Tuesday, December 1, 2009

The curious case of Illamasqua Collide... or rather, Boo!

As I posted yesterday, during my trip to New York, I ended up buying an Illamasqua polish at Sephora in Times Square (the one not on 42nd St). Since it's generally out of my desired price range, I don't really have the Illamasqua color charts memorized. I easily recognize the more talked about polishes like Rampage, Milf, Baptiste and Wayward but I can't easily identify the rest of them.

So when I picked up a bottle of glittery gorgeousness that said "Collide" on the bottom, I didn't think it was anything but Collide...


When I posted my NYC haul yesterday, some much more observant reader pointed out an interesting fact: Illamasqua Collide is a neon pink creme. And this dense jumble of purple, dark blue and hot pink glitter in clear base was not neon, not pink, and not creme.

...the heck did I end up with?!

Well, my best guess came along when I was catching up on my nail blog reading: it's Boo!. All Lacquered Up recently reviewed the Boo! Duo which comes with Boo! glitter topcoat and Baptiste. ALU describes it exactly as it looks and though she did swatches with fewer coats, they look like they're the same polish.

How odd and fortuitous! Boo! isn't even sold in the US (and it's not currently sold without Baptiste either).

Illamasqua Boo!


Gorgeous, isn't it? Sometimes it's purple, sometimes it's blue and in the light, the hot pink twinkles like crazy. It's awesomely sparkly! I used five coats for these swatches. The first three apply very thinly and evenly; the last two ran into the trouble of dragging polish off of my nail. Boo!, however, wasn't meant to be worn alone. It's actually pretty smooth for a glitter though it definitely needs topcoat to be even.

Close-up of Boo!

Video of Boo!

Makes me wonder how many mislabeled Collides are floating around...