Do I Need Them All? Zoya Ryan vs Essie Style Cartel

Welcome to this month's edition of Do I Need Them All!  Today we'll be looking at two lovely navy blue cremes: Zoya Ryan and Essie Style Cartel.  They're both from each company's Fall 2014 collections, but navy is always a good color for this time of year!  I actually bought Ryan shortly before breaking a no-buy policy to snatch up Style Cartel, and then I facepalmed at myself when I held them up next to each other.  Let's see how they actually compare!

Style Cartel is a little bit lighter and more blue-toned than Ryan.  Ryan is such a deep shade of navy that it almost looks black in lots of lighting.

Don't mind the airbubbles on my ring finger!  Or the bright blue glare, which is from my lamp and its blue shade.

Overall, I like Ryan more than Style Cartel.  Ryan's formula is dense and highly pigmented.  It can almost be a one-coater, as long as you have a steady hand.  I did use two coats in these photos, mainly to help neaten the line around my cuticles.  Style Cartel, however, is much thinner, almost the the point that it's watery.  I left it at two coats on my middle finger, and did three coats on my pinkie.  You can see that the third coat deepened the shade just a little bit, but it still looks lighter and bluer than Ryan.

So, Do I Need Them All?  Ehhhh, I would say no.  They are slightly different, so I wouldn't call them dupes, but they're so close that I don't think owning both is a must.  My personal recommendation is Ryan, simply because the formula is so much smoother and more opaque, but Style Cartel is also a  good navy blue polish.

Do I Need Them All? Zoya Mikka, Shivon, and Haven vs Julep Elle

Welcome to this month's edition of Do I Need Them All!  Since it's September, I thought I would start looking at deeper, more autumn-y colors.  Today we'll be looking at four purples: Zoya Mikka, Haven, and Shivon, and Julep Elle.  All of these polishes are at least a year old, but they're all lovely purples that are perfect for this time of year!

From left to right is Elle, Mikka, Haven, and then Shivon.  As always with this series, I have the polishes in the same order on my nails from pointer to pinkie fingers.

As you can see, Shivon is on an entirely different page than the rest of these shades.  It's not as deeply purple as the other three, but I figured it was close enough that it should be included in this post, anyway.  Once you get it on the nail, it's a very rosy purple with flashes of gold, while the other three colors are much more purple and less colorshifty.

These polishes all photographed pretty horribly; no matter what I tried, they just came out looking brownish or blackened.  I did the best I could to edit the photos for color accuracy, but they're still a little bit off.  I know Elle, Mikka, and Haven all look pretty much identical in this photo.  There are some subtle differences between the three in person that you'll just have to take my word on.  Be sure to check out the linked store pages for the companies' photos!

Elle and Mikka are similar enough that I think it's safe to say that they're dupes.  Mikka is perhaps a touch more reddish, but barely.  They look the most identical in the bottle as well: they both have a silver shimmer to them, while Haven glistens with a brighter orchid purple.  Between Elle and Mikka, my personal favorite is Elle.

So, Do I Need Them All?  Not really!  Shivon definitely stands out from the other three, but if you only want one deep purple metallic, you'll be happy with Elle, Mikka, or Haven.  Haven's orchid tones make it stand out from Elle and Mikka, but as for the latter two, I would recommend choosing one or the other.

Do I Need Them All?: Zoya Demetria vs China Glaze I Brake For Colour

Welcome to this month's edition of Do I Need Them All!  Today, we're going to look at two fairly new polishes: Zoya Demetria and China Glaze I Brake For Colour.  Demetria is from Zoya's Paradise Sun collection, while I Brake For Colour is from China Glaze's Road Trip collection.

I have Demetria on my pointer and ring fingers, and I Brake For Colour on my middle and pinkie fingers.

This image is slightly Photoshopped; please see the bottom section for an explanation!

They're pretty close in color, but definitely different!  (Unless you're part of the population who can't see as many shades of red, perhaps?)  Demetria is a bright, summery red that borders on neon, while I Brake For Colour is more of a bright pinkish coral.  In the bottle they look very close, but on the nail, they definitely belong to two different color families!

The formula on both polishes is very similar: both apply very smoothly and are highly pigmented, and both require two coats.  I Brake For Colour leans a tad to the thin side, so be careful of flooding your cuticles with too much polish.

So, do I need them all?  Sure!  It's always fun to have bright reds and pinks in one's nail polish collection.  These are definitely not dupes.

