Brazilian Polish Swatches - Cora

Greetings lovely ladies! I welcome you to the second week of my Brazilian polish swatchathon and there are still many more to go! 

Today's brand is 'Cora' and I have 4 polishes to show you today and another 4 tomorrow, though it has to be said I am a very lucky girl as I actually only purchased one of today's myself and the rest of them were given to me as a gift from my sister in law Deborah! Needless to say that I will love her forever! 

In today's polishes I have 2 neons crellies, a holographic glitter (which is the one I bought of course, nothing ever changes!) and a crackle polish!

Let's do the neons first,  I have 2 crellies from the 'Sampa' collection, the name being an abbreviation of 'Sao Paulo' and the names of the polishes are untranslatable as they actually refer to the names of urban areas within the city of Sao Paulo! I love that my Brazilian polishes are sharing a bit of Brazilian culture with me too!

The first polish is 'Ibirapuera' and is a weird mix of apple and lime green. As the polish is a crelly I tested it for opacity before doing a full swatch, and I discovered that it is very sheer and after 5 coats was no closer to being opaque. As I hate VNL and hate wasting polish with 20 layers just to cover it even more, I layered this and the next polish over a white base, and 2 coats was all they needed with a base, just to get nice even coverage.

Now I have to apologise, this image is not a true representation of the actual colour of this polish, my camera picked it up much lighter and mintier then it really is, but I thought hey no problem, I can do a colour balance in photoshop to get it right. Actually no, turns out this is the weirdest shade of green ever, and despite fannying around with various colour adjustments in photoshop for over 2 hours, and getting my computer nerd designer husband working on it too(!) I just could not get the colour to match what's in the bottle. I even went on line and searched a trillion colour charts to get the exact right shade of green and found nothing that even came close! It's like this shade of green never existed until this polish came out! The image is the closest I could possibly get it, but imagine it's a bit darker with a hint more lime, it's like a weird acidic cross of lime and apple green. I know it sounds like it shouldn't be that hard a colour to find, but my husband, 2 hours on photoshop and a further hour searching colour charts beg to differ! I couldn't even try to get the colour darker because it just ruined the neon affect, so it's just going to have to be one of those polishes where you think you know what colour it is, but will never truly know until you've got it on your nails! I even checked other Brazilian girls swatches of this polish, and non of them had managed to get the exact colour spot on either! GAH!

Anyway, it was a MAJOR stress and I need to get over it already, so let's move on! 

The next neon crelly, also layered over a white base, is a lovely royal blue and this is named after the Sao Paulo neighborhood of 'Garoa'. Thankfully, even though my camera also picked this colour up much lighter than it really is, it was very easy to colour adjust in photoshop and get it exactly right! When I managed to get the colour of this polish right in just one click I was like 'Phew! Thank fuck for that!'

This next polish is the one I purchsed, and you know I chose it because it's another holo glitter! The collection was simply called 'Holographic' and the polish name is 'Eclipse', its a dark purple jelly with quite fine silver holo glitter. This is another polish that gave me grief when it came to the pics though, I couldn't get the holo effect to show up very well at all, I tried everything and took over 200 photos just trying! Even my usual 'professionally taken blurred images' (lol!) couldn't pick up the colours, and that usually works every time! I don't know if it's because the glitter is so fine, but my camera already hates holographic glitter anyway so I was fighting a loosing battle! This is one of those occasions in which you're just gonna have to trust me when I say 'it's so much sparklier in real life!' You should believe me though, you know what that holo glitter can do!

 This last polish is a crackle effect, and I have to say, I haven't played with one of these in a good couple of years, and I forgot how much fun they can be! I know a lot of nail bloggers say that crackle polish was just a fad that everyone got over real fast, clearly I thought I had too if I haven't touched it for so long, but doing this swatch just served to remind me that actually, the effect is kinda frickin cool!

The polish I have is a bright pink shimmer, aptly named 'pink'!

I layered it first over the purple holo glitter thinking that purple and pink would be awesome together, but upon doing it I realised it was a little sheer, and you can't really do a second coat of crackle, you gotta get it right first time! It still looked interesting though so I will you show you the pic anyway, but then I took it off and layered the crackle over white too so you could see the colour better. It crackled much better over a smooth base instead of the glitter too, though you might think it would work the other way round!

Overall I was impressed by the formula of Cora polishes, nice and smooth and easy to apply, no streaking (which I at least expected from the crellies but didn't get any at all! Awesome!) I will be defintely be keeping my eye out for more of these! This is also another brand that I haven't been able to find for sale internationally and shall be included in my giveaway prize back, but I'm not telling you if they will be from todays, tomorrow's or both sets of swatches, you're just gonna have to wait for the surprise!

The Cora polishes I will be showing you tomorrow are from a rather awesome collection and definitely my favourites of the whole bunch!