Zoya Giovanna

I'd had Giovanna in my Zoya wish list for quite some time before buying it.  It's an older polish, part of the Fall 2013 Satins & Cashmeres collection.  I always put off buying it because I have so many blue-turquoise-green polishes already.  But then I saw it at ULTA ages ago, and I absolutely had to have it!

Giovanna photographs much darker than it actually is, but in person it's a stunningly bright emerald green.  So it's definitely not a part of my extensive blue/green/turquoise/gold collection, but a part of my shockingly small actual-green collection!

Giovanna is a rare type of metallic with no noticeable secondary color.  Most metallics that I've seen have, if not an entire color shift, at least a shimmer of a slightly different hue.  But Giovanna is entirely monochromatic, yet still very shiny and shimmery.  Absolutely gorgeous!

 

It's a liiiiittle bit streaky, but I don't really mind.  I noticed more streaks on nails where I accidentally applied too much polish, so definitely be careful to apply this one nice and thinly.  Two coats yields perfect coverage.

In the months that passed between the time I wrote and the time I published this post, Zoya released their Summer 2015 collections.  One of the metallics, Selene, is almost identical to Giovanna.  I actually don't own Selene, but Kirby of The Mercurial Magpie owns both, and she compared them in this post.  They're so similar that even I don't see any reason to own both of them, unless you either a) love the color SO much that you use it all the time and don't want to run out, or b) are really concerned with collecting and want to own every polish from each collection.  As Kirby notes, the metallic texture is very slightly different between the two - Selene has that new flakie metallic texture, while Giovana is a classically smooth metallic.

One more note - if my fingers look weird in these photos, well, they were kinda weird!  I had a nasty scab on my pinky from a slip-up with a cheese grater, so I blurred it out to avoid upsetting anyone who might be squeamish.  And my middle finger nail had recently split very badly, so I patched it up using the tea bag method and a LOT of layers of nail glue.  It ended up making my nail look super wide and flat and bleh, but it's better than breaking off so short that it hurts for days.