Ha Bisky! Nails: Hard Candy Beetle

Monday, March 7, 2011

Hard Candy Beetle

Hello!

First off I want to say Hi and Thank you to our 2 new followers!! I know I haven't posted in a while but its that time during the semester when my professors start piling on the homework... also I've been lazy and kinda out of it... no real excuses.

Anyway, as promised, here I have today Hard Candy Beetle which is, as you know, a dupe for the infamous Orly Space Cadet.

I don't have Space Cadet so I can't compare them but many bloggers have done fantastic comparisons of the two, such as The Manicured Manatee here.

Amanda bought this when we went on weekly Walmart trip a few weeks ago. I was so excited when I saw it... I had never seen it there before! Now on to find Hard Candy Sky... *devious smile* So she tested it first and said it went on really sheer and was having VNL issues at 3 coats. Now, I have REALLY nasty stained nails so VNL will not work for me! (I blame the bulk of the staining on China Glaze Entourage which I will NEVER use again since I think my SH XW Ivy League is a dupe for it and it gave me really badly stained green nails when I used it months ago... I didn't buff my nails because they're thin and I heard buffing is bad for thin nails.) So when I used this I layered it over one coat of SH XW Black Out (a nearly one coat black that dries really shiny!) These pictures are 2 coats of Beetle over the black with top coat.

This is how my stupid camera kept wanting to capture it with the flash on. I like the flash because of the crispness of the photos. Buuutt... this is not what Beetle looks like!!
I liked this polish a lot because of the amazing duochrome (duh!!), it went on very smoothly and it just looks so awesome!! I didn't like how sheer it was. I think you would need 4 -5 coats to get rid of VNL and that's ridonkulous!! I also didn't like the finish. It was kinda satiny without top coat and the top coat still didn't make it very shiny. Plus it has like this scratched appearance that you can see in the photos which I HATE!! This is after 24 hours of wear as well so excuse the tipwear.

Now this is better! This is with the flash off in artificial light. Now you can really see the duochrome. I guess I don't really need to explain the colors as most polish addicts are familiar with the thousands of swatches of Space Cadet, this one and MAC Mean and Green but... this is mainly rosey purple with a golden and green flash. In different lights it flashes different colors, like purple, pink, yellow and orange-ish. I could stare at the pretty changing colors forever.