I recently made my first Llarowe purchase, which included a few lovely and beautiful A-England polishes that I’ve been dreaming about for a while…
After much self-deliberation, the first colour I decided to try was Lancelot, described as an “intriguing mysterious black red garnet” on A-England’s web site. The colour is extremely deep–to the point it looks black in most light. I simply adore deep-dark polishes like this!
The colour glides on like a dream. It’s thick enough to almost cover in just one coat, yet goes on smoothly and dries rather quickly. Even without a top coat the polish was super-shiny! I used an OPI base coat, 2 coats of Lancelot, and finished with a coat of OPI’s top coat. The only thing I realized was that if you’re too stingy with the top coat (as I was), you’ll leave streaks on your polish. I fixed that later!
After a few days, I wanted to change things up a bit. A while back I had seen a wonderful review of Essie LuxEffects on Scrangie‘s blog, and I decided to top off Lancelot with Essie’s A Cut Above, a multi-size pink glitter suspended in a clear base that I hadn’t yet had a chance to try. Can I just say… WOW!
The pink glitter seemed to hover overtop of the deep base, almost like a gorgeous constellation or a pink nightsky!
Here I added another coat of Lancelot (just because!) one coat of A Cut Above, and another coat of OPI top coat. The clear glitter base combined with the top coat gave my polish an almost gel-like look that I just love! The polish is even shinier than before, and what impressed me was just how quickly this combo dried! The Essie formula was good and packed with glitter. It was denser than some other glitters I’ve tried, meaning I didn’t have to go digging in the bottle to get enough coverage!
So… what do you think?
Essie’s LuxEffects was released for holiday 2011 and may still be found at some beauty suppliers; A-England can be purchased from Llarowe or directly from A-England.