- - Maybelline's Mystic Green & Julep's Beatrix - -

Hi everyone!

I'm taking a break from studying for tomorrow's midterm to quickly show you a manicure I've been sporting since the beginning of the week. On Sunday I saw one of my co-workers with what I think was O.P.I.'s Just Spotted The Lizard nail polish. It was honestly love at first sight. I haven't been able to find it in stores, but I have heard that apparently it's a replica of Chanel's Peridot. In any case, trying to hold on to the image of my co-worker's nails in my memory, I ended up going to Rexall on Monday to search for the colour. There were a couple of similar polishes that I found...

To read more, click click click...

I remember my co-worker saying that the nail polish looked green in the bottle but was mostly gold when on the nails. Therefore, I set out to search for any kind of green-ish metallic colours I could find. I ended up finding that Sally Hansen's Lustre Shine Nail Color in "Plume" and Maybelline's "Mystic Green" nail lacquer were very similar to my co-worker's nail polish. The latter was in a smaller bottle and, therefore, cheaper, so I ended up going with that.

Now, I am fairly new to everything pertaining to blogging and to swatches, so please just bear with me and my pictures :)

If you look past the bright glare from the flash of my camera, you can see that the colour sort of changes depending on the angle and the lighting. For example, to me the picture below looks more gold:

Indoors + flash

As opposed to this one, which (in my opinion) looks more green:

Indoors + flash

 ...and now we've got an interesting shade of blue:

Indoors; no flash

I had to put on about 2 coats of Mystic Green to achieve almost full opacity. I say almost because there were still some places where I could see my nails a bit. Nonetheless, the formula of this nail polish is really good, so there was no problem in going over the spots that needed to be covered up some more. I have to say that I've gotten so used to the thicker formulas of Julep's nail polishes that it kind of surprised me that going over a few spots didn't create an clumps.

Moving right along, I recently received Beatrix, the nail polish that I had my eye on for a bit. Just to clarify -- Julep states that Beatrix is "coal black with multidimensional glitter." This description is a bit deceiving because Beatrix has a clear base and is actually full of black/holographic glitter. Therefore, it's perfect for layering over other polishes!

You have to understand that I used to rarely ever do my nails, let alone create intricate designs on them. So, even those this is a pretty basic manicure, it's still pretty exciting for me to try it out -- and hey, we do all have to start somewhere. It's difficult to convey how lovely and edgy this looks in person, but here are a few pictures for you to check out:

As I mentioned above, Mystic Green seems to have a blue tint at certain angles. Here's a close up with no flash that might help you see this:

Note the hint of blue at the top of each nail

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alrighty, it's back to studying for me. Before I go though I want to share with you a sneak peak of the Julep December Maven box that I received today. I absolutely love the colours that I selected from this collection! Tomorrow is the only day of school/exam that I have this week, so I'll try to write up the review after I come home. In the meantime, you're welcome to check out my summary of what Julep's Glitterati collection consists of.

 As always, thank you kindly for reading!~