The Battle of the Cornflower Blues

I try to only buy polishes that are dissimilar to each other, but I noticed the other day that I seem to have accrued several cornflower blues that all look alike. Oops! I thought it might be interesting to see how they stack up against each other. Without further ado, the contenders are:

From left to right:
Nails Inc Chalk Farm
Rimmel London Aqua Cool
China Glaze Electric Beat
Essie Lapis of Luxury

I used three coats of each polish. Only Lapis of Luxury actually needed the third. In terms of application, I'd say Chalk Farm and Aqua Cool were the best and Electric Beat was the worst - but to be honest they were all pretty great so I'm just being picky here!

As for colour, it's immediately obvious that Chalk Lane is darker and perhaps more of a periwinkle than cornflower blue because it has a touch of purple in it. Although Aqua Cool and Lapis of Luxury look very slightly different in my photos, in real life they're identical - Electric Beat is a touch lighter than these two.

I hope this helps anyone who's on the hunt for a pretty cornflower blue. Do any of you have several very similar colours in your stash?

Comparison: Nubar Innocent Whispers & OPI Give Me the Moon

Last month I showed you Nubar Innocent Whispers, a pretty grey/pink duochrome. I mentioned that it reminded me a bit of OPI Give Me the Moon, so here is the proper comparison between them!

In the bottle, these two polishes are clearly very different. The Nubar looks lilac with a blue shimmer, while the OPI just looks...grey. But as we all know, what a polish looks like in the bottle very often doesn't translate onto the nails, so here's what they look like on me:

From left to right:
Nubar Innocent Whispers (two coats)
OPI Give Me the Moon (two coats)
Nubar Innocent Whispers (four coats)
OPI Give Me the Moon (four coats)

Hmmm, they're still not as similar as I thought they'd be! The Nubar is much pinker - and sheerer. The OPI is paler and more opaque, and it doesn't shift colour the way Innocent Whispers does. What is similar, however, is the blue shimmer apparent in both these colours. Oh well, at least we know now that they're not even remotely dupes!

P.S. Apologies for the horrendous state of my hands! The freakily warm weather in March has played havoc with my skin, and even my beloved E45 cream has been powerless against it.

17 Magentized Nail Polish

I had such a positive experience with Nails Inc magnetic nail polish that I was interested to try another brand's version and see how they compare. I decided to try 17 from Boots. I couldn't find it in store so I bought two colours - blue and teal - off their website.

The bottle design is idential to the Nails Inc one. It's a 10ml bottle with a detachable magnet cap. Both caps also have a little lip that you rest against your cuticle to line up the magnet.

So I could try both colours at once, I alternated the colours on each nail. As with the Nails Inc polish I did two coats of each, the first coat obviously without the magnet and the second holding the magnet over the nail while the polish was wet. It was incredibly easy to do. I then sealed with a top coat to make it super shiny.

These photos were taken after three days so there's a bit of tip wear, but no chipping. As you can see, the blue has a more subtle effect than the teal but I like both colours equally. They're just so pretty.

17 vs. Nails Inc

So if you were only going to buy one magnetic polish, which brand should it be? Well, the Nails Inc formula was definitely superior to the 17 one. I can't fault the former, which I found the latter a bit gloopy. It wasn't bad enough to cause any real problems, though. 17 has a choice of four colours (silver, lilac, blue and teal) and Nails Inc has three (gold, silver and purple). But the most obvious difference is in the price. I got the 17 polishes for £4.99 each, while the Nails Inc ones were a whopping £13! In spite of the inferior formula, for more than half the price and a wider range of colours, I'd personally go with the 17 polishes.