Models Own - Tropical Sun

I think I mentioned yesterday that I have been looking at some different cruelty free brands and this is one. They advertise themselves to be "Furry Friendly" and go on to explain if you click on it, that they do not use animal products or test on animals. Good enough!

I don't honestly know how long this brand has been around but I've seen it on other blogs and there are some rather spectacular colors. This is a British company which means overseas shipping and they do charge for it. Quite a lot. So I didn't screw around. I bought a bunch and made the shipping feel more worth it. Also, as it was my first order I was able to get a free black eye liner which helped with the shipping sting as well. I picked up the Beetlejuice collections, both of them, plus the Hed Kandi collection. Today I decided to try Tropical Sun. It's a peach so it's springy, but it definitely has a hot feel to it.

I thought, too, since I'm always telling you the mechanics of a manicure that I should show you what these steps look like, but I think I will make that a separate post as it would make this very picture heavy and keep you from looking at something you might really be interested in. So without further ado, here is Models Own - Tropical Sun:

It's a lovely pinky orange sort of thing. It's really very complex.

Here is one coat over everything I'll show you in the next post:

OK...very sheer, and very pink. It's really not this pink going on. It took me awhile but I figured it out. Between the natural sunlight from the window and the flash...pink. But that's OK because there really is quite a bit of pink in it.

A closer one coat shot. Let's see what we have here...a pink sheer with a yellow gold flash. OK...I buy that. I also feel a sort of green in this. Does that make sense? I don't detect green consciously, but it feels very green...and very hot. If this color had a temperature it would be hot. White hot.

Two coats and looking very pink here. It really honestly isn't and I can show you that in a bit. Just hang with me because these pink shots DO help explain the polish some. This is the pink in the peach. In normal every day lighting you will never see this pink but it's in the polish. It's there and it's what gives the color depth.

A two coat shot. I think I was still deciding if three was going to be the way to go. I did three and more, actually, but we'll get there. I'm still using a flash here.

Here is what happens when wonder genius (me) takes the flash off:

Ah. The actual color. But see what is happening? It's like a duochrome effect, with gold flash. THe pink is in there but it's not that noticeable. However...those bubbles are. I barely shook this so what is up with the bubbles? Oh where ohr where is that Twit in the Beret when I need her?

My right hand was better able to be in the sunlight from the window where I was sitting and this shows the color beautifully. You can also see what a rubbish paint job I typically do, but regardless, this is a great representation of the color. There is a lot happening here but it's very wearable. This is three coats. Three coats gave a nice opacity. Two might have been OK, but I like three better.

Less light here, but a nice show of the color in low light. It becomes more tangerine, which is also very pretty. I was wondering what this would do on someone who could generate a tan. I cannot. I will be this ghostly no matter what. Redhead. But it's pretty on me, I think.

A nice bottle shot. Ugh. The bubbles! I will walk you through how I attempted to fix that.

The bottom label shot. Note the pink at the top of the bottle. Fascinating!

Mechanics:

1 coat Models Own 3in1 - It came with the set.
1 coat Nailtiques 2 Plus
2 coats Seche Rebuild
3 coats Models Own Tropical Sun
1 coat Models Own 3in1

The 3in1...hm. Well....it was a nice base coat. We'll see how it wears. As a top coat...it wasn't bad, but it was slow to dry. Not terrible, but remained tacky. I had a dinner to put on and tacky wasn't going to cut it. Plus, I had those bloody bubbles. So. I put on a fourth coat of Tropical Sun and then a coat of Seche Vite top coat.

Here are the results of that in natural sunlight:

OK, blurry but neat photo. The camera focused on the barn wall and not my fingers. However, this does show the glow this polish has. It looks like a Tropical Sun. Isn't that great? No hint of the pink we saw before but without it this wouldn't work, I don't think. It's really quite lovely.

Against the black top. A nice glowy peach. You can see here how wearable this is.

Now all we need to do is see how it wears. Now...with the fourth coat of lacquer over the top coat it should wear very well. I find that is a cute little trick to get the most out of your polish. I've already had a casualty, however, where it apparently didn't dry all the way through and got pushed back on one nail and bungled on another. I didn't take pics. We'll see how it does over all. I need to go make a repair attempt on these two and we'll go from there.


Some notes on the packaging. The bottles come individually shrink wrapped. At first I was really not amused by this. What a nuisance! Then I thought of the LCN debacle. They keep emailing me and I keep not ordering from them. I'm not wasting my money on polish that comes open and spilled all over. I suppose the shrink wrap system DOES prevent that. I was grumbling inwardly because I almost always ruin a nail getting that crap off when..what did I spy?

 Check it! It's a little pull handle! I should have known. The company IS purported to be owned by models, which means they have probably applied a layer of lacquer or two in their day which means...they may know my pain! This was painless!

Pull the little tab and Voila!:

It comes down the little perforations like a dream. Un-zips in a lovely way and no split nails over it. Nice.

The formula was...runny. Not terrible, not watery like the horrible experience with Spa Ritual but runny enough. Several times I had to stop and re-dab the brush because polish was running down the wand. It wasn't hard to control but you had to pay attention. Which probably explains why I have lacquer all over me. I was trying to root on Tony Kanaan (Maybe next year is your year, baby! You keep driving like you drive! Third is COMPLETELY respectable at the Indy!) and I wasn't fully focusing on my paint. Sorry, but I've been pulling for Tony to get an Indy win for over a decade now. I just love to watch him drive. And no, I've not met him personally but when you root someone on faithfully for 11 years you FEEL like you're on a first name basis. The drivers I met in my youth (and my parents wilder days) are now coaching from the pits. But I always root for Tony.

I suspect if I left the top off this for about an hour it would thicken up nicely and be a breeze. It was kind of annoying but it wasn't unbearable.

So let's see how it wears!

Happy Talons!!

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!