Indie polish trend update: KBShimmer’s Winter 2014 collection has recently been released, and I purchased three of them (weirdly, one of them was already available last year (and bought by me)). Undoubtedly, I will soon talk about the three Christmas polishes, but today I review Spot Sign, a very special top coat. It has a transparant base, with huge chunky leopard spots floating in it! This is a really cool idea, because I thought it would create a wildprint design on your nails without having to do any work. However, this is not entirely the case. Of course, that is not really a problem, because I just seemed to have the wrong expectations.
The polish does not only contain leopard spots (which are roughly C-shaped and curly, perfect really), but also tiny holographic glitter, as well as about three different sizes of black circles. All the pictures show one coat of Spot Sign over one coat of My Life’s Porpoise (which is a great grey by the way!).
The application is kind of annoying though. Granted, these are chunky glitters so some bottle-fishing and glitter placement can be expected, but I just don’t like when the general glitter is scattered unevenly and the big spots cannot be found on every nail. I did discover that dipping the brush several times in the polish, before applying it onto each nail, helps with getting more leopard spots on the brush. Therefore (as you can see in the pictures) my right thumb has no spots at all, and the other fingers of the right hand have only one or two of them, as well as the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. But I dipped several times before applying the polish on my left middle finger, and suddenly there were four spots on my nail! So apparently, it takes some technique which I have yet to master. Maybe two coats of Spot Sign will also help to prevent having one very thick layer of polish, which you get when you desperately add polish in order to get some more chunky glitter on your nail.
So maybe the former remarks were all my own rookie mistakes. But I really dislike it when glitters bend when you have applied them. With these big chunks, there is always some relief on your nails, which a top coat can mostly cover, but some of these leopard spots do just not lie flat on your nail, they stick out (as you can clearly see on the picture of my left ring finger). And no matter how hard you try to flatten them out, they just won’t.
So overall, maybe I am just not that big of a fan of chunky glitter top coats (although I really like the pattern!) or I am not experienced enough to apply them correctly. I was just not as impressed with the real thing as I expected. Admittedly, KBShimmer does warn about these issues in the description box.
However, I love the fact that this top coat is actual ‘panther in a bottle’, so if you don’t have my issues, be sure to give it a try, because who would want to miss this unique glitter in their collection?
