Nautical Navy

Today I have another polish from China Glaze’s Anchors Away Collection, called “First Mate,” given to me of course by the lovely Kirsten Glittagloves.

When I first saw this blue I was underwhelmed (yes, you can be underwhelmed, but usually only in Europe…), but I figured that with some creativity I could put this polish to use. At first glance I thought it wasn’t a shade of blue that I would enjoy, since it’s quite a bit flatter than most of the blues I am drawn to. Even though it’s not actually a polish with a matte finish, I feel like the tone of the blue was very matte from how it looked in the bottle. Thankfully it didn’t really turn out the same as the bottle portrayed it, and it was actually quite lovely on. It’s a nice, subtle, slightly-lighter-than-normal navy, and it has a LOT of gloss to the finish, which gives it a bit more kick than I was anticipating. It covered pretty nicely in one coat, but for safety’s sake I decided to do a second, which made the colour quite a bit deeper. Sorry that the polish is a bit messy in these shots, but I was too lazy to actually do any clean-up, and Photoshopping was too much effort as well :p

I was surprised by was how much the colour changes between the light where I was painting my nails in comparison to natural light, and natural fluorescent bulbs. In incandescent light the colour looks like a true navy, and is quite dark, but under proper light it lightens up quite a bit, and is kind of a middle tone between navy and periwinkle. Obviously periwinkle is quite a light blue, and navy is quite dark, but First Mate falls pretty darn close to the middle of the spectrum of colours between them.

under natural fluorescent light

I decided to try and give First Mate a bit more personality by doing an accent nail in a glitter polish, even though I was rather happy with how it turned out solo. Breaking from the polish-norm I did an overcoat on my pointer fingers of OPI Last Friday Night (from the Katy Perry Collection). Suffice to say I was not pleased. The colours of the multi-sized glitter in Last Friday Night (silver, turquoise, and blue), and the slightly tinted base colour actually worked against the blue of First Mate. The problem was that Last Friday Night had too much going on with itself to be added to another polish properly. I’m also rather akeptical about how Last Friday Night is on it’s own, since I don’t really like that the base colour is tinted and not clear. Bu tI’ll try it on it’s own eventually, and we’ll see how that goes. 

glitter fail :(