Deborah Lippmann - Just Walk Away Renee, with Renee Zellweger

No....Renee Zellweger isn't guest appearing on the blog or anything. She helped create this polish and it's gorgeous. Go Renee! When I first saw swatches of it I was like mehhhh....brownish red. Not in real life and not on me! I would suspect that Ms. Zellweger and I are about the same level of glow in the dark white. The girl is fair and it looks good on her. I am also very fair and her polish looked good on me. I have a couple swatches that I shared with a friend I was chatting with online while I was doing my nails, they're like...action shots! Taken against my glow in the dark keyboard. Hey. Don't knock it. Know how your letters wear off your keyboard in time? Doesn't happen when the characters are laser etched into the keys themselves. Definitely recommend the Logitech back lit keyboard if you hate your letters wearing off. And you like the dark, comme moi!

So anyways, I have those just done swatches and you guys will see the mess ups, thus proving that when I tell you a polish is easy to apply that I know what I'm talking about. I didn't clean them up beforehand.

JWAR, for short, is a gorgeous, vampy, dark blood red. Like "Just walk away, Renee, and you won't get busted for drawing blood on that person" red.

OK. Note the cuticles. Lippmann's are traditionally great formulas, dependable, the black pump of the nail polish world, up there with their friends Rescue Beauty Lounge - the strappy sandal, and Illamasqua - the red patent leather stiletto. Always dependably great, suitable anywhere and with varying degrees of edge. Like I said, I had been chatting away online and I think I wasn't being too careful because the formula on this was no different than every other Lippmann cream I've ever used.

In an effort to show the color differently I tried a white background:

Errr. I've definitely given you guys better swatches, but maybe if you click and blow it up you will see something different here. This has some plum in it, which is nice.

This is VERY true to color. See what happens when I swatch before doing some clean up? This is what I'm sayin'. I SUCK at painting my nails actually, so good formula is key. When I tell you something is easy to apply, I mean it because it has to be fool-proof for me not to have it in my hair, on the dog...I have a very short attention span and usually I want it done. Runny bad formula is a deal breaker. As much as I love SpaRitual's colors and philosophy I won't spend a lot more on them because they're flat too runny. Deal breaker.

Several days later:

 

Ummm...what the freak happened? I think this mani was maybe 4 days old. Not bad, but...hello. I'm getting not great wear out of my Lippmann's and I can't figure out why. Is my top coat going bad? Am I just being too hard on my nails? I know I was a little pissed off about this. $16 and I got 4 days? I need to figure this out because these are some of my favorite polishes. Maybe I need to spring for a new bottle of top coat. I don't know. 

God, those cuticles. I'm embarrassed. So let's talk about the color for a sec because color wise, these swatches are great. You can see the plummy undertones, but the primary color is a deep red. It's just a very very blue red, but while the plummy undertones are definitely there and a factor, you will never mistake this for plum. 

My nails aren't long at this point, and shorter now as I write this, but this is really too dark for really long nails. It's going to look very Morticia Addams if you put it on very long Talons. The length my nails are here are about as long as I would go with this color, but do as you love. It's a great winter Christmas color, for all it's dangerous look. I was very tempted to put a slight glittery shimmer over it but then we got into the chipping thing and I didn't. 

I did only slightly better on the right hand's cuticles.

I didn't realize how many pictures I had of this. This is a very swatch heavy post!

Wear on the right is WAY worse than the left. I'm ambi, but I favor my right hand, probably because that's what I was taught to do. I do many things left handed. Regardless, the right hand took a beating. My last couple Lippmann manicures have been like this and I just don't understand it. Though I have never found Lippmann's to be ages better on wear (if you want that, look at A-England) but usually I get a day or two more than I've been getting lately. 

OK. I've been putting up and shutting up for awhile but I finally am irritated enough to say something. I hate these boxes. Lippmann's come in these plastic boxes. I'm sure they're fairly cheap to produce, protect the bottles and let you see the polish. But I hate them. They're hard to open, they're frustrating and after so long pieces will start to break off of them. Throw the boxes away, you say. Well, if you look on the evil auction sight, where you would likely go to sell off your collection if you wanted to, boxes up the value of a hard to find polish. Polish collectors are like every other kind of collector, they want it in as near original condition as they can get it. It sounds irrational maybe, but I've seen it to be true. Besides, my OCD doesn't let me throw things like this out. It came in it, it needs to stay in it. But I hate them.

Nice bottle shot, you can see how true the color is compared to what you see in the bottle. Normally true of Lippmann's. 

I took all these pictures and I'm going to make you look at them!

Last one, though. 

This is a lovely red cream. It's opaque, it's highly pigmented and the formula is great, though I did seem to have some trouble with it. I think it was an off night. I was more interested in my conversation than my nails at that point. 

This is an older Deborah Lippmann color, but it's still widely available, for good reason. This is pretty much a classic and most of us should have something like it around for that black tie event that you want to feel a little more vampy for. Or just for work, to remind those bitchy girls that you WILL claw their eyes out. I wore it to remind me to Just Walk Away, Tricksie, from a bad situation. It is going to change the world? No. It's not that daring, but there is something blackened and sexy and rowr about it. Definitely recommend, especially if I can figure out the wear problem!

Happy Talons!