.  It took 3 coats to get it to visible opacity, of the sort where it can look sheer if you hold your fingernails up to the light.  Though it's most often a metallic to slightly brush-strokey chrome, in the sunlight, a sparkly shimmer peeks out. outdoor, bright sunlight The color range can be soft and muted: ok, "muted" for something like this, anyway.  outdoor, overcast/cloudy day It can be mostly wine: outdoor, overcast daylight
Read more

Topcoat battle! HK Girl VS Pro-FX quick dry!

By -
Image
I'm sure that every polish geek has a half a handful (or plenty more) topcoats - I myself have my go-to quick dry, a thicker one for chunky or unsmooth finishes, some back-up "lesser" quick drys, and a matte.  Having that many, though, honestly means we're all still looking for MORE! For a couple of years now, my holy grail TC has been HK Girl.  I'd been pretty happy with INM Out the Door for a year or so, but HKG dries much faster to a harder (aka more chip-resistant) finish, so I made that switch around the time we started blogging here.  I've never had the love affair with Seche that plenty do - it seems more stinky to me and I get shrinkage often enough to have never bought more after my first 99 cent mini of it.  I've seen a few blog posts mentioned some behemoth from WalMart, and remembered to pick up a bottle when driven to the commercial den of iniquity by a wild goose chase for multichrome notebooks, which brings us to... Topcoat Battle!!!!
Read more

Sally Hansen Belle of the Ball

By -
Image
 Just a few weeks ago, I saw a stunning swatch pic in the facebook dupes/comparisons group that led me (and I think several others) down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what we were looking at.  Turns out that the original pic was both photoshopped all to hell and from a brand that's no longer active... but several people suggested alternates, including this: indoor, CF lighting Well, hellooooo there, vampy dream. outdoor, bright sunlight The end result of all the image searching is that Sally Hansen released a whole red collection in 2018, several of which weren't truly red, and that one of which was reported as a dead-on dupe for OPI Every Month is Oktoberfest, with a more opaque and smooth formula.  Oktoberfest is one of the ones that got away - it looked identical to Germanicure in the bottle, and by the time I realized I'd like both, it was going for crazy prices on ebay.  For a mere $5, I was more than willing to take this possible dupe for a spin. outdoor, dire
Read more