Get in the Mood...

  Here is another one of the lovely color changing polishes from Claire's. This time, I added a bit of a design to go with it!

  This is Claire's Mood Polish in Excited/Bored.  The color on this changes from a light peachy pink color when warm and a coral pink when cool.  Again, this is 5 coats - insane, I know.. but they are rather thin and dry super speedy!  The polish actually dries rather matte, so I applied a topcoat to get the smooth shiny look.  I then added little butterflies using Konad Special White polish and BM-222.  The color changing nail polishes are so fun on longer nails! :)

Are You Feeling Flirty? Or Shy?

  While searching through my polish drawers for a fun untried polish, I remembered that I had yet to wear three out of the four Claire's Mood Polishes that I bought last fall.  Especially since I had some nice long nails for a gradient/tip effect, I decided to play with these babies some more!

Outdoors, shade

  Claire's Flirty/Shy Mood Polish is a really great blue color changer - dark indigo when cold and a warm blue when hot.  The coolest thing about these polishes, for me at least, is that my normal body temp seems to be perfect to create a gradient look.  However, when I am freezing to death in my lab all day they tended to stay quite dark, haha.

Outdoors, sunlight

  While this polish is totally gorgeous and the effect is awesome, application and wear are a bit tricky.  This took five coats to get totally opaque and smooth - yikes!  The first few coats were very streaky and nasty, and four (thicker) or five (thinner) coats are necessary to have no VNL.  Wear is also a challenge - after two days I started getting some rather large chips.  But the effect is cool enough to make it worth it, I think.  Do you all have any of these fun mood polishes?  If so, how do they hold up for you, and do you have any tips on keeping them nice longer?  I'd love any advice!

Claire's Awesome/Silly Mood Polish

First off, let me say thank you SO much to the people that have commented, followed, and added me to your blog roll.  I really appreciate you helping me to get a good start in the world of nail blogs!  I am planning on doing a giveaway for our one month anniversary, and I will probably give out extra entries for being one of our first X followers (haven't decided the number yet).  But again, thank you, it makes me so happy to know that somebody out there wants to listen to what I have to say!  :)

Last night I tried out my new Claire's Mood Polish.  I picked up four of these when I was at the mall with my little sister Becky last week, and this is the first I have tried.  I also added some Konad from a new plate I got on the same mall trip.

Indoors, Artificial Light, No Flash

Awesome/Silly is a light pink/dark pink combo of color-changing polish; light when warm, dark when cool.  It has the tiniest hint of shimmer to it as well.  I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the polish, having been spoiled by using almost exclusively OPI for several years.  The formula went on a little streaky, and in the end I used 4 coats for complete coverage, although 3 was almost adequate.  The finish is a bit matte, so the drying time was super speedy - I was very pleased with this aspect, and made the multiple coat application not nearly as annoying.  After the full 4 coats everything looked nice a smooth!  I used Seche Vite as the topcoat here - I used one coat after just the color, and then another coat after I decided to Konad.

The color changing aspect is a lot of fun.  I have just barely long enough nails that normally, I have almost all light pink nails with slightly darker tips.

Here you can see the darker colored tips of the nails

It is a lot of fun to watch the color change when you wash your hands.

After cold water

After warm water

The next morning - Indoors, Natural Light, No Flash

For the Konad, I used plate m78 with Konad Special White polish.  I did a lot better this time with the design not smearing - and Seche Vite works wonders with Konad!  However, I did have some problems picking up all of the hearts in the design on some of the nails, which was frustrating.  But overall I find these nails cute and kind of simple.  I wanted to do a light pink and white design since I am going to meet my baby niece tomorrow.  I am very excited to be an aunt!  On that note, I am not sure how much I will be posting from now until Tuesday.  I will be bringing down some nail stuff, to probably redo mine at some point as well as hopefully find time to pamper my stressed out big sister Christy, but not sure whether I will get things posted or not.  So if I am not back until Tuesday, don't give up on me!  I will definitely be back with some awesome new nails to show you early next week.  :D