Box o' polish from Pretty Serious Cosmetics!

Earlier this week I got a package in the mail from Pretty Serious Cosmetics, an Australian indie company. Luckily for us Americans, Pretty Serious has a distributor in the US that facilitates sales to individuals here because apparently small international shipments of flammable product from Australia are a legal no-no.

Wanna see what's in the box?

nail polishes from Pretty Serious Cosmetics!

how adorable is this packaging? LOVE!

from l to r: Mummy Mush, Elliot, Claris

Mummy Mush, Elliot, Claris

Mummy Mush bottle shot, shimmer shimmer shimmer!

Elliot bottle shot

Claris bottle shot

prrreciousss!

Mummy Mush, Elliot and Claris, artisinal polishes formulated in Australia by Kaz of Pretty Serious Cosmetics.

I wanted to swatch them ASAP, of course, was hoping for a couple of sunny days in a row to do this, but we keep having cloudy days here. Cloudy days with the spits, one after the other. It was cloudy the day I opened up the package, can you tell by the darkish photos? Personally I love cloudy days especially windy spitty cloudy days like today, but they're not the best for taking pictures of nail polish. So all my photos in this post are a wee bit dark.

The first polish I swatched was Mummy Mush, which is just full of golden shimmer in a pinkish tinted translucent base. To avoid VNL (Visible Nail Line, where your nails go from the pink of the nail bed to white at the tip) I thought I'd start with a pink base color. I chose Off The Record Pink from Sation from my stash. Here are Mummy Mush and Off The Record Pink together and a pic to show you what Off The Record Pink looks like by itself...

Pretty Serious Mummy Mush and Sation Off The Record Pink

Sation Off The Record Pink, pretty sheer stuff -- I can't remember whether this is two or three coats

In retrospect, I wish I'd swatched Mummy Mush by itself. Here's how it turned out over Off The Record Pink...

glowy!

you can see the pink peeking through, I wish I could have photographed this in the sun

"the claw," modified version

The next one I tried out was Elliot, the blue one. So very pretty! It's a very saturated sky blue, the color you see when you look straight up into the sky on a brilliant cloudless day. This is a very pigmented polish, no VNL here. The silver shimmer you see in the bottle is not so obvious on the nail, but I think it would be easier to see in direct sunlight. Which is in short supply around here lately, as I mentioned.

Pretty Serious Elliot, you can see a teensy bit of that silver shimmer here and there

frrrresh!

Pretty Serious Elliot

Love it? Love it! That was two coats of Elliot.

Finally, there is Claris. Claris is a bright milky pink with lots of golden shimmer that is not shy. The golden color of the shimmer together with the pink gives it a summery corally look. The polish itself is slightly sheer and jelly-ish. I only did two coats and it turned out gorgeous but I think it would be even better and more true-to-color with three coats.

Pretty Serious Claris

Pretty Serious Claris, modified claw

shimmer shot!

Pretty Serious Claris -- tres fem, no?

Oh and look who wandered into the bathroom to help with the photography...

Cheeser, lookin a bit wild-eyed and goofy... CUTENESS!

All in all, I loved my new Pretty Serious polishes. I think I could do better with Mummy Mush. Next time I will not use "underwear" (this is what polish enthusiasts call colors that are worn underneath sheer polishes to avoid the Visible Nail Line). And I will wait for a sunny day. I think Elliot was my favorite, it is just so blooooooo! Both Elliot and Claris dried to a nice "squishy" glossy finish, yummy.

Til next time, Miss B.

love,
Aunt Liz