Polish Groupie

It’s not lost on me that this is my 13th post, as this was one unlucky manicure.

It features Rainbow Honey’s Mare Of The Moon, which is a beautiful purplish-blue color shifter that has shimmer plus silver crescent moon glitter. I have been lusting after a blue polish with moon glitter ever since I first saw Windestine’s Spica featured on a blog two months ago (it’s on my lemmings list).

So when I saw Mare Of The Moon, part of Rainbow Honey’s Equestria collection, I had to have it. Let me just say off the top that I love the color of this polish. It really is a beauty. And despite what’s to follow, I really enjoyed wearing this polish. Can’t take my eyes off of it.

But here’s where we get into the “unlucky” part of this manicure. I had a terrible time with the application. Part of my problem was definitely that this was a mini (7ml) bottle, and I found the short brush challenging to work with and the large top a bit awkward to hold. With my painting hand being so close to my “being painted” hand, it was difficult for me to maneuver the brush the way I wanted, and to see what was going on. Maybe this is just the danger of the mini bottle. I admit, I haven’t purchased that many. Will definitely pause next time I’m tempted to buy one. That said, I applied undies on this which was also a mini bottle, and I didn’t have nearly the trouble applying that one. More on the undies later.

The rest of my application problems I think had to do with the polish itself. It can be quite thin and watery, almost like water color if you don’t load the brush enough. I didn’t mind that as much as I did the drying time. It seemed to dry very quickly; before I had even finished painting a nail, that nail had already begun to set. Plus it has what I would call just shy of a matte finish. That was a disaster given that I had to fish out and try to place the moon glitter, which for me was the main attraction of this polish.

As I’d try to move the glitter or even transfer it from the brush to my nail, i was disrupting the parts of the polish that had already begun setting. It made for a very uneven, bumpy and frankly not very attractive end result, though adding topcoat helped smooth things out.

The final nail in the coffin here is that I cannot find my cleanup brush, which I desperately needed on this one. I did what I could with an orange stick dipped in acetone.

natural light

For undies I used one coat of Mattese Elite’s Up My Platinum, available from Ricky’s NYC. I probably didn’t need it, but I didn’t want to risk it. Up My Platinum is a frosty silver that went on pretty smoothly. Formula was quite nice. Here it is on its own with a top coat.

I followed that with two coats of Mare Of The Moon and a coat of Poshe.

I will definitely try this one out again when I have all my ducks in a row and am feeling at the top of my game. Now that I’m more familiar with the formula, I think I could do a better job of wrangling it.

Mare of the Moon is available from RainbowHoney.com. Currently the minis are in stock but the full size is not. Rainbow Honey’s polishes are 3-free, as are Mattese Elite’s.