China Glaze's "I'm with the Lifeguard" swatch

Today I have a swatch of the second China Glaze polish that I bought. "I'm with the Lifeguard" is a bright neon green with shimmer. I really like this colour, it's so bright and perfect for the summer. That is, if England ever gets some nice weather...

Of course, being a neon it's impossibly difficult to capture the colour on camera. The second picture is more colour accurate than the first, but it's still brighter in real life. These swatches show 2 coats and a topcoat.

Sorry for the short post today, but I don't have much else to say... :P

What's your favourite colour for the summer? I would definitely wear this one again. :)

China Glaze's "Sunkissed" dupe

I promised this post a couple of weeks ago, and finally it's here! When I showed you the Primark neons, I said that the yellow looks similar to swatches of China Glaze's "Sunkissed" that I had seen. Since I had the polish on order, I wanted to swatch it and compare. This would have been posted last week, but something jubilee related was needed, of course.

In the bottles, both polishes look pretty similar, other than China Glaze having a little more shimmer and being slightly greener.

However, the consistencies of the polishes are loads different to each other when applied to the nails. Primark's yellow is much, much sheerer than Sunkissed and could have had another coat to be more opaque. Also, the difference in shimmer is more obvious. When dry, Sunkissed dries with a semi-matte finish but Primark's yellow dries quite shiny. I added a topcoat to make both polishes shiny.

These pictures are more colour accurate than the original Primark neons swatches because I used a different camera. What do you think, have you noticed a difference in the picture quality or is it the same?

Overall, I don't think that the Primark yellow is a perfect dupe for China Glaze's "Sunkissed", however it could make a nice alternative if you can't China Glaze's polishes. They're just as bright as each other, although I think China Glaze has a better finish. But for the price of Primark's polishes (although the bottles are smaller) you can't go wrong!

Primark Neons swatch

If you hadn't noticed, the weather is amazing in the UK right now! With the summer weather finally arriving, it's time to take out the neon colours. Yesterday, I went into Primark and saw these neon polishes (and a few colour collections) at £2 for a box of 4. Mega bargain!

Unfortunately, my camera struggled to get the colours right. The pink and orange are accurate, but the green and yellow are tons brighter in real life. The yellow is more of a highlighter yellow, with shimmer, and the green is super bright, and kinda yellow-ish.

For the swatches, I painted each of my nails except the ring finger in a solid colour. For the ring finger, I put some of each colour on the nail then swirled them together at the edges. This created a colourful tie-dye effect. The inspiration for this was from Nail Stories.

The swatches are two coats of each colour. This got them to be the same colour as they appear in the bottle. The application was a bit difficult as the brushes didn't flatten out too well for me, but clean up isn't a huge issue. Also, I'm not a huge fan of "fat lids", I prefer the skinny ones as in Barry M polishes. But that's just down to personal preference. The formula was to be expected of cheap polishes. It was streaky in the first coat, and kinda uneven, but with a second coat and a top coat it was fine. Also, the smell was odd... it's as if they used something to cover up the usual chemical smells, but I can't put my finger on what it is.

Overall, I think they're well worth the price and I look forward to trying more of Primark's collections!
On a side note, the yellow looks like it could be a dupe of China Glaze's "Sun Kissed" from their 2012 Summer Neons collection. I have that coming in the post, so as soon as it arrives I'll do a comparison!