Knackered by butterLONDON

This was one of those rare nail polishes that seemed to unite the nail polish blogging world in a fervor. Knackered appears innocuous enough from the photos on the butterLONDON website, but once you see it in person you instantly go into the have-to-have-it trance. I would say this was probably the most popular shade of butterLONDON’s spring/summer 2012 collection. Just how do those little glitter particles stay so perfectly suspended in the polish?? Well, I certainly had to find out!

Image by clairesayswhat

Knackered is a hard polish to capture in a photo due to the shifting blues and purples of the color, but the name is truly perfect. It really does remind you of the feeling of being tired/drunk/hungover and seeing stars when you close your eyes. The light blue base color with the purple and green accents is truly beautiful. It’s almost a duochrome, but not quite. More on that shortly. The glitter is slightly holographic and very evenly distributed in the polish. Somehow it just magically stays suspended in the polish! On the nail, it disperses nicely and doesn’t add any grittiness to the overall feel because it’s so small. I would still recommend using a thicker topcoat, though. Either Seche or butterLONDON’s.

This is also because this polish is quite sheer. Now, I don’t know about you, but just looking at the bottle I assumed this polish was going to be much more opaque. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why this couldn’t be the case. I think the glitter would still have shown up nicely if the base was more opaque, but perhaps then the glitter wouldn’t stay as suspended as well. I don’t know…. Either way, I needed 3 coats of Knackered for it to be opaque enough on my nail. And I did experience considerably more tip wear and overall chipping than I normally do with butterLONDON polishes. But overall, I still wore Knackered for more than a few days longer than a lot of other brands can manage, so it still gets a thumbs up in my book!

I would recommend layering this polish over another blue based color. Or maybe even over purple or green! Some of the other colors that are present in this shade might show themselves better when layered over another shade, too. Also, after trying this polish and Disco Biscuit, I really appreciate that butterLONDON is making polishes that feature glitter rather than being all-glitter-all-the-time. Stay tuned for my next post where I shall elaborate on that point….

Revlon Whimsical (aka Anemic Cupcakes)

Revlon has done it again with another great Deborah Lippmann dupe! Previously, they released Facets of Fuchsia as a dupe for Lippmann’s Bad Romance. If you missed it the first time around, check the new Revlon Brilliant Color display at your local drugstore, and you’ll find it’s been re-released once again as Scandalous. It was quite the popular polish!

Now, in this same display, Revlon has also bestowed upon us a shade called Whimsical, which is a dupe for another Deborah Lippmann polish called Glitter In the Air. I normally avoid Revlon’s nail polish as their formula can be so hit or miss, but since Facets of Fuchsia was so great and the price is certainly right, I couldn’t pass up Whimsical.

Although, I must admit, I ended up being quite taken with this polish. It’s such a different shade and not one that I expected to end up liking as much as I did.

Image by clairesayswhat

It’s one of those polishes that has a semi-sheer, almost snotty (gross, I know, but that’s truly what it reminds me of!) base that can be notoriously difficult to apply. The base here is light blue, and there is blue and pink hexagonal glitter as well as smaller silver glitter and iridescent blue microglitter suspended all throughout.

Surprisingly, I didn’t experience any issues with the formula. I used 3 coats, and each dried nicely. The glitter effect builds up as you increase coats: some of the glitter from the previous coat becomes opaque while the newer glitter is brighter. This makes for a kind of 3-D, reflecting pool effect. It’s really quite beautiful. The base color is less blue on the nail than in the bottle, and it’s for this reason that I thought of  “Anemic Cupcakes.” It’s like if you took a cupcake and made it a halftone lighter, then you’d have this shade. That’s the best way I can think of describe why I thought of calling it that! Maybe it makes sense only to me…haha Another way I can think of describe it is like a crystal ball. It’s as though you’re looking through glass and can see through the layers of liquid beneath.

Anyway, let me give you a heads up on the glitter in this polish. It tends to sink to the bottom, so you’ll want to kind of plunge the brush down into the bottle and wipe the excess off carefully in order to get the best amount of glitter on the brush. I found that I got the best distribution of glitter on my larger nails, such as my thumb. Most of my other nails required me to strategically place a few extra bits of glitter so they wouldn’t so bare. If you have shorter nails, you may find this polish more difficult to work with. I’d suggest using a thin nail brush or even an orange wood stick to catch and apply the pieces of glitter to your nails if you find that you have trouble getting enough with the brush.

Also, you will never get this polish to be opaque, so don’t even try! You have to accept the fact that the sheerness is part of what makes Whimsical so special. If you take your time and let each coat dry before applying the next, I promise that you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the effect you achieve!

I expected this polish to chip very easily, but it didn’t! In fact, I ended up wearing Whimsical for a full week. The blue in the base did seem to get paler as the week went on due to hand washing and light exposure, but overall the effect held up.

Whimsical is a really great polish, and certainly worth the incredibly cheap price when compared to its Deborah Lippmann original. I can’t personally compare it to Glitter In the Air, but swatches on other blogs confirm that it is a pretty spot-on dupe.

So with two great Deborah Lippmann dupes from Revlon now on the market, I can’t wait to see what they’ll come up with next!