half moon - Lucy's Stash

Hello lovelies, I finally got to swatching the China Glaze Metro collection for Fall 2011. It's a great range of shades from greys and taupes to reds and raspberry shades. I think everybody can find their shade.

Here is the first half! The collection is divided into two parts - Uptown and Downtown. Today I will show you swatches of Uptown collection, my favourite :)

Uptown includes CG in the City, Urban-Night, Traffic Jam, City Siren, Street Chic and Brownstone.

No more introduction, let's see the swatches! First up

Traffic Jam - a raspberry creme colour. This is a beautiful shade that reminds me CHG Heli-Yum from Spring 2010. The formula is great - so smooth, not watery and shiny! The polish is opaque about 90% in one coat and it takes just second thin coat for perfection. I dried quite fast and became #1 of the whole collection for me!

Street Chic - creme taupe with a hint of grey. I needed two coats for a full coverage but had to be careful because formula is a little bit runny. Nothing horrible but you can't use too thick coats. It is nice and shiny without top coat.

City Siren - beautiful cool tone red creme. One coat was almost enough for a full coverage and it's soo shiny! It applied very nicely and dried reasonably fast. This is a very nice shade of red I must say.

Direct sunlight

Brownstone - reddish brown creme colour. Again the formula was very nice, smoth and shiny just like the rest of the collection and it dried fast and was nicely pigmented. I needed two coats as usual but one had very good coverage.

Urban Night - rich eggplant purple creme colour. Really nice and deep shade with blue-ish undertones. Formula is smooth, pigmented and shiny.

CG In The City - fine silver, purple and orange glitter particles. The first coat dried quite fast but was a bit grity. The second and third were all right and were enough for the coverage you can see in the pictures. The polish dries fast but leaves a bit of a matte and gritty finish. With one layer of top coat it will be nice and smooth :) It's a nice layering polish as you'll se below in the pictures. The removing was a bit difficult because it's a glitter polish but I just left soaked cotton buds on my nails for few minutes and it helped a lot. I don't bother with wrapping my fingers with foil, that's too much hassle.

In the direct sunlight

CG In The City over Traffic Jam

In the direct sunlight

The first half of the collection impressed me a lot with the great formula of the polishes. All the five creme shades applied smoothly and were really nicely pigmented. I haven't done the 'wearing' test yet but I have good experience with CHG polishes. I will report on this issue later.

So far it's a great Fall collection and it's already available in e-shops. I'm really looking forward to try the second half - Downtown Collection. Stay tuned cos it's coming soon!

*These products were sent to me by a PR company for a review and I expressed my honest opinions.

Hello lovelies,

Today I want to show you another SpaRitual shade from the Rock collection for this fall and a dotticure I've done with it. Few days ago I've reviewed Lithophonic from the same collection and you can read the review here. Today's shade is called Basalt and it's also very interesting.

For this dotticure I've used dotting tools and SpaRitual shades in Basalt, Optical Illusion and Back To Your Roots. The smallest white dots are done with Essence White Stamping polish.

Lucy's Stash - Nail art dotticure with SpaRitual Basalt

Basalt - blue-ish dark grey jelly-creme. The formula is a bit strange - it's something between jelly and creme finish. Despite being half-jelly, it applied very easily. The pigmentation is little lower but two thicker coats were enough. You might consider applying three thin coats for faster drying. I'm also wearing a topcoat and it removed very easily