Phew- that's not a pithy title, is it?

Well, to begin the new week, I've got some nail art to share! This is the look I was wearing in my , so if you couldn't see what was going on there due to image quality, this post might help!

I have to admit that I fully succumbed to the entire Color Club Poptastic Pastel Neon Remix collection for Summer 2015. I'm not sure what got into me, because I hardly ever purchase entire Color Club sets, but I thought these were a little unique, I suppose.

I've used five of the seven of them for this look:

L to R: Feel the Funk, Call of the Disco Ball, Soul Sister, It's Electric, On the Flip Side

These polishes are companions to Color Club's Spring 2015 set, the Poptastic Pastel Neons, and each shade here has a coordinating creme-finish pastel neon shade in the original set. But these Summer 2015 Remix shades are sheer jelly finishes with iridescent hex glitters.

And, they glow in the dark:


Now, about that. That ^ looks pretty impressive, doesn't it? Well, I found that the glow decays incredibly quickly after a charge with these polishes- like, I'm talking seconds.

So, I made you a GIF:


These shots were taken with a tripod and remote release because the shutter speed used to capture the glow in a pitch dark space was obviously longer than you could hand-hold the camera. Each shot has identical exposure settings (1.3 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 250) and I didn't even touch the camera in between exposures. They were all taken more or less ~3 seconds apart. So you can see how rapidly the glow charge decays.

The polishes were charged using full-spectrum CFL bulbs. I tried incandescent too, but the results were similar.

Anyway, thought that was interesting!

On to the nails:



There weren't many bloggers showing these polishes in their sheer form. Most people are layering them over the Poptastic Pastel Neon polishes, which looks great! But, I'm not afraid of a little VNL sometimes, so I wanted to experiment with them that way.

Then, I ended up stamping over it all before I even took a picture, so it's really hard to see anyway. Oh well! But, what I'm trying to say is that with 2-3 coats, depending on the shade, these aren't bad by themselves! There is a little nail line visible, but it's not crazy, and the polishes have a squishy jelly look. Mattifying them made everything look even better.

Thumb:



The colors, thumb to pinkie, are in the same bottle order as above: Feel the Funk, Call of the Disco Ball, Soul Sister, It's Electric!, & On the Flip Side. All nails have three coats except for It's Electric! (ring) and Feel the Funk (thumb), which have two.

All of the stamping comes from MoYou Mother Nature- 14, which when MoYou London had a worldwide free shipping sale. The metallic stamping color is Essie- Penny Talk, which I'm addicted to stamping with lately. I'm all about the rose gold thing still (foreeeever!), so Penny Talk is perfect, and I did try to coordinate rings- lol!

To mattify, I used Butter London- Matte Finish.

I did use the new Creative Shop Stamper to do this, and I do think it has a learning curve. I found it very easy to pick up images with the stamper, but difficult to get clean transfers onto the nail. So, I am still experimenting with it!

In the dark:


Very difficult to get clean shots of glow-in-the-dark nails!  You can't just tripod the camera like I did with the bottle shots, because your hand is still moving around, unlike the bottles which were stationary! So, between that, and the rapid "glow decay," I haven't found a good way to show this.

On the nail, the polishes do glow very similar shades of yellow-green. In the bottle, they look different, especially Call of the Disco Ball, but on the nail- very similar. Soul Sister and It's Electric (two middle nails) did seem to glow the brightest/ longest, though!

In the end, you know, the glow-in-the-dark thing is a bit gimmicky, but I think these polishes are pretty in their natural pastel daylight state. I didn't love the formulas; they were a bit sticky- not goopy, and not impossible to work with, just not creamy, you know? Decent.