Rescue Beauty Lounge Piu Mosso

Good morning. Today I have for you one of the new Rescue Beauty Lounge polishes from the recent Firebird collection. I chose one shade from the collection, Piu Mosso, and pre-ordered it way back in July. I received it in late August and finally got around to wearing it yesterday.

Unfortunately my experience with Piu Mosso was not what I had hoped, in general and certainly not based on my previous experience with RBL polishes. However, some of that was definitely due to operator error and was not the fault of the polish - so I'll have to give it another try to know for sure. Perhaps my thoughts will be helpful if you're considering buying this shade.

I chose Piu Mosso because of the gorgeous murky blue base color and the sunset-orange shimmer.

Doesn't it look awesome? Amazing? Delightfully unique? Well in the bottle, it is.

Part of me knew the shimmer would not be that strong or dramatic on the nail but...I couldn't help hoping otherwise. You do get flashes of it from time to time:

But mostly, it looks like this.

Indoor lighting

Natural lighting

In the picture above, you can see a bit of the dragging (near the cuticle on my middle finger) and the dullness of the finish. These are two of the issues I had with Piu Mosso.

To be fair, I didn't exactly set myself up for success with this manicure. I put the polish on at around 11pm, when I should have been going to bed. I was dead tired, exhausted actually; and to make matters worse I decided it would be okay to drink a Diet Coke before/during doing my nails. So my application skills were probably not what I would call "ideal." I was impatient and cranky and probably rushed a little.

However.

The formula was definitely thick and definitely difficult to control. It was pasty, resulting in drag marks like you can see in the picture above. I did a very thin first coat but went fairly thick on the second coat; this would also prove a bad idea when not 10 hours later the manicure began chipping. (I do think that's my fault...I used too thick of a second coat.)

I used Seche Vite as a top coat. I don't remember this giving me problems with RBL previously but I'll definitely try something different with Piu Mosso next time. The chipping got much, much worse and I actually removed the polish less than 24 hours after putting it on. Typically I leave manicures on for at least 2-3 days and if I need to, I often get 5-6 days of wear. So this was annoying.

I dearly love my other RBL polishes - they are heavily pigmented, easy to apply and have good wear with my usual base coat/top coat combination. I might try a couple drops of thinner in Piu Mosso.

The fact is, however, that none of these tactics will change the fact that the color isn't quite what I'd hoped. Someone suggested trying Piu Mosso over another polish with a similar base color, and I'm willing to give that a try as well.

The biggest bummer of all is that when you lightly swipe a cotton ball soaked in acetone over the polish, it lifts up just enough of the murky blue to let that coppery orange shimmer really glow. ARGH!

NOTD: Revlon Fierce

FIERCE!!

It's appropriate that I've bought this polish the same week the new season of America's Next Top Model starts up again. I'm not watching it this season ("All-Stars"...too crazy) but if you are, or if you have ever seen it in the past, or know anything about Tyra Banks whatsoever, then you know that the show and the word "fierce" are inextricably linked.

Anyhow. It was during a random trip to Rite Aid that I finally found the new Revlon Edgy Elegance display. I've been cruising the drugstores lately looking for the Wet 'n' Wild Halloween release, along with new stuff from L'Oreal and Revlon, and coming up with nada for the most part.

(My CVS in particular is useless for this right now. All the cosmetics special display space is taken up by Burt's Bees products, Garnier hair color (??) and the woefully boring WnW "Go With The Flow-er" display from early summer. GAH!)

Revlon nail products are BOGO 1/2 off at the moment, so I scrounged another Just Tinted topcoat (not in love with it...more on this in a minute) and picked Fierce from the Edgy Elegance collection.

Revlon Fierce

Fierce can best be described as a violet-leaning silvery purple foil. The formula on this was thick thick thick but easy to control. It could possibly be a one-coater.

With flash, indoors

In natural light

So I mentioned the Just Tinted topcoat. I heard that this was akin to Seche Vite but without the shrinkage issues, so last time I was in a Walgreens I took a peek and found one hanging around. I picked up another bottle at Rite Aid because of the 1/2 off sale. I figured the likelihood of this playing well with another Revlon product was high, so I gave it a try with Fierce.

Well. First of all, a lot of color came up on the brush. I'm not sure if that's the fault of the topcoat or the polish (or me). Otherwise it applied very well, but it took forever to dry. (It doesn't claim to be a quick dry top coat anywhere on the bottle, I just thought that was worth noting.) It's shiny, but not as shiny as SV or Sally Hansen Insta-Dri. My nails were tacky for a very long time and in fact were still dentable this morning - although now the dent has disappeared...which is strange yet sort of awesome.

I'll definitely try the Just Tinted topcoat with another polish and see how that goes. It's not horrible by any means but I suspect it wasn't at its best over Fierce. And I do love Fierce, so I want to wear it with an awesome top coat.

Incidentally, the stickers on the caps of the Edgy Elegance polishes say "New Shade" rather than "Limited Edition." So perhaps they will become core, which is good news for those whose local drugstores are a bit slow on the uptake. (Ahem, northeast Ohio.)

Les Jeans de Chanel

I bought myself the Fashion's Night Out exclusive Les Jeans de Chanel polishes for my birthday. This is a limited edition collection and they are sold individually at selected Chanel boutiques and online. (At the time of writing this post, they are still available.) I'm not certain if you can find these at Chanel counters or not.

(You may remember the Les Khakis de Chanel from last year's FNO. I treated myself to Khaki Vert, which I love but oddly enough don't have a swatch picture of.)

Anyway.

The three shades are Blue Boy, Blue Rebel and Coco Blue. Coco Blue is a shimmer, the other two shades are cremes.

Blue Boy, the medium shade.

Blue Rebel, the darkest shade.

And finally, Coco Blue. The shimmer is quite subtle.


In my memory, Nouvelle Vague was a light blue with subtle shimmer, just like Coco Blue. However! They are very different.

I don't have Riva to compare to these shades, unfortunately.


Here they are on the nail wheel at one coat. Blue Rebel, Blue Boy, Coco Blue.

And at two coats:

You can see some drag at the bottom of the nails for the two lightest shades, but I did a full manicure with Blue Boy and that wasn't the case. Two coats covered perfectly. The application on these was very nice, though I haven't done full manis with Blue Rebel or Coco Blue.

Some comparisons:

Misa Office Polish-tics, Blue Reble, Blue Boy

Blue Boy, Coco Blue, Nouvelle Vague. It's amazing how green NV looks next to Coco Blue!

Here's Blue Boy on the nail.

I do love this color. The formula is almost jelly-like and I had excellent control of it going on. Definite A+.

Of course this release brings up the usual hate and resentment about Chanel. There will always be people outraged at Chanel for the simple fact that it's Chanel, and there's nothing anyone can do about that.

Are these polishes 100% unique? Nope. I don't have any dupes in my collection, but I am sure they are out there. If all you want is a blue creme you have hundreds of choices. But I've never regretted buying a Chanel polish.

This brought up an interesting question...what kind of Chanel release would I not buy? Well I didn't buy Riva (I had purchase NV not long before and it just didn't whet my whistle) and I didn't buy Quartz. I passed on Particuliere and its friends Inattendu and Tendresse.

So there are many I don't buy. What else would I pass up? Bar glitter...though to be honest if Chanel actually did lose its marbles and released a bar glitter, I might have to buy it for the sheer noteworthiness of such an event. Perhaps a red creme...though I have from time to time given red Chanel cremes as gifts.

So it's not a knee jerk reaction to just buy them all regardless of what they look like. People like to say that Chanel could bottle a frosty mauve and people would go nuts for it, and while that might apply to some people I'd like to think I'm immune to label whoredom.

I mean I'd like to think it. I guess we'll have to wait for that frosty mauve to really know for sure.