China Glaze: Adventure Red-y

China Glaze: Adventure Red-y

     Well, let's start off with the name. When I first saw this polish on the promotional I was like "no, for real china glaze?" That name is super lame. And when the polish was launched this fall as part of the Fall 2012 I completely overlooked it as "been-done" and selected instead three other polishes. I got Elephant Walk, Exotic Encounters and Jungle Queen. The first two I will swatch for you later, but the last Jungle Queen turned out to be a complete bust in my opinion. I just hated it on my fingers and couldn't wait to take it off. I'll probably never wear it again. But enough about that...Adventure Red-y. I was actually thinking about this polish in hindsight wishing I had a nice creme red and wishing I'd have picked this one up as part of the Fall collection but now that it's Halloween I knew it would be nearly impossible to find without going online. Lucky me I just happened to see it on clearance in Sally's when I was getting something else. Score!

CG: Adventure Red-y outdoors in full sun

Here it is on my nails. This two coats with one coat of Borghese Presto top coat. Formula was super smooth and could've almost been a one coater but I'm picky about bald spots. As it turns out I was glad I picked this up, it might be my new favorite red!

Same as above

I give this polish an : A
I would give it an A+ but I haven't tried to remove it yet and it looks like it might be a real stainer....

The Essie "Clambake" Mystery

The Essie "Clambake" Mystery

Today I have for you an unusual post. Polishes I have yet to even swatch. I came across these polishes at Job Lot and immediately noticed the trademark Essie bottles amongst the other polishes in the discount bin. Two dollar Essie? I sure will! It wasn't until I started looking at the colors at the bottom that I realized many of them were labeled the same. "Clambake". Well obviously someone F-d up. I pulled out my phone and googled what Clambake was supposed to look like and still I'm not sure any of these are Clambake.

(L-R) Clambake, Clambake, Clambake, Clambake and Clambake....just kidding

Pretty, if not Perfect

 Every single one of these is labeled the same Clambake #476. Each one has a white Essie cap with an E and no label. Except the furthest one to the right which is labeled on the top "Damsel in a Dress". This seems to be the accurate color labeling. None of these bottles have the clear/white Essie label on the side of the bottle leading me to believe they are all slip-ups that were never fully rendered. It appears though that the only problem was that they had Clambake printed on the bottom. If Damsel is one of the slipups however, I'm not sure what the others are because they don't match up with any of the other Winter 2008 Collection.

(L-R) Aruba Blue, Downtown Brown, Bordeaux

Here we have a few more that I found in the discount bin. Aruba Blue which is missing its clear/white side stickers but seems to be color-accurate. Downtown Brown, and Bordeaux which are similar but definitely not the same. I also found Angora Cardi but I already had that one at home (damn, kicking myself for paying full price). 

Anyways, it was very curious but I'm glad someones screw up led to more polish landing cheaply in my collection. For this my badly-labeling-factory-worker-friend you WIN!

So any guess on what these mystery colors really are? I saw a bottle of Geranium correctly labeled in the bin right next to the reddest of the "Clambake" colors and it seemed in bottle to be a perfect dupe....