Cirque Happy Monday
Happy Monday was released at the end of April this year by NYC-based indie polish maker Cirque Colors as a part of the Kawaii collection. One of several limited edition polishes in the collection, it is officially described as "a violet holographic with a flash of teal." The base color is a medium-toned violet or floral lavender shade bearing superabundant ultrafine teal shimmers, which read as sky blue from within the base and create an almost duochromatic effect, with a gleaming, semi-metallic sky blue sheen along the axis of light. They give the polish a sleek, airbrushed sort of quality that softens the color quite a bit, but the illuminating holographic properties keep it from being too subdued, adding dimensionality and a skosh of that finely-grained texture to the look in bright ambient light. Direct sun transforms the shimmery sheen into a bright, glistening mist surrounded by scattered prismatic sparks in all of the rainbow colors.
Application was a comedy of errors through no fault of the polish, which has all the native Cirque-ean qualities of careful formulation and consummate paintability that you'd expect. But it was a spectacularly off day for the wielder of the brush, complete with a ridiculous amount of sidewall and cuticle swipage, several disasterous examples of fiber extraction from wet polish, dings, smudges and an uneven, heavy-handed approach in general. Happy Monday will deliver evenly opaque coverage in two coats, but the mess I made of my second coat required a third to rectify. Luckily, cleanup is easy. Happy Monday dries naturally in fairly good time to a smooth, slightly flat finish that wants a glossy topcoat to make the most of the shimmer effects and look its very best.
Is it just me or do super fine shimmers like this dry more slowly than other polishes? It's just me? That's what I thought.
Photos show three coats of Happy Monday over basecoat with a topcoat of Seche Vite.
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
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| Cirque Happy Monday |
Happy Monday is constructed similarly to its stablemate Vaporwave, with the shimmer effects overtaking the holographic properties in most viewing circumstances, giving the polish a silky, slightly old-school-shimmer sort of look. I'm not typically a fan of ultrafine shimmer polishes, but like Vaporwave, this one grew on me, and the holographic properties add a substantial twist that keeps the composition fresh and modern. It's an interesting, innovative combination of effects that I've not experienced in quite this way before now, and it works beautifully.
love,
Liz
These kinds of posts of yours are why I love your work So Very Much!
ReplyDeleteI see absolutely no signs of application woes, in spite of the fact that, "...it was a spectacularly off day for the wielder of the brush...." .
Magnificent colour, fabulous finish, absolutely brilliant post!
Thank You XO
You are most welcome, Cath, and thank YOU for your kind words!
ReplyDeleteAll I have to say is thank heavens for cleanup! I have hand tremors and never have managed a perfectly clean manicure, but some days are worse than others and this was one of them. And in the way of many things, the more I realized how badly things were going, the worse they got. Lots of mouth breathing, upper lip sweat, grimacing and flinching and there even may or may not have been a little involuntary drooling. In concentration, I mean. It goes along with the mouth breathing. *lol*