And Now for Something Completely Different... NaiLuv "Not So Innocent"

Hey again!  Today marks quite a milestone: this is the first time in the entire two-year history of my blog that I have a translucent nail polish color to show you--without layering it over an opaque base color.  That's remarkable to me because, well, I don't usually go for the "visible nail line" or "French manicure" look.  But the times, they are a-changing.

NaiLuv "Not So Innocent" is a clear gel filled with tiny clear iridescent hexagonal glitter.   It's pretty amazing for being such a simple gel polish, though; the iridescent quality makes these glitters shine in all colors of the rainbow, with orange, green and blue-purple being the most predominant.   Because the glitter is clear-based, when light is not reflecting off of it, the glitter may "disappear" on the nail bed and create the illusion of a "bald spot" sans glitter--but since gel polish offers much more dimension than a flat regular polish, this rarely happens. Worn alone like this, "Not So Innocent" looks really clean and girly--and somehow even healthy--a gel polish like this brings out any natural pinkness in your nail beds and makes them look pearly and clean.  It's also demure enough that you might get away with it at places where brighter colors are prohibited.  I tried to capture a few extra photos to show how awesome it is:

First up, a macro shot--towards the sides of my nail beds you can see what look like "bald spots" without any glitter, but that's really just the illusion I talked about earlier:

Then a slightly blurry shot in a  somewhat successful attempt to show off the iridescence (believe me, it looks better in real life!):

And finally, I found this pixelated low light shot when going through my camera's images.  It's not "blog-quality" for sure, but look how this glitter glows even in the worst lighting!

 

I used three coats to get the look you see here, although it would look ok with one coat, too; the glitter would just be more sparse.  This is part of the "Rebel Without a Cause" collection, and like the other shade I reviewed so far (NaiLuv "Acid Rain"), it's a much thicker gel than usual--maybe because it needs to suspend all of the glitters in it.  So when applying, it feels more like a traditional "pot" style gel than the kinds that I'm used to--you know, the ones that come in a nail polish style bottle.  This can cause a bit of a learning curve when you go to apply it, then: you want to get enough gel on your brush that you get glitter coverage on your nails, but you don't want to get too much that you flood your cuticles! It also creates layers that are thicker than normal, which increases the strength of your manicure, but also increases removal time.  Last time, I wasn't so careful with application and my manicure didn't last too long.  This time, however, I got about 9 days of wear out of my manicure, with only one nail that had application problems.

Like the other shade in this collection, I also received "Not So Innocent" free because I won NaiLuv's Facebook contest (where I got to name 3 of their colors)--keep an eye out on their parent company's page, Chrislie Formations, and hopefully they will do more things like this soon!

I should do an overview of all the colors I received too... maybe?  Because, as you might be able to guess, all the colors are following the same theme as "Acid Rain" and "Not So Innocent"--and it's a pretty unique theme!