OPI Ink and Essie Stroke of Brilliance

In my OPI deal from Nail Polish Direct I picked up OPI's Ink a polish that's been on my want list for a wee while now. But seriously how many purple polishes does one person need?

Anyway, this isn't just any purple as it appears blue in bright light, I'm leaning more towards polishes that are Holographic or change colour at the moment. I don't think I blogged about it, but my latest favourite is OPI's Peace and Love and OPI, an amazing polish that looks so many different colours in different lights.

Anyway back to this manicure, I've added some sparkle using Essie's 'Stroke Of Brilliance' from their Luxeffect collection. It's a Blue Glitter and my thumb here shows three coats (God Only knows how I'm going to get this off). I took the more sensible method and layered it over OPI's Ink on on the ring finger on my right hand.

The Essie varnish is there to stay, and you'll need to be quick and put your quick drying top coat of choice over as soon as you can when the last layer is painted or this polish isn't going to dry anytime soon. The OPI Ink chipped quite quickly though, don't know if that was due to the dark colour and it was more noticeable, or if it was because I'd done too much cleaning this week. 

Anyway love them both!

Leather Look Varnish

I have a thing for this colour at the moment and was keen to try a leather look varnish to see what it looked like.

Excuse the chips, I have been wearing this colour since Sunday last week and it's lasted incredibly well considering I used no top coat.

This Burgundy varnish is from Claire's and has a textured finish and not quite what I was expecting from a Leather look varnish. It's quite shiny and not matt as I'd thought, I did experiment with a matt top coat but it really looked better without.

This little badger cost me £4.50, and they have this varnish in various other colours. They also had a load of 9ml bottles at the counter for 99p, so I had a rummage. More about that later...