*    *    *

Okay, these polishes photographed kind of horribly.  My camera has a tendency to highly over-saturate very bright colors and reds.  So ask it to photograph a bright red polish, and it looks horrid.  I couldn't even hold either of the bottles in the photos because of how badly it flattened the reds and whitened my skin (as if my skin isn't already white enough)!  No amount of adjusting the white balance, ISO, shutter speed, or aperture seemed to help (for the non-photography savvy: I tried changing how much light the camera let in).  Here's how grossly over-saturated the polishes actually showed up on my camera:

As you can see, both polishes look much more orange than they truly are, and they don't really look all that different.  So I cooled down the color on the computer by adding a LOT of blue to the photo.  This photo more accurately shows the colors of the polishes:

My skin is so blue here that it's pretty jarring.  So for the first image that you saw, I crudely Photoshopped my nails in the blue photo onto my hands in the non-blue photo.  I know it's not the best job, but I wanted to show you what the polishes actually look like on my skin, rather than make you try to picture the blue-d nails on my non-blue skin.

What do you think of this new series?  Want to see more posts like it, or other types of posts that I haven't done many of?  Let me know in the comments or by giving your feedback here!

Do I Need Them All?: A new comparison series!

Welcome to my new monthly series of blog posts, called "Do I Need Them All?"!  Once a month from now on, I'll be comparing nail polishes that look very similar or even identical and answering the question of whether or not one really needs them all.  (I was going to go with "Do I Need Them Both," but then as I was pulling out polishes for this post, I had four very similar polishes so I decided to make the series title a bit more open-ended.)  Similar or identical polishes, whether they were released by the same or by different companies, are often called "dupes," or duplicates, of each other.  Unless you're a professional nail artist or a collector, buying a dupe of a polish that you already have can be frustrating and expensive.  So I'm here to help you out by letting you know if you need them all!

For today's inaugural Do I Need Them All post, I'll be comparing four different blue creme polishes: Zoya Robyn, Zoya Ling, Sinful Colors Why Not?, and Essie Strut Your Stuff.

In the name of consistency, I made sure to line up the polishes in the same order from left to right in both photos.

 

As you can see, these are all very similar.  Probably the two that are most similar are Robyn and Why Not.  Although those two are nearly identical, they are still just a tiiiiny bit different: Why Not is a tad bit richer and bolder.  They both look pretty much 100% the same as Strut Your Stuff on camera, but you can see the variation better in person.

Ling is definitely the darkest and deepest, while Strut Your Stuff stands out as the most neon.

Even the formulas on these four was very similar.  They all required two coats, though Strut Your Stuff was the only one that I would say definitely always needs two coats.  The first three are pigmented enough that a very steady, skilled hand might be able to get away with using only one coat, but Strut Your Stuff was much thinner.  Blue polish is pretty notorious for staining, and even though I didn't wear these for long, 3 of these 4 were no exception.  Ling didn't really stain my nails or skin at all; Robyn, Why Not, and Strut Your Stuff all required some light scrubbing with toothpaste to get rid of all the blue.

So, to answer the question of do I need them all?: probably not.  If you love blue as much as I do, you might, but if you're just looking for a good bright sky blue creme, any one of these will satisfy your needs.  They're all so close in color and formula that your color palette won't be missing much by only owning one of these.  But if you really want two of them, make sure one of them is Ling.

What do you think of this new series?  Want to see more of it, or is there a different type of non-swatch post that you'd like to see?  Let me know in the comments or by giving your feedback here!

Matte Topcoats: OPI vs Zoya

First off, just a heads up: this is going to be a long post, and VERY photo-heavy.  Bear with me!

Recently, Zoya offered their Matte Velvet top coat for free with any purchase.  Being the frugal nail blogger that I am, I opted to buy just one polish (Zuza - a beautiful mermaid-turquoise that I will swatch eventually).  Although I already had a matte top coat, I wanted to get Zoya's because I haven't been very happy with the one I have.

So, naturally, as a nail blogger with two of basically the same polish but by different brands, the only thing I could do is a comparison.

In this comparison, I look at three different factors: Application (does it smear?), Dry Time (which is faster?), and Wear (does it crack or chip easily? does it allow edge shrinkage?).

I decided that the best way to test smearing upon application would be by doing a variety of nail art designs: stripes, dots, a gradient, and Crackle.  I figured that a white background would show the most smearing.

This nail art is ah... well, horizontal stripes aren't my strong point, as you'll see on my thumbs.  This really wasn't meant to look like super good nail art; I simply wanted to show a good variety of colors and designs.  I chose dark colors for the horizontal stripes and the dots, since I figured those were most likely to smear.  And the gradient, well, I missed the candy corn day of the LPLGlamghouls Halloween challenge, but I'd really been looking forward to it!

OPI's Matte top coat is on my left hand, and Zoya's is on my right.  Bear in mind that I'm right-handed, which means the nails on my right hand take more of a beating in my day-to-day activities.  Both hands have the same base coat: ORLY Bonder.

For reference: Day One was Wednesday, Day Two Thursday, and Day Three Friday (Halloween (yeah, this post has been sitting around for a while)).

Day One: Application 

For both of these, I sat back and let my nails dry for at least ten minutes before applying two coats of top coat. I also wrapped my tips, both with the base color and with the top coats. 

