Currently Wearing - Deborah Lippmann's Brown Eyed Girl

I am hoping to make this the first installment of what I'm "Currently Wearing". I haven't lost sight of the whole idea of this blog which was to let you know how each polish wears, but in order to get posts out more frequently, I have been swatching. How to balance showing you lots of colors without letting go of one of my purposes, which is to give you wear and color ideas that are cruelty free and worth the bucks we shell out. So often we can spend quite a lot of money and not get the wear in return. Tight wire, man! Walking a tight wire! So, in order to better accomplish my goal of giving you an honest opinion on wear from a girl who works, who has a house to see to and meals to cook, and clean up!, I'm going to start trying to do colors in updates and see how that works. This is the first of those. Between now and when the wear goes horribly awry, I will post color swatches and talk about formula and application.

See...what happens in this blogger's world is when a manicure wears out and I can't repair it or haven't liked it enough to bother with the fuss of a repair, I take that off and then I will often swatch. I will sit down with a bunch of new colors or with colors I've been curious about or wanting to layer together and I will apply, snap and remove. Readers like this because they get to see lots of colors in action, as it were. However, I still feel that wear is an important issue for us polish aholics. If something wears rubbish and you have limited polish dollars to spend...don't you want to know that? Yeah. Ya do. This is my thought process. I'll scatter my actual manicure in giving wear updates to let you know how things are going with the one I'm wearing in real life with swatches I take when I swatch. And when I swatch, I swatch a LOT. Sometimes all day and 20 or more polishes. It's hard on my nails and my back, but I like doing it and you guys seem to like seeing it. We'll see how this goes!

So the first offering is Deborah Lippmann's Brown Eyed Girl. This isn't a new color but it's still available. I haven't forgot that promise, either, from when I started: not to show you a bunch of stuff you fall in love with and then can't get. Not fair, in my book. Not fair at all!!! So yes, this one is still out there. But rarely, as it turns out. Try Amazon.com, there are a few out there. Darn! I had seen this and seen this on lippmanncollection.com and it didn't occur to me she didn't have it any longer. They are out there to be had, though. You have to dig, but you can get them. And not on evilbay.

I got lucky, I had some natural sunlight so all these swatches today, anyway, are in natural light.

Bottle shot, just to show you the color:

Lots of gold shimmer there...which does not translate to the nail at all!

OK, here's a glare shot, I hadn't turned the flash off yet, but it shows how much flash is in the polish, but you can see on the nail, this only translates to a shimmer on the nail, but no flash. It's not showing the gold at all on the nail. It didn't even show wet, so...I'm not sure. I would have loved to have seen it. Not that this isn't gorgeous. Let me show you a non-flash, natural light picture because while this is good for it's purpose, it's not terribly true to color in real life.

OK, that's better. It's really this deep reddish brown. To only consider this brown would be to deny the red that gives it such depth.

Very nice. This is very true to color. I've been thinking of it as a shade more brown than a red velvet cake. It's a nice winter color. It probably is really an Autumn shade but you know I don't really care about that. I was in the mood for a brown/red so that's what I took to my manicure. BMWWU, of course, chose this because the two Rescue Beauty's I took she deemed to be "liver colored". I thought they were beautiful, but I got vetoed. You'll see them eventually. This is fine because I have a lot of butter LONDON and Rescue Beauty Lounge swatches to show you yet so a Deborah Lippmann will shake that up a little. Plus, you guys LOVE Lippmann's!

I do too, honestly.

OK, so...you can see some tipwear there. As you will know if you've been reading me at all, I've not been getting great wear out of my Lippmann's. I did get FANTASTIC wear out of the GaGa Barney's exclusive Edge of Darkness set, which I stupidly did not swatch for you. Ah...well, an excuse to wear it again! (which BMWWU declared to be "something dark with bits of vomit on it". Nice. She can turn a phrase. It's actually black with holographic flakie on it...but who am I to judge? I loved it. That's all I care about. And I will show it to you, if it's still out there to be had. If not, you can Google it. Others have done it.

This manicure is...let's see. I had it done Wednesday night, it's now Saturday, so it's 3 days old and I didn't go to work yesterday. Huh. Not terrible but I've seen better.

This is a look at how much that gold flash didn't show up on the nail picture. But...the gold in the polish does lend something. If it didn't have it, I think it would be missing something. It just adds something mysterious, even though it's not obvious. You can see a hint of it.

 Lovely, isn't it? This one really shows how dark red this is. It's not truly a red, but it's red enough. And completely work appropriate.

 Tip wear, right hand. Hm. I will try repairing this and see what happens.

So this was mechanically:

2 coats Orly Nail Armor mixed with Salon Sciences Fiberglass Network. I didn't know she was doing this, but I found it she is. BMWWU is creating nail treatment frankens. Interesting.
2 coats Deborah Lippmann Brown Eyed Girl
2 coats Seche UV Top coat dried under LED light

When I repair it I will probably then, touch up the tips with Fiberglass Network because I find it repairs way better than Orly Nail Armor and I don't presume to franken. I'd mess something up for sure. Then a coat of Brown Eyed Girl over the tips and then probably a coat of Poshe top coat because Seche will cause peeling, which I hate. Poshe not so much.

This was a really chatty post. I'm sorry! I just had lots to say, I guess. I hope you like this color and I'm trying to locate places that are still carrying it. I did find it on a search on amazon through a third party vendor and I'm sure there are others. That was a surprise to me.

Happy Talons!