Brazilian Polish Swatchathon - Ludurana Supernovas

My god ladies do I have some beauties to show you today! I mentioned in yesterday's post that the 'Aurora Boreal' collection was at the top of my wish list, but that's only because I didn't know that this collection had been released since then! (Aurora would still take a very close second place though!)

This is the Supernova collection, and they are multichrome holo's! My favourite things all in one ohhh lordy! I told you I alway saved the best til last! ;)

 They are 'multichromes' but seem to have 3 main colours, with only 2 colours at a time being seen in different lighting situations. They have a strong holo flare in full sun though this does diminish the multichrome effect quite a lot. Unlike other multichromes the colours do not show up with underwater photography, and layering these over a black base does not help at all, it actually does the opposite of what you would expect and almost cancels the multichrome effect completely, but you do get a different and interesting darker shade of the dominant colour within the polish, and the holo effect is much stronger over black too. I have found that the best lighting in which to appreciate both the multichrome and the holo effect at the same time, is with the harsh white strip lights or with very bright white day time bulbs, but to be honest you get lots of different effects in all kinds of different lighting. I have been wearing a couple of them over the last week and have seen them in sun, in shade, in a dark garage, under storm clouds, sat outside smoking a cig under a dingy light at night... you name it.. and in every lighting situation the polishes look completely different, anyone who owns these will just not be able to take there eyes off their nails when wearing them! There were so many shades and combinations of colours to these polishes that it was just impossible to get photos of every possibility, and with multichromes and holos being a bitch to get good photo's of at the best of times, you can imagine how hard it was with the two effects combined! While looking at the pictures just remember - however lovely you think these polishes are in my pictures, they are a 100 times more awesome in real life!

I managed to get 3 from this collection and I <3 them all, but as usual I always have my favourites!

Let's start with 'Orion' who's shifty colours are navy blue to blurple to pink with a good holo flare.

Here I am wearing 3 coats without a black base, and this first pic was taken in full sun.

As I said the multichrome was difficult to catch in full sun, though in my pics done in the shade it doesn't look much better either, it is much more visibile in real life. In the shade you get a much more pastel version of the colours. You don't see much blue and the blurple looks much more like lavender with hints of pink.

 

This next picture was taken indoors under the bright white lights I mentioned before, as I was not using a lightbox set up the picture is not the best quality and not very sharp, but that's the sacrifice I had to make to capture the colour shift better under the harsh white light.

 In this last pic the polish is 2 coats layered over a black base, the multchrome is pretty much gone, but you get a nice navy holo out of it!

The next polish I have in this collection is called 'Onda De Luz' (Light Wave) and shifts from very pale mellow yellow gold to peach to pale rose pink, it is totally lush, but the worst of the 3 polishes to take pictures of! Again here I am wearing 3 coats without black base, this first pic taken in full sun.

Here it shows up as a really warm and rich nude colour, but in the shade it's much more mellow with the gold tones more visible. Though the rose colour is not really visible per se, it does give the whole polish a slight pink glow to it.

Here is the pic that I took under the harsh white lighting, there is a more warmer richer gold tone under this light with the pink shift being much more visible.

 

Though I would not say that the pink was the dominant colour in this shifter, thats what you got when layered over a black base.

The final polish of my Brazilian polish haul and swatchathon, and probably my favourite of them all is 'Fenomeno' and shifts from a light powder blue to aqua green to violet. This has the most obvious colour shift of all them and looks fricking amazing in harsh white light! Here it is in full sun first where the light blue and violet (which looks more lavender here) are the most obvious colours.

In the shade the aqua green is much more obvious and the violet looks more like mauve.

 I want to show you the polish layered over black before I show you it on it's own in white light, cos it's damn glorious and totally the right pic to end my 3 week swatchathon, so here it is over black first and in full sun.

And now you can see the polish on it's own in harsh white light, you should probably grab a towel or something because you're undoubtedly going to drool all over yourself just at the sight of it. This is why Fenomeno is my favourite polish of the whole haul....

