Love And Beauty Olive

I recently got an awesome care package from Sheila, who is not only one of my readers, but she runs a great blog called Pointless Cafe with really interesting posts, and great swatches. She sent me my very first Love & Beauty polish, called Olive. I've heard they're not very imaginative with their names, which is kind of sad because this polish deserves something really awesome - it's GORGEOUS. Seriously.
Well, you guys know how much I love olive shades anyway. This is a deep olive jam packed with gold shimmer. I cannot rave enough about it! If you can pick this up and you like these kinds of greens too, do it. I used two coats for this swatch. The bottle and brush reminds me of L.A. Girl.
So, enough raving, let's have a look, right? I got a pretty good macro so I've included that and a bottle shot.

Yup. I just can't get enough of these shades, I really can't. I love this so much! Thanks Sheila.

China Glaze Zombie Zest

Confession: I wore this polish for six days straight while I was sick. The swatch I'm showing you tonight is right before I removed it! So, you can see it wore like iron - no chips or anything out of place, at all.
Zombie Zest is from last year's Halloween collection. It's an olive green jelly jam packed with the signature China Glaze glass fleck shimmer. It has a slight blue duochrome, that I cannot seem to capture in photos but I see it at weird angles when I'm wearing it. You can see it pretty well in the bottle shot I've included. I used three coats here for this level of opacity.
I have to go ahead and say this. I know everyone loves It's Alive from this year's offering - and I have it to show off as well this week - I too love it, I think it's great - but to me, Zombie Zest just does it. I can't explain why I love it so much more but I will tell you that it's one of my all time favorite polishes.
Anyway, I'll stop waxing poetic about it and just show y'all a ridiculous amount of photos.

Yeah. I LURVE YOU, ZOMBIE ZEST!

Nina Ultra Pro Mossy Britches

Oh my goodness, it's finally October! I have a lot to show you this month and it should be quite fun.
Anyway, this is another fall shade - it's actually quite like the CQ I just showed you guys recently, Golden Green.  I do have a comparison shot to show you for this!
So, Mossy Britches - love the name! - has actually been out for a while, I think I first picked this up last year, and it's in regular stock at Sally's Beauty Supply. It's a olive green based shimmer absolutely loaded with gold. There are bubbles on my nails, but that is not from the formula - I was using up the last of my base coat, and it's sticky and gloopy, so please ignore the bubbles. I used two coats for this swatch. It's a perfect formula, really - between medium and thin, and I like the brushes and the bottles. Easy to work with! Application is nice and even.

Okay, so you can click to enlarge this if you want to see the minor differences I'm talking about. These are essentially dupes. The biggest difference is formula - the CQ is more prone for brushstrokes, so you have to baby it a bit. Also, the shimmer in the CQ seems to float suspended in the olive base, so the base color comes through a bit more and it seems to have a bit more of a glow. Other than that, they're virtually the same shade!

I can deal with babying a formula, so I think if I had to chose one it'd be the CQ. Either way, they're both beauties!

China Glaze Westside Warrior

Ahh, the last of my picks from China Glaze Metro. This is darker and less yellow than some of the olive greens I've shown you from fall collections, I think. Gorgeous. Maybe a little easier for everyone to wear? I love that there have been a wide variety to choose from - considering the paucity of olive greens up until now.
I had no troubles with the formula of this, I could almost have gotten away with one coat, since it's very pigmented. But I had a wonky brush - it was shorter in the middle and longer on the sides, and I haven't trimmed it so it made application a bit more of a challenge.

Yup, that's a beauty! I love this shade.

CQ Golden Green

At the same time that I bought CQ Idyllic, I also purchased this one - CQ Golden Green. C'mon, I'm a fiend for olive greens, go figure! It looks a lot like Nina Ultra Pro Mossy Britches, which I did swatch on Magic Maid. I'll be reswatching it for you all here, and I'll do a comparison between the two.
Umm, this is amazeballs. I am so in love with this color. It's a perfect olive green shade that's shot through with gold shimmer, which seems to be suspended in the base color. It glows. I had to be a little careful of brushstrokes, but not too bad, really. I did two thin coats and tried to wait in between, for it to dry a bit. That helped, also - I didn't push the polish around much on my nails if I could help it.
I don't even know how the ding on my ring finger happened, so my apologies for that.

Umm, please click to enlarge these? Seriously. Isn't that a beauty?
I don't know if I have ever mentioned it, but I probably should make a note of this somewhere. All the photos I take on this blog are in natural light, and with base coat. If for any reason I ever take a photo inside, or with flash, I will post that. Also, I rarely use top coat before I photograph something. If I do, for instance with neon shades, I make note of that in the post as well.
Alright, have a good evening! I'll be trying to get all of the fall shades I've nabbed posted before October hits, so I can play with some ideas I've got going on in my head, but I probably won't finish them. Fall is my favorite nail polish season, followed closely by the holidays.

Zoya Dree

Another of this fall's olive offerings, Zoya Dree is very yellow toned - love that! The formula is so perfect, I could have almost used one coat, but I used two to cover up any misses I had on my first "swipe".
On another note, I don't know what's up with so many of these fall shades - I see a lot of pigment separation in my bottles of both Zoya and Finger Paints. No matter how much rolling I do, they don't seem to want to blend together - I always feel like the color might be affected, though I'm sure I'm wrong? I haven't had any troubles with the colors or formula, but my bottles look wonky, so I apologize for that.
I decided not to leave well enough alone with this and I topped it with one of the recent Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear polishes, Set The Stage, which is a clear-based gold glitter. It has two sizes of glitter, larger hex glitter and smaller squares! So pretty. This is my alternative to Boom Boom Pow, which I don't have. I think this gold looks awesome over Dree!
One word of warning: double up on your base coat. This stained my nails yellow like nobody's business. Seriously bad staining.

I'm a little disappointed in my photo of the layering - this was definitely more mesmerizing off camera than on. But if you have a gold glitter to layer over the top of one of your olive greens, give this a whirl, you won't be disappointed!

China Glaze Trendsetter

China Glaze Trendsetter is the uglyawesome color to end all uglyawesome colors. Seriously, this is ugly. And so awesome! This will probably not appeal to a wide audience, but it's perfect. Last year, I was hoping Classic Camel was more like this. Classic Camel only worked on a few people, but if you're remotely interested in this shade, I think it will work with a much wider range of skin tones.
So, Trendsetter. This is a yellow with a lot of green. As a matter of fact, this pulls much more green on me than yellow. Very olive toned! It is chock full of gold shimmer, so that's just an added bonus in my opinion. Swampy. When I think of swampy, this definitely fits the nail polish bill! Formula was perfect, I only needed two coats and could almost have gotten away with one.

Oh ye Gods, I love that. It's so cool! So, time to weigh in. Would you wear this? Do you hate it? Do you love uglyawesome as much as I do?

Zoya Yara

Oh, this is a beauty. Zoya Yara is from this fall's Mirrors collection - it's a dusty olive green creme absolutely packed with gold shimmer. It's beautiful, and the shimmer doesn't sink when it gets on your nails, it's obvious. I couldn't stop staring at my nails!
Application was flawless, I only needed two coats. I actually wore this all weekend, so three days with not a single chip. I only took it off because I get bored too easily! This was one of the colors I was most interested in, and it definitely lived up to my expectations.

I think that this is actually a couple of shades darker, but the gold is making it look a bit lighter on camera!
This is my first swatch of the Smoke & Mirrors set I won from the sweet Zara of Never Unpolished.

Finger Paints Military Green

I am seriously loving all these olive toned, dusty greens in fall releases. This is right up my alley! I knew for sure that this would be another color I'd pick out from the Finger Paints fall release.
Military Green is a dusty, soft olive green. A neutral with a twist, I guess? I don't know if most folks would consider olive green a neutral but for me it's the perfect neutral. At any rate, this is a creme, and almost as opaque as Cordur-Orange, it's just slightly thinner so I ended up using two coats. For cremes, both of these colors I've tried applied very smoothly. I sometimes have trouble keeping cremes even on my nails, because they're thicker, but these have an absolutely buttery application.

Again, you can see that this dried just a shade deeper than the bottle color. Lovely!

Zoya Edyta

I LOVE this polish. For some weird reason though, I got bumpies on my middle and ring finger - no clue why! This is a nice rich, deep murky forest green, almost olive shade, packed with gold flaky shimmer. The gold translates really well on the nail - I think you should be able to see it if you click to enlarge this. I used two coats.

I know this is a "fall" shade, but I really don't care about seasons. I'll wear anything whenever I feel like it - though I'm not going to lie, I start craving brights after a long winter.