OPI

OPI's Matte is rather thick.  Not un-spreadably thick, and not problematically thick - just thick.

I barely wiped off any excess polish, to prevent the bristles of the brush from smearing my designs.  This is a trick I learned a while ago.  It worked on my four fingers, but on my thumb I still got a liiiittle bit of smearing.

This wasn't really a surprise, since black almost always smears no matter what you do.  However, the smearing wasn't so bad that I had to clean off the top coat brush.

OPI Application rating: 8/10

Zoya

The formula for Zoya's Matte Velvet is much thinner than OPI's.  Not too thin.  It's about on par with INM's Out The Door top coat, which is what I'm most used to.  I wiped off some excess polish and was still able to keep the bristles from smearing directly against my designs.

It did smear a tiny bit on one of the dotted flowers, and a little bit on my thumb as well - but again, the smearing was not so bad that I had to clean off the brush.  There is a bit of a smear on my pointer finger, but that's because I smooshed the yellow stripe before it dried - not the top coat's fault.

And the ding on my thumb is more user error - I dinged that as I was setting up my camera and lighting.  I need to be more patient with that....

Zoya Application rating: 9/10

Day One: After Cooking

My timing when I paint my nails is often pretty bad, and I end up having to cook dinner less than an hour after I finish painting.  This day was no different; even though I painted much earlier in the day, I had to prep a slow cooker recipe almost immediately after taking the initial pictures.  I decided to show you how the top coats held up after cooking.  (This recipe was simple; all I did was trim the meat and pour some sauces over it in the slow cooker.)

OPI

My left hand held up pretty well, though the knife did slip and chip in to my middle finger nail a tiny bit.

That counts as user error; I'm sure that would have chipped no matter what top coat I was wearing.

 

OPI Dry Time rating: 10/10

Zoya

I didn't notice anything while I was prepping, but when I went back to my room I noticed a terrible wrinkle on my middle finger.  I would guess this happened while I was holding the knife; I tend to put a lot of pressure on my middle finger when cutting.

After noticing that wrinkle, I poked a little at my other nails and found that they were still slightly damp as well.  In future, perhaps I'll use a thin coat of Out The Door before using this top coat.

I also noticed some slight edge shrinkage on my pointer finger, and I dinged the tip of my thumb on something-or-other.

Zoya Dry Time rating: 5/10

Day Two: After Showering and Sleeping

After I cooked on Wednesday, I didn't do much with my hands all day and I didn't notice myself slamming any fingers particularly hard against any surfaces.  I showered before bed, and the next pictures were taken not long after I got up on Thursday.

OPI

A HUGE crack appeared over night on my pointer finger, as well as some edge shrinkage.

This wasn't surprising based on my experience with this top coat in the past.

There was a little bit more edge shrinkage on my middle finger, and a small spot of shrinkage appeared on my ring finger.

OPI Initial Wear rating: 5/10

Zoya

A thin crack appeared on my pointer finger, but I actually didn't see it until I looked at the pictures on my computer.  The cracks were so fine that my eyes didn't really pick up on them at this point.

 

There was little change otherwise, even on the wrinkled-polish nail.

  
Zoya Initial Wear rating: 9/10

Day Three: After another Shower and more Sleeping

Admittedly, I did not do very much at all on Thursday.  I wasn't feeling well all day, so I didn't go out at all, and I didn't exercise either.  I would have liked to keep wearing these top coats for at least another day, but as Day Three was Halloween, I needed to re-do my nails to match my costume!  These photos were taken after eating breakfast and right before I removed this polish.

OPI

Another large crack appeared on my pointer finger.

A slight crack also appeared on my middle finger.   

Edge shrinkage worsened noticeably on all fingers except my pinky and thumb.  (In fact, there was very little change in either of my thumbs at all - and since this post is already so long, I decided not to bother showing my thumbs.)

OPI Overall Wear rating: 4/10

Zoya

The cracks on my pointer finger worsened to the point that I could see them with my naked eye, but they were still nowhere near as deep as the ones on my left hand.  This says a lot about the top coat, as I use my right hand more frequently.

There was little to no edge shrinkage on any other finger, and I also didn't notice any cracks on other fingers.

  
Zoya Overall Wear rating: 9/10

To Summarize

OPI Combined score: 27/40 (D+)
Zoya Combined score: 32/40 (B-) 

While OPI's Matte Top Coat dries faster, the quality of the manicure diminishes greatly as time goes on.  Not only does cracking look bad, it's also bad for your nails as the crack can potentially damage the top few layers of your actual nail.  I would much rather sacrifice dry time for a good, lasting manicure.  It looks like from now on, I'll be using Zoya's Matte Velvet Top Coat!

What's your matte top coat of choice?  Have you had a different experience with either of these two?  Have you found a matte top coat that would get a B+ or better?  Let me know in the comments!