Essie Ole Caliente + Essie Shine of the Times

Essie Ole Caliente is part of Essie's Navigate Her collection for this spring. At first I was thinking "Meh, whatever. Boring." but then I saw the collection in person and realized how pretty it actually is! Most of the colors are terrible for my skintone, but Ole Caliente is gorgeous. I'm debating getting Navigate her too. Light greens are tricky for me, so we'll see how that goes. Anyway, here's Ole Caliente.

Essie cremes can be a little tricky and prone to patching (case in point: Pretty Edgy), but I found that Ole Caliente works best in 4 super-thin coats. I let them dry completely just to be on the safe side.

Mind you, this is without top coat! It's that glossy on its own. It dried quickly, and I didn't have any issues with running or pooling.

Coral is pretty far out of my comfort zone, and while I do really like this color, I'm just not used to pink/orange/coral on me, so it looked a little weird. I figured adding flakies would help. This is one thin coat of Shine of the Times over Ole Caliente:

Usually the flakes in Shine of the Times and its assorted dupes are more orange, but they looked yellow most of the time. It's not a bad thing, just unexpected.

I think all the yellow from the flakes made Ole Caliente look more orange overall? They did help though. Coral is a lot less weird on my hands when there's glitter or flakes involved.

I don't usually keep the same polish on for more than 2 days, but I wore this combination for four days, and it wore really well. Very minor tipwear on a few nails, and no chipping whatsoever.

Thanks for looking!

China Glaze GR8 + Franken Friday #3

For today's franken, I started with China Glaze GR8, a yellow/gold linear holo. The formula was smooth and GR8 was opaque in two coats.

The only problem? The color...not so flattering. It's like mustard, and it's weird. No me gusta. So I dumped out a little bit and replaced it with a blue jelly, Ruby Kisses Regaled Out Blue. I'm much happier with the result! Still opaque in 2 coats, but now it's a sea green linear holo. Here it is in direct sunlight:

It refused to photograph accurately though, so here's a color-accurate photo I took in the shade.

It's a weird photo and I'm not sure what's going on with my skintone, but it at least shows you what color the polish actually is! I tried photographing it in my usual lighting setup but that was even less accurate than the sunlight photos, as you can see...

It looks a lot like DV8 there. Here's a comparison between the franken, DV8, and L8R G8R under artifial light:

In direct sunlight:

As you can see, DV8 is much bluer than my franken. It doesn't even look teal in comparison, whereas L8R G8R practically looks silver rather than the celadon green that it actually is.

Thanks for looking!