BB Couture Vampy Varnish Collection

I know this came out ages ago... I have been wanting to post it but I've had such crazy anxiety about it. Let me explain my messed up head... This collection isn't like some regular collection the mostly faceless polish companies spit out every three months. This collection is special and important because it was designed by not just a fellow blogger but a friend. Therefore, it deserves perfect pictures.. special attention to detail... Keen observation... I've actually been afraid I'd mess up my review or pictures and miss some great detail that the creator intended to be noticed, or maybe my pictures would be bad and I wouldn't do the polishes justice. So yes... performance anxiety... I haz it. I'm like this with anything special. I don't even consider myself a perfectionist, but if it's something someone I know made I always want to get it just right.

But, in honor of Kelly aka Vampy Varnish's birthday, here it is, the BB Couture collection she created.

Kelly's Green. A vintage muted avocado green base with flecks of silver, pale iridescent green and black microglitter. You may need to enlarge to see the black glitter. The glitter particles are small and don't take center stage in this polish- it works as a whole package and gives me them impression of stones. Are there green stones? Like river rocks with veins of granite.


Mendocino Midnight. A very tricky polish. Sometimes I think it looks mostly green... sometimes I think it looks grey-green... sometimes it looks like blue-green with a faint pink flash. It's deep and dark and does have a subtle pink shimmer to it, and to make it even more interesting it's packed with green and gold and blue slightly iridescent glitter. Very complex.


Napa Valley Red. Now this is a red I can love. It is slightly deeper than this in real life but I wanted to be able to capture all of the glittery goodness of this polish in bright light. It's a deep wine red jelly base with a little bit of a purple undertone and lots of sparkly pink-toned red glitter. When I look at it in direct light I can even see very tiny flashes of violet sparkle. This is the type of color I think of when I hear 'vampy'.


Redwood Forest. My picture makes this look more blue-toned than it really is. In real life it's more vibrant and has a lot more yellow to it. It's a medium saturated forest green with a sprinkling of fine silvery glitter. Some of the glitter looks blue to me, but I can't tell if it's actually blue glitter if it's cause I'm looking at it through green polish. Either way, it's a dream color for me. Glittery forest green. I've been looking for a color like this for a long time! It's really beautiful, I don't think my picture captures it at all. I really need to re-do this one again. It keeps coming out so blue!


Union Square. Super super sparkly bronzed taupe foil. This one is hard for me to describe! Being a foil, it's made up of little metallic particles, and this has a few different colors swirling around to make one color on the nail. It has some lighter champagne colored flecks, some deeper bronze colored ones and some in-between taupe gold ones. The end result is this shimmering earth toned foil.


Vampy Varnish. The crown jewel of the collection. Seriously. This is *amazing*. I have put a massive dent in my bottle of this, I even wore it back-to-back for almost two weeks. How do I describe this? The base is a deep, dark, foreboding green jelly- deeper and darker than NARS Zulu. It has glitter. Boy, does it ever have glitter. It has blue glitter. It has green glitter. It has gold glitter and even what looks to be a tiny bit of silver glitter. And it sparkles, majorly. The sparkling glitter lights up the vampy green base and makes a really nice contrast. I love when there are jelly polishes with glitter because you can see the glitter in the lower layers of the polish and it adds a lot of depth and just looks freakin' sweet. This is like the forest in summer on a moonless midnight. All you can see are the flashes of the fireflies against dark green foliage.


The formula on these was good. BB Couture standard, pretty much. Not thick, not thin, nice medium texture. I did three coats of all and that was pretty much perfect. You could do two coats with most of these, but I think the third coat added more depth and color to the glittery dark shades. Dry time is a little longer than I'm used to, but not really what I'd call long. Longer than OPI (with Seche) but not anywhere near as long as something like Orly or Barielle. I'd say about half an hour for complete dryness. Because the glitter is so fine, removal wasn't too difficult either. All around solid formula, good bottles and brushes, good wear time.

I think it goes without saying that I love this collection. I mean, look at it... It's all green and glitter! And it's unique! The only polish in this collection that I can think of something similar is Kelly's Green. Golf Pro looks a little bit like Kelly's Green but it's definitely not a match, and it came out months after... I wonder if it was an early prototype? Now I'm curious. But anyway, all around amazing collection. It seems like Kelly and I have similar taste because I'm majorly digging these. I think she did a great job on these.