Wednesday, May 06, 2015

Del Sol Swatches

I'm finally posting these long-awaited Del Sol swatches!
I can't believe how long this has taken, from a weird mix-up with UPS which extended delivery time, to exams, to the sun not cooperating with me, these swatches have encountered setback after setback. But fear not, they are finally here!

I should probably give you a little background on these polishes before I get into the specifics of my review. If you haven't heard of or used Del Sol products before, their nail polishes (as well as other products they carry, like T-shirts and bags) change colour in the sun! In the picture above you can see coloured stickers on the tops of each of the bottles of polish; these stickers show you the colour the polish will turn when exposed to sunlight!
It's a really cool concept and it's pretty interesting to see them change colour, (I snapchatted my friends a video of the polishes changing colour while I was swatching and they were so amazed, haha!).
Now that you have a bit of background on the polishes, I'll get on to talking about the specific colours I was trying out.

You Make Me Blush
First up we have You Make Me Blush which is a pink-based beige in the shade and when in the sun turns to a deep raspberry. I liked this polish because the formula was nice (very opaque and not too streaky), and both the in-shade and in-sun colours were very nice. It changes colour very quickly once in the sun and doesn't hold the in-sun colour for very long when you go inside. I found that the in-sun colour also looks darker when on your nails then in the bottle. I feel like of the three this will be the polish that I use the most because both of its colours can be worked into designs.
I used two coats plus topcoat for this swatch.







Something Blue
Next is Something Blue and it was really... something. In the bottle this looks like a kind of light blue-green duochrome, and in the sun it's a dark metallic blue. The problem is, however, that when you actually put it on your nails it's really thin. Like really, really thin. I used three coats for the swatch and you can still clearly see right through to my nail. The polish looks much more opaque when in the sun, but in the shade it honestly looks pretty bad. Since my nails have yellowed from constantly being polished, having this sheer blue over top of them just make them appear to be a gross looking grey-green. It looks ok in the swatch photos, but I think I just caught it in a decent light; in most lighting it doesn't really look like that. In the interest of a complete review though, I tried this polish a few different ways to get the whole story. I tried the polish on my Cinderella hand (the nails on my right hand are much whiter), I tried it with over a coat of sheer white polish (which I've found has helped some thin, creamy polishes keep their colour), and I tried it over a solid white base. None of these trials produced satisfactory results in my opinion, especially putting the polish over a solid white base which only made it look like a streaky, thin, light green.
While I did like the dark blue that the polish turn in the sunlight, I don't think that that can save this polish. Honestly, if you're looking to try a Del Sol polish I wouldn't recommend going for this colour.

Moss Me Much?
The last colour I tried out was Moss Me Much?, which is a very light green indoors and a kind of red-pink in the sun. If you're comparing it to You Make Me Blush, the in-sun colour for this polish is more red based whereas Blush was more purple based, (in my opinion). This polish was kind of similar to Blush in consistency and opacity, but I found this one to be a little thinner and I needed three coats to make sure it was completely opaque. The green is very, very light; it almost looks white. It's still really pretty though and I think it would go well with a lot of different colours because of how pale it is. The in-sun colour, on the other hand, is really bright which is a fun change from its in-shade counterpart. Both shades of this polish were very nice.



Topcoat + Basecoat
I also received a topcoat and basecoat from Del Sol to try with their polishes! I obligingly used them for all of my swatches and they were quite a change from my usually Essie + Seche Vite basecoat/topcoat combo.
The first thing I noticed about the basecoat/topcoat was that they smell like dry-erase markers, or really strong permanent markers. The smell is probably irrelevant to how the polishes work, but I figured I'd mention it anyways since it's very different from most other polishes I've used.
I found the basecoat to be quite thin (but that could just be because the basecoat I'm used to using is getting a bit old and gummy), but it seemed to work ok.
The topcoat on the other hand didn't really stand up against my usual go-to topcoat. It was kind of streaky (you can see in the swatches for You Make Me Blush that there are some streaks in it from the topcoat), and it actually chipped at the tip of my nail while I was wearing it which is something I haven't experienced in a very long time. The brush was also cut on an angle which made application kind of odd, but I think this was probably just a mistake made on the specific bottle of polish I received, not a commonality of all topcoats.
Unless this basecoat and topcoat help the polish change colour in some way (which I doubt since the polished change colour when they're still in the bottle), I would probably stick with your regular choice of basecoat/topcoat.

And we're done!
Which polish did you like best?






If you want to try any Del Sol polishes for yourself, you can use my promo code "nyanails" for a single-use, 20% discount on your order from now until August!

I'll have some new designs up for you guys soon!

xo,
Becca.

2 comments:

  1. I didn't know such polishes existed! What a nice idea. About that top coat: it's really odd indeed! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, you don't see colour-changing polishes around that often but they're definitely really cool! ^^

      Delete