Wet n' Wild : Enchanted Halloween : Happy Hour Hop, Roadwork, Pot of Gold, & Under Your Spell

Hello, Twinklings!!  It's my last week in Montana before I have to go back to school, and it's been bumming me out but I can't be too sad because it's my birthday week!!!  Whee!!  Yes, I am unabashedly a birthday week person.  I can't help it, I just love birthdays.  Secretly, I've been kind of having a birