Polish Me Royalty: Strawberry Shortcake

A little while ago, I played a fun game on Instagram, started by one of the crocheters that I follow.  She promised to buy something from the winner's shop, and then the winner would start the next round and buy something from the next winner's shop.  I won the first round, so I got to host the second round!  Even though I posted the game on my crochet shop account and used hashtags to lure in fellow crocheters, most of the people who played wound up being indie polish makers.  I wasn't exactly complaining about that, though!  I ended up randomly selecting Polish Me Royalty, a UK-based polish company.  I briefly contemplated cheating and picking someone else, because of international shipping fees, but I'm really glad that I stayed honorable!  PMR only charges $9.51 (that's USD) in shipping to the US, and to be honest, I've paid close to that amount in shipping with domestic orders before.  So I picked out two mini polishes for myself.

I think we're past the point of me needing to introduce my obsession with strawberries.  It's a well-known fact that Kate's Nailing It loves strawberries by now, right?  So when I saw that Polish Me Royalty made a polish called Strawberry Shortcake, I knew I had to have it and that made me all the more glad that I'd drawn this shop as my winner in the Indie Shop Game.

Strawberry Shortcake is super highly pigmented.  Even with a mini bottle, and even with my super-long nails, it was very nearly a one-coater!  Incredible.  I'd be willing to bet that a full-sized bottle would be a OCW every time.

The color is exactly what you'd expect from a strawberry-inspired polish: bright, berry pink.  It's a creme formula, and there's a bit of a subtle shimmer to it.  Sadly, my camera could barely pick it up except in the bottle.  The shimmer is very pretty though, being pinkish-silver in tone.  I think that's why it's so subtle - because the shimmer color is so similar to the base color.  You can also see the shimmer pretty decently in the picture with flash:

Oh, and as it turns out, this polish is scented!  I noticed a scent on my nails the whole time I was wearing this one (I wore it for a few days on both hands), but I kept thinking that the raspberry scented cuticle oil I'd just started using had simply soaked in to my skin and made me smell like berries.  But I talked to Sarah, PMR's maker, on Facebook and it turns out that this polish has a strawberry scent to it.  Strawberry Shortcake is part of her Just Desserts trio, and each polish is scented like the fruity dessert that it's inspired by!  It is a fairly faint scent, though - I barely noticed it unless I was actively sniffing my nails.  But Sarah said that she's working on making the scent stronger, so future batches may be more noticeable than mine!

I really like PMR's little heart-shaped bottles.  They're so cute and delicate!

All in all, I'm very glad that I had an excuse to try out a new indie brand.  I also bought Space Wizzard, which I'll swatch on the blog somewhere down the line.  And Sarah was kind enough to throw in a mini bottle of Hollow, which was super nice of her!  I'll probably put those two in a post together since they're both incredible holographic glitters.

In the meantime, be sure to enter my blogiversary giveaway!  It's ending in just under a week and there are still VERY few individual entrants!

UPDATE: This post was initially posted with the wrong polish name!  I fixed it.  shhhhh