I’m questioning Summer because lately here in Halifax, it’s just not feeling like it!  Rain, rain and more rain.  Totally bummer.

Anyway, earlier in the week I had on an awesome combo – China Glaze ‘Ahoy’ and Orly ‘Royal Navy’.  The brightness of the shades and their shimmer fire went perfectly together: a total ‘power combo.’  However, for whatever reason, Royal Navy was chipping on me like mad within a day, and then starting coming off in big chunks, so I put the kibosh on that pretty quickly.  I’m concerned it might be the butter London Foundation base coat I’ve been wearing, because I don’t recall that happening the last time I wore R.Navy, but I’m not entirely sure.  In the mani I’m about to show you, I have Sally Hansen’s No Chip Age Correct on one hand as a base, and butter London’s Foundation on the other.  We’ll see what happens.

Ok, details.  On my nails, I’m wearing Milani’s ‘Totally Cool,’ a purple jelly with duochrome glitter.  There’s a story behind this one: my friend gave this to me a long while back – it turned out it wasn’t the color she was hoping it to be, and she knew I was a nail polish fiend and figured I could make it work.  I tried it on, and after applying two coats and finding it to still be sheer and watered-down looking, I got turned off and put it in the ‘give-away’ pile.  However, a couple months ago through my never-ending blog trolling, I found a swatch of this polish online that blew my mind.  The post-er’s idea to layer it over another color is totally awesome too, I tried it with different variations and it comes as damn near close to Clarins 230 as I’ll ever get, so I’m loving it.

Anyway, I tried it out again, and consider me converted.  I highly suggest googling swatches of this baby, it’s really amazingly beautiful, and for around $5 at Lawtons, you can’t go wrong!!  See my own pics below:

You can get a hint of its duochrome-y nature in the bottle.This is how it looked to me when I first wore it – watery and washed out and lame.  But then…And the pièce de résistance:

My photo doesn’t quite do it justice…its really, really beautiful.  As I mentioned before, if you layered this over a burgundy base, it really brings something else to the table too – making it look like a close cousin to Clarins 230.  Awwwwwesome

Oh, one thing I wanted to show you was the crazy shrinking I had on one nail from the Seche Vite top coat I normally use.  I’ve been noticing this effect more and more lately and its kinda pissing me off……Yowza!  Might be time to research a new top coat!

Anyway, since I had no reason to remove ‘Ahoy’ from my toes – it didn’t act like a jerk and flake off at the drop of a hat – I kept it on because it matched ‘Totally Cool’ to a T.  Check it out:I couldn’t capture the shimmer properly in either polish, but the pinky-gold shimmer of Totally Cool really compliments the tone of Ahoy.  I tried to show the shimmer of Ahoy in the photo below (although I have featured this shade on the blog here):Not a great shot either, I’m afraid.  But trust me that Ahoy is definitely a polish to own, one of my favorites of my collection.  I’d forgotten how much I loved it until I applied it again.  It has such amazing richness and it flows on the nail so darn easily.  Love!

Totally Cool, aside from requiring four coats (you could definitely do three but I’m terribly particular), was super easy to apply and dried quickly enough that I could apply another coat soon after the one before it with absolutely no dragging.

As for the base coat wars, I’ll report back to let you know if it’s the fault of butter London or Orly for the wonky chipping.  Hopefully it’s neither and it was just an off day manicure-wise!

Has anyone else tried Totally Cool and totally fallen in love?  Does the number of polish coats turn you off a shade no matter how pretty, or will you forgive if it’s a to-die-for color?  Have you ever tried a shade and written it off, only to try it again later and change your mind?

Last night I tried sitting straight up in bed so I wouldn’t cough all night, but it’s terribly uncomfortable and I ended up getting very little sleep for a second night in a row.  I picked up a 12 hour cough suppressant and in a few minutes I’m gonna chug a bunch and strap myself to the bed so I can get some rest!!  Another sleepless night and I’m sure to snap soon :S