Sinful Colors You Goji and Sketch Daisies Nail Art

I have another new acquisition for you today (maybe I have a problem...)! Trolling the endcap at Walmart, I spotted one bottle of a Sinful Colors shade I hadn't seen before, a berry purple called You Goji. It turns out that this color is even more unusual than I expected. When I searched for swatches, I came up empty. It's like this color never existed. This leaves me in the very high pressure position of swatching this presumably hard to find shade, just for you!

The first thing you may notice about You Goji is that I described it as berry purple, but it swatches almost brick red. It turns out that this shade is pretty difficult to photograph without TONS of light. In low light, the red is more prominent, and these swatches are fairly true to color in those conditions. It makes me sad that the low light end was all I managed to catch, though, because the purple end of this shade is so pretty, and completely different from what you see here. It's a cooler pinky berry shade very similar to how it looks in bottle. If you like the bottle shade, I think you'll be pleased with it when you get home, too. It's not wholly original, but not a dupe for any of the other berrys in my collection, and I'm pretty fond of it so far. Pink and purple lovers should pick it up if you see it.

 

Application was very good- two coats here, but you could get away with one thick coat applied carefully for full coverage. It's a creme finish, dries fast and levels well. It was also really, really shiny- no topcoat in these pictures! The downside of such a rich color is that cleanup is a bit of a bear. I had trouble getting it off of my cuticles with acetone, and when I removed it from one finger to fix a nail art oops (stay tuned!), I had some heavy smearage. In short, getting it on was easy, but I expect that getting it off will take some finesse. It would probably be less of an issue if I hadn't been slacking on the cuticle oil but, keeping it real, very few of us have perfect cuticles, you have been warned.




Now for the nail art! I wanted to do a purple/pink galaxy mani on this shade, but the red undertones proved to be a little too strong, and it just didn't look right, so I went back to the well for some sketchpad daisies. While I have a sometimes maddening love for very precise nail designs, I think daisies are so cute when they've got that worn, brushstroked look as if you doodled them in a notebook with a dull number 2 pencil. I used an LA Colors white striper to draw my daisy petals around a dot of Julep Nessa. I have a few white stripers, but the formula on this one is a touch thin. Crappy for stripes, but perfect for the softer, slightly transparent look I was going for in my daisy petals.

Is You Goji in your collection? I'm always curious about when polishes I haven't seen came out and whether a polish I like is LE, but all I can find on this one is an eBay listing with a snap of the bottle and a ridiculous price tag. (I paid $1.99, they want $7.99-I hate when online sellers price gouge a color because it's somewhat HTF. I mean, I found it at Walmart, so it's not exactly unicorn pee.) If you have a little history or other thoughts on this color, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. In other news, this is my 100th post! I've had so much fun with the first 100, learning to take photos, practicing nail art, and jumping into the nail blogger community, and I hope to keep getting better all the time. Whether it's your first visit or I pop up in your Bloglovin' feed with every post, I appreciate you, and it never ceases to amaze me that people manage to find my super secret blog. THANK YOU!

March Maven Swatches and Review: Danica, April, and Angie (a Julep holo!)

This month as an add on, Julep introduced a holo! I tried so hard to say no, I really did, but it didn't happen. Angie had to be mine. Wanna see it, and the other colors I picked up this month? Here you go!

Angie is a silver "liquid holographic," which I would call an apt description. When you're applying it or looking at it in the bottle, it has a really cool flowy quality. It does pool in the cuticles a little bit, so application isn't crazy, but is a touch delicate. What surprised me most was how rich the coverage was. Angie is opaque in two to three coats. To my delight, this is not a holo topper. It's almost like a holo that applies like a creme. It even cleans up surprisingly easily. I hope Angie will be the first color in a series of liquid holographics. I'd love to see this finish in just about every color (mint green first, please!). I would call it more scattered than linear, and it scatters even more with topcoat (I used Julep Freedom Polymer). This made me a little sad, because it's a touch dull without it. It's kind of strange-it clouds up when you apply the topcoat, but as it dries, it gets the most of its holo-y goodness back. If you like a good silver holo, this is a solid one, and I'm more than happy with this add-on. It's my full mani right now, and it is effectively slowing down your ability to read this post because I keep stopping to look at my nails instead of writing.

The second color I got was April, a "vermilion" creme. I'm not sure what the heck vermilion is supposed to be, but I'd call this a cheerful red based poppy orange. April's the kind of color that will get a fair amount of mileage for me. It's a bright that compliments my medium skin tone, feels seasonal 3/4 of the time (not much of a winter tone, I'm afraid), and applies nicely. I don't have any real complaints about it. It's not a revolutionary shade, but it's a lovely staple red-orange.






Finally, I picked up Danica, a unique purple-blue shimmer. I found it almost impossible to photograph this one accurately! When I went back to Julep's photos, theirs were also much more blue than Danica looks in real life. I'd hoped that it would lean more purple, and I was wowed by this shade, but if you want blue-blue, you may want to try a different shade. Or you can layer it over a brighter blue...because this shade is much sheerer than I expected. On the first coat, it's pretty much a jelly, and it builds to the opacity you see here in about four coats. It's listed as a chrome, but it's not similar in consistency to other Julep shades that I'd call chromes, like Greta and Karmen. And one more gripe: it smells pretty bad. All that said, while I wish it were a little more opaque, I like the flexibility that the consistency gives, and the actual color is fantastic. It has fine blue and purple shimmers that make it totally different than anything else I have. The blend of blue and purple is interesting and unexpected-I like it a lot.

Oh dear, I got wordy again, sorry! The TL;DR version is that all of these were really nice, but Angie's the one that really stands out. I'm sure not everyone will love it, but I'd definitely recommend it. Did you get a Maven box this month? What did you pick?