Playtime with Sally Hansen

My blogging and swapping friend Lucy of Lucy's Stash recently came up with a great idea for us to share nail polish PR samples; she'd contact the companies, and I'd get the polishes here in the U.S. and then ship them on to her in the U.K. when I was done. Sally Hansen was the first brand to take us up on this "two bloggers for the price of one" offer and sent Complete Salon Manicure and Crackle Overcoat colors for us to try. It was hard to know where to start, so I first quickly swatched on a wheel to help me decide.



In case you can't read my writing, the Complete Salon Manicure colors, starting at the bottom with the light pink and moving around clockwise, are: Shell We Dance?, Naked Ambition, Café Au Lait, Back to the Fuchsia, All Fired Up, Right Said Red, Plum's The Word, Commander in Chic, Wine Not, and Hot Chocolate. The rest of the tips show Crackle Overcoat colors on various of the Complete Salons; the crackles are: Snow Blast, Ink Splatter, Fractured Foil, Antiqued Gold, Cherry Smash, Fuchsia Shock, Antiqued Gold (again), Vintage Violet, Vintage Violet (again), and Cherry Smash (again).

Wine Not has a really pretty shimmer (as always, click to see bigger):



My tone-on-tone red crackle over red polish experiment didn't yield as interesting a result as I'd hoped for; All Fired Up and Cherry Smash match so well that it was hard to tell if I'd used crackle or just really done a horrible job of painting.



I had already used some of these colors (in particular, you may remember a couple from my mannequin hands post last month), so chose one I didn't own for my first swatch, Plum's The Word. This is a muted plum creme that took only two coats and is plenty shiny without topcoat.





I was very intrigued with how this one looked with Cherry Smash over it on the wheel, so had to do that on my nails. The deep plum base makes the red crackle look a lot darker than bottle color, and the crackle dries to a satin finish, so there's a shiny/matte contrast thing going on that I quite like.







Back to the Fuchsia is a warm bright pink with a subtle shimmer. I used three coats of this one. The purple highlights in the shimmer only showed up in bright light (see second photo below).





The purple shimmer in there inspired me to top it with Vintage Violet crackle, but this time I applied it diagonally. Since I'm not used to painting on the diagonal, some areas were a lot thicker than others. I've decided that just adds more visual interest. I did add topcoat to this combination.





Then I got even wilder and put Snow Blast on top, also applied diagonally but in the opposite direction. (Then I added topcoat to keep things shiny). The added visual interest here are the parts where you can see where my strokes overlapped.





I was quite entranced by this and want to try more crackle on crackle layering soon. Even though I need to send these particular bottles to Lucy, that's no problem because of course I have plenty in my stash to play with.

And now that I've bombarded you with all these photos, I'm planning to give you all a break from me and me a break from spending so many hours a day online, starting tomorrow. I'm not sure how well that will work, since I do love me some internet, but it's good to unplug every once in a while so I'm going to try. Expect me back in a week or so, and probably answering mail and commenting various places a lot sooner than that.

The polishes used for this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider, and the products do not need to be returned to the provider.