Isn't is just fu*king glorious! I want to paint my whole body like this, I want clothes bags and shoes like this, I wanna glow and sparkle in pretty girly colours like a frickin holographic unicorn! And I aint even the girly, frilly bows and unicorns kinda gal! How could anyone not fall in love with that? Seriously, try to tell me you don't love it and I must insist that you are not really a polish addict! I dare you to not like it dammit!

The formula on this polishes was wonderful, a wee bit sheer but still opaque in 3 coats, smooth glossy finish and quite long wearing too. These polishes have been out for a while as far as I'm aware, and I don't know of any comercial brands that have started doing multichrome holo's yet, Indie makers have only just been doing them since the beginning of this year, but Ludurana did it first so in my book that makes Ludrana an official trend setter!

I have loved swatching my brazilian haul for you, many of those pollishes I bought remained untried, so I'm really pleased I got to wear them all and see them and appreciate them properly, and that you came along with me for the ride!
It's got to be said that the Brazilian polish addicts are very lucky and have got some seriously amazing polishes going on here. Normally I would be totes jealous but I'm actually really happy for the Brazilian ladies.

The poor people here get ripped off by their government at every turn who pretty much tax everything except the air you breath, and at ridiculous rates. People are starving here, continually drowning in floods because the infrastructure sucks balls, constantly getting robbed cos everyones just so damn short of everything, and all while the government pile millions into stadiums for football and the olympics - events which are going to break the people here, because while those events are going on the price of EVERYTHING will triple. People can't afford food as it is and I fear for what will happen to the Brazilian people when these events start. The saddest bit is that the tourist dollars won't even end up in their pockets, just in the governments via the enormous tax rates that business owners will be subject to while these events are taking place. It's just fucking tragic, it really is.
So if Brazilian gals can't afford our foreign brands now while they are set at the standard of 100% tax upon entering the country, imagine how much the poor loves are gonna end up paying during event time, even just for a normal drugstore brand like Sinful Colours or something,  it sickens me to think. You can forget about OPI in this country, cost of a bottle of that stuff will feed your entire family for a week here, and so amazing polishes like that remain but a distant dream for the loveley Brasileiras!
For that reason I am really really happy that the homegrown brands here in Brazil are really making an effort not just to keep up with the nail trends, but to set a few of them too, and provide some of the nail addicts here the awesome polish they deserve. I hope they keep it up, and give the rest of us a reason to envy the ladies here!

Tomorrow I will be posting my giveaway, so makesure you come back to check out the prizes and enter!

I still have a couple of weeks left before I leave Brazil, and like a good girl I've done most of my preparations to leave, so after Carnaval I'm really hoping to have some free time to do some nail art as I haven't done any in months! Even if I don't get the chance, I still have a few designs that I did last october, to keep you entertained until I get to Italy at least! Thanks for reading me during my swatchathon, I'll see you tomorrow for giveaway time :)

Brazilian Polish Swatches - Ludurana and Bonus Brand Mohda Flakies!

So I'm back with more gorgeous polishes for you (and these are truly gorgeous!) but I confess I told a little lie! I said this was Ludurana week because I completely forgot that I have another brand of flakies to show you! I had been saving them until now because I really wanted to show you one of them with one of the Ludurana polishes I will show you today, but I forgot all about it until I found the photos again last night, so today you get an unexpected bonus brand! Yay!

So I'm going to start with the Luduranas, this first one I found in a sale bin, and I almost didn't buy it until I actually opened the bottle. It's called 'Rubra' (Ruby!) and on the bottle it said was a creme polish, but I was confused because in the bottle it looked black not red, and I thought there must be some kind of mistake so out of pure curiosity I opened the bottle, and I'm sure as hell glad I did! What I discovered inside was not a creme polish, but an absolutely stunning deep blood red jelly! It reminded me of the fake gel blood you can buy at halloween, and it went straight in my shopping basket!

It's a very darkly tinted jelly and I managed to get full opacity in 4 coats which I was very pleased about, I absolute ADORE the colour, but what I love the most about this polish is the finish, it's the glossiest shiniest polish I have ever seen, it reflects the light like pure glass! It is so shiny that I dared not even touch it for hours because it just appeared to be wet and I couldn't be sure if it had even dried or not! I have never seen a top coat that can achieve this kind of mega gloss! Top coat would just ruin it!

I also took pictures of this polish in the shade where the reflective surface was even more apparent, but in the end I chose not to show them, because in that perfectly reflective surface on each single nail was a crystal clear image of my face! I looked a right mess too, shitty hair no makeup and pyjamas! lol! So as I also work as a model I have a reputation that does not permit me to circulate photos of myself looking anything less than FABULOUS! hahahahaha.

On to the next polish, and this one is from the collection that was on the very top of my wishlist! The absolutely incredible 'Aurora Boreal' multichrome collection! Unfortunately I was only able to find this one, it turns out the Brazilian girls don't like this particular colour much and I found it on sale everywhere, but only this colour! The only place I ever saw the rest of the collection was on the stall that I posted a pic of on last fridays's post, but they were really expensive, even if I had known that I would never see that stall again I still don't think I would have bought them. To give you an idea of how expensive, the average polish here retails for 4 Brazilian Reals, the average Ludurana polish retails at around 8 Reals, but the Aurora Boreal collection on this stall were a whopping 20 Reals each! I was with my mother in law too and I think she may have fainted had she witnessed me spending so much for one polish, especially in a country where saying that money is 'tight' would be a massive understatement! I have since found a Brazilian website that still has the whole collection for sale, and to be honest, I think once I get back to Europe and start earning again, I'm going to purchase the full collection (at a nice price cos the conversion from euro to real is awesome!) and have it delivered to my mother in laws house to keep until I visit next! It will be difficult to live until next January knowing that they are sitting there waiting for me, but at least they will be mine!!!

Anyways, the polish! This one is called 'Espetacular' (can you figure it out?!) and is a multichrome wihich shows gold, copper, red, green and even a hint of blue at extreme angles.Personally I thought it was lovely and couldn't understand why it was the only colour that had not been sold out like the others. Being a multichrome I took a shit ton of photographs in different lighting and stuff, these first 2 were taken in full sun where the colours come up quite dark and metallic.

Tilted at an angle you can start to see the green coming through, but in full sun you can really only see this red, orangey copper and green.

These next pics were taken in the shade and the colours are much lighter with a lot more of the gold tones coming through.

Of course, to do a multichrome polish any real justice with photography, I had to dunk my hand in some water and catch ALL the magic colours. We had just had a lot of rain so it was too cold to get in the pool, I had to settle for lying on the floor next to it and dangling my hand in there to get the pics, but the family actually had work men at the house wondering around and fixing stuff, I swatched a few multichromes in the pool that day, and I'm sure they thought I was quite mad lying on the floor every half hour and dunking my hand in the pool to take pics, I was getting some very strange looks, but screw em', they wouldn't understand even if I had explained!

Look at all those amazing colours! I love how the red becomes so dark and deep but still goes through the whole colour shift all the way to the blue! I apologise for the reflections on the water surface, I didn't realise they were there until days later when I went to sort the pics, and I had already travelled to my husband's home city by then, didn't have the polish with me or access to a pool to re-do the photos! Here's one more pic that captured the blue just perfectly!

What I loved most about this polish is that I didn't need to mess around with a black base first, I did swatch a finger over black just to check, but the polish is so highly pigmented it made absolutely no difference, the formua is fantastic, the only polish I ever wore here that was flawless in 2 coats, and it has a really glossy finish too which is unusual for metallic type polishes, have another look at the pics taken in the shade and see how glossy it is, no top coat!

 Now for the flakies! This first one I wanted to show you with the Ludurana polish I just showed you, because it's a colour shifting flaky with exactly the same colour range, and turns a magic polish into a mind blowing one! The brand is called is 'Mohda' and the collction is 'Flocado Estilo' (Flaked style). This particular polish is called 'Techno' and had an amazing formula for a flaky, it's densly packed with flakes and you get a lot of coverage in just two coats, and it dries perfectly smooth, if you run your finger over it (when it's dry!) you wouldn't even know that there were any flakies in there!

This first pic was taken in full sun, which didn't show much of a colour shift in the flakies, but they gave the Ludurana a stunning sparkle and helped to bring out more of the Luduranas gold tones which without the flaky were not very visible in full sun.

This next pic was taken in the shade and the green and copper tones of the flaky are much more obvious, and combined with the colour shift of the base polish just looks frickin' awesome!

And of course, I took an underwater pic too! So gorgeous I can't even get over it! It's polishes like this that remind me why I love polish so much in the first place, you can get so many amazing effects that just can't be reproduced in make-up or clothing!

I also have a couple of pictures of this flaky layered over a plain black creme base so that we can appreciate the colour shift of the flakies alone without the added confusion of the shifting base below. The clouds were coming back to start raining again when I was ready to take this first picture and so couldn't get a full sun shot, but shifters don't fare well in full sun anyway so I figured you would forgive me! 

Ahhhh just as glorious even without a shifty base! I took a pic in the pool too and was surprised to discover a very blue tone to it, you couldn't see that even in the bottle!

One last flaky from Mohda and this is called 'Mix Ballada' which I was unable to translate! I should have swatched this one first, it's not a colour shifter but it's still pretty, it's just that after witnessing the magic of the last one it made me feel a bit meh! I have to get that colour shifter out of my head and try this other one another day and I'm sure I'll feel better about it! It has blue, green and copper flakies, and I have it here layered over black in full sun and shade. Though not as pretty as the last one the formula was just as great!

So that's it for todays post, I hope you enjoyed the bonus flakies and the shit ton of pics of colour shifters! lol! Tomorrow I have the very last of my Brazilian polish haul, but as always I saved the best til last, so if you thought that today's polishes were beautiful, tomorrow Imma' blow yer socks off! Don't miss it!

Brazilian Polish Swatches - Ludurana D'lux and Alta Definicao

Yay more Ludurana polishes and I have a couple of polishes from two different collections to show you today! A couple of these were even on my wish list!

The first collection is 'Alta Definicao' (High Definition) and they are just simple metallics in bright gold and silver. The reason I wanted them is because I don't have a silver as bright as this one, and I don't have a gold as bold as this one either, the silvers I have are more like shimmery shades of grey, and I usually normally go for lighter tones of gold and this one is pretty dark, so I needed the variety.

This polish is called 'Prata Pura' (Pure Silver) and is a really light super bright metallic polish, just blinding in the sun. It has a quite a pasty texture but apply's really smoothly and dries super fast too.

The second is called 'Ouro Puro' (Pure Gold) it's dark and warm toned but did not have the same texture as the silver polish, this was more of the usual jelly base and takes quite a bit longer to dry, though technically it does say that they are fast dry on both bottles. The gold Is faster drying than the average polish here, but not as fast as the silver.

The next polishes are from the D'lux collection and were both on my wish list, so when I found them at a slightly discounted rate I snapped them up!

This is called 'Acao' (Action) and is a light fuchsia shimmery jelly with very light gold, large fleck glitter. It had a really nice consistency and went on nice and smooth despite the odd shaped glitter. I'm really loving the fleck type glitters and think I'm going to need many more!

This last one is my absolute favourite and is called 'Jambo' (which is just one of those made up names and doesn't really mean anything!) This a dark magenta jelly densly packed with fine glass fleck glitter which flickers between blue and violet. Again this had a pefect formula, and was so much more sparkly than it is in the picture. I also have a ring that matches this polish perfectly, but that was even worse to get pictures of than the polish! It's basically a trasparent magenta, oval shaped stone, with the surface that is rough as though it were covered in tiny glass shards, but the shards are actually irridescent blue and violet and the pink stone shines through from underneath. It's just cheap crap that turns my finger green, but it's sooo pretty and is just totally the jewellry baby of this polish!

I still have more Luduranas and as usual I always save the best til last! So keep up with me this week as then it will be the giveaway!

Brazilian Polish Swatches - Ludurana Duo Chromes

Hey everyone! Welcome to the third and final week of my Brazilian polishes swatchathon! 

I have been showing you new different brands almost everyday the last couple of weeks, but this week is a little different as I really only have one brand left to show you, my favourite of all Brazilian Polishes - Ludurana! I had been drooling over pics of some of these polishes for the longest time, and when I found that I was actually going to come to Brazil I almost died! Finally I was going to get my hands on some long time lemmed polish beauties! I have managed to get my hands on quite a few Ludurana polishes while I've been here, some from my lemmings list, some not, but I still have more Luduranas in my collection than any other brand, so I will have to spread it out over a few days to not overwhelm you!

Today I am going to start with my least favourites, the duochromes. Now you're asking yourself  'why on earth would duochromes be your least favourite!?' and the sad truth is that a couple of them were frankly a bit disappointing, It's a good job I found them in a sales bin and didn't break the bank on them as with some other Ludurana polishes.  Let's get the biggest disappointment out of the way first.

The first polish is Ludurana Duochrome Magenta-Gold, which I was excited about and thought would be fabulous, but is anything but! Before I go on just take a look at the picture, I already know what you're thinking - 'That my friend - is the shoddiest paint job I have seen you do in a while!' and I couldn't even blame you for thinking so, but I promise it wasn't me, it's just the crappy polish, and I'm sure it's the crappy polish because I painted my nails three times to get this swatch, black base and all! The first time I painted them I thought 'Bloody hell love, you must have beer goggles on today cos you've done a terrible job!', so I took it all off, painted the black base again and covered it with the duochrome. This time I was very careful about my application, but it still looked terrible, and I thought 'Jeeeez I'm going crazy today!'. So I took it all off yet again, re-painted the base, applied the duochrome with painful attention and precision, and when it came up the third time looking just as bad a the first two, well, there was nothing else for it, I just had to resign to the fact that the polish is poop!

First of all, it's not even magenta, it's lavender, and mixed with gold comes up a very strange and rather unattractive shade of lavender, not loving the colour at all.

Secondly, it does just does not apply well. It doesn't matter what I do it just doesn't spread evenly on the nail, there is streaking with dark patches and light patches, It pulls away from the cuticle revealing the black base, and it generally just looks terrible. Three attempts and it still looks bad! I just don't ever want to wear this polish, and wouldn't even know what to do with it to franken it and make it useable! Suggestions on a postcard please!

This next Duochrome is Orange- Blue and disappointed me too, though not nearly as much as the first!

The reason it was disappointing is because there is virtually no duochrome to be seen at all, not on camera, not irl, not in the sun or the shade, there just is no duochrome, only blue (which is surprising because the dominant colour in the bottle is actually orange!!) It's a shame because I thought that orange and blue together would be rather lovely. There is a consolation though, that being that the shade of blue is rather spectacular, and the formula was light years ahead of the last polish, so it might not be the duochrome I hoped for, but it's still pretty and wearable. Here is a pic of it layered over black.

The last duochrome I have I like to call 'the redeemer' because it is everything I want in a duochrome and didn't disappoint even a tiny bit! Unlike the last two it had nice opacity in 3 coats so can be worn on it's own without a black base and the duochrome is still nice and obvious, (I didn't even need to take extra shots at different angles the duochrome is so obvious!) but you can also wear it over a black base too for a much darker shade and a totally different look, so it's a versatile polish too. It also had a very nice non streaky formula. In the first picture I am wearing the polish on it's own, and in the second I am wearing it layered over black.

So these were my Ludurana duochromes, it's not the best collection they ever brought out, you will have to keep tuning in this week to catch my other Ludurana's, some of which are spectacular!

Brazilian Polish Swatches - Hits Specialita'

Yaaaaay we've finally made it to my two favourite Brazilian brands, and today it's Hits Specialita' which is 3 free..

To be honest, all the best polishes that I wanted from this brand have been impossible to find. I have searched and searched and searched some more, but they are nowhere to be seen. I have managed to buy a couple that I adore and a couple that I like, but the vast majority of what was on my wish list are still extremely far from my grasp. I'm happy that I found a couple from my wishlist, but mostly disappointed that the rest escaped me :(

The first 3 I will show you are from the 'Glitter World' Collection, all glitter toppers where each polish is named after a major city somewhere in the world. For each topper I have tried to pick a base colour that matches the jelly base of the glitter.

This first polish is named after the city of Cancun in Mexico and it's a light peachy jelly base with magenta micro dots, and holographic medium hexes in gold and magenta. When I say holographic though I really mean it, these glitters are MEGA bright and shine all different colours in the sun. This is two coats layered over Australis - Sinfully Sweet, and as you can see you get a lot of glitter on the nail.

 

The next polish is named after the island of Ibiza in Spain, and essentially it is just like Cancun but with a much darker orange jelly base, you might say it has quite a brick red tone to it too. I chose to layer it over Duri - Summer Peach, but if you layered it over something more red I'm sure you would get a totally different colour.

The last one I have from the Glitter World collection is named after Rome, and seen as I lived in Rome for 5 whole years, well, I could hardly turn my back on this one could I!? It is awesome though, and is one of the many that was on my wishlist! Its a light pink jelly base with similar glitter to the first two, magenta micro dots and medium hexes in holographic gold, but it also has the addition of medium holographic hexes in blue and purple, and medium and large matte white hexes which give it a totally different look. Again this is just 2 coats and you get so much glitter!

The fourth polish I have to show doesn't appear to be from any particular collection, and is called 'Power Pop'. I thought it was a glitter topper, it's basically a lightly tinted peach jelly base packed with an orange irridescent glitter, so I layered it over Rimmel - Lemon drop. But after applying just two coats of  the glitter I couldn't see the lemon base at all, so I guess you can wear it on it's own too! The irridesence of this polish brings up extra colours of yellow and green, though for some reason when I took the pictures those colours only showed up in the bottle and not my nails. :( Still damn pretty though!

 This last polish, ooooohhhh this last polish! I saw this on a stall in a shopping mall my first week in Brazil and the stall had quite the selection of polishes from my wishlist. I restricted myself to buying just this one from Hits and a couple of other brands, the prices on the stall were quite expensive to be honest, and I thought 'Don't go mad yet, you just got here and can probably buy these cheaper elsewhere'. Just in case though, I did ask the girl if she was in this mall all the time, and she told me she was a permanent fixture, but when I discovered that all the polishes she had were impossible to find elsewhere I went back to the mall to buy my wishlist items from her, and she was gone! Permanent fixture my ass! I deeply regret not buying everything I wanted from her when I was there the first time, I could have smashed most of my wishlist right there, but because she lied to me about being there permanently I lost the chance, and my wish list remains just that, a wish list :( Why would you do that? Why would you not just tell me that you move around and where I can find you so that I can come and give you my money? It makes no sense to me at all, but I need to get out of rant mode before I go over board! GAH!

Here is a picture of my ridiculous face when I first found that stall with my entire wish list on it:

 

Look at all that damn polish, I should have just spent all our savings right then and there! 

But anyway, the polish. This is from the 'Hits phenomena' collection, and it's a fricking multichrome glitter! A MULTI CHROME GLITTER! I never even knew such a thing existed! I thought it was just polish that could do that, not glitter! A goddamn phenomena indeed! *Cries because she didn't by the whole collection when she had the chance* :(

It's called moonbow, and the dominant colors in it are purple and green (of course!) but at extreme angles you can also get blue, pink, purple, reddish copper and gold.

I did two coats over a base of Colorama - Amethyst, which I swatched in last friday's post, and then tried to take the pictures. In the sun I could just about pick up the purple and green. The green came out very tealy (nice) but even in the shade it was difficult to get more than those 2 colours despite their being many more.

I took literally hundreds of photos just to get these 3, which let's face it, for a multichrome is not that good. I got so hot and bothered about it that I had to take a break and go for a dip in the pool, and that's when I remembered what needed to be done for a polish like this one, under water shots!

I took hundreds more similar pics, but this one just captured all those awesome colours perfectly anyway, and this post is already long enough. Plus, I just don't wanna look at too many pics of this to be reminded of the rest of the collection that I left behind on that stall....... *Cries some more*

At least in the last brand I have to show you next week I had a bit more luck in finding some of my wishlists, though even for this last brand there are still many many more to find!