CrowsToes Barrel

And finally, I have the third and last polish from the Oogie Boys Trio to show you today: Barrel, by North Carolina-based indie polish maker CrowsToes Nail Color. It's described as "a deep, dank, murky green topped with blue, green and purple sparks."

The color is a dark, cool-toned, slatey bottle green with a silvery aspect and a blackened-style kind of dimensionality on the nail. Now I don't know for sure what all is in this lacquer, but it appears to be a grey-tinted base that's absolutely packed with nanoscale dark green microflake shimmers, dotted with a sprinkling of holographic particles and copious tiny sparkly bits, mostly in blue and green, which, judging from Diana's superb macro shot in her review of the Trio on Snacks On Rotation, may be microglitters. Or they may be more microflake shimmers. Whatever they are, they do sparkle beautifully against their bottle green backdrop, interspersed with even finer pinpoint prismatic sparkle from the holographic pigment, which blankets the polish with a net of bright rainbow sparks in the sun.

Application was fabulous. The consistency of Barrel is fluid and smooth with a medium viscosity and a fluent, silky, self-leveling glide over the nail that is amenable to thin or thicker coats as preference dictates. Pigmentation is sheerish on the first coat but builds quickly to wearable opacity with the second. I actually think it looks best in three coats, the color and effects just seem noticeably richer to me that way. Cleanup is straightforward, mostly a matter of chasing down microflakes. Barrel dries naturally in very good time to an ever-so-slightly textured finish, easily smoothed by topcoat.

Photos show three coats of Barrel over basecoat with a topcoat of Seche Vite. The polish color leans slightly more grey in my pics than it appears in person, where it's more clearly a true bottle green.

CrowsToes Barrel

CrowsToes Barrel

CrowsToes Barrel

CrowsToes Barrel

CrowsToes Barrel

CrowsToes Barrel

CrowsToes Barrel

CrowsToes Barrel

CrowsToes Barrel

CrowsToes Barrel

CrowsToes Barrel

Having anticipated (wrongly) that it would have that washed-out, watery look on the nail that shimmers like this can have when the shimmer component is too sparse and the color doesn't have enough oomph, I was all set not like this polish. Denied! The color is a rich, shimmering, dimensional, blue-leaning green with a blackened, foresty vibe and the beautiful and seductive but treacherous sensibility of a siren sorceress. A long time ago I read a detective/mystery novel about a female serial killer who always wore a bottle green dress when she went out to hunt her victims, and that's the kind of feel I get from this polish. Vampy, for sure!

love,
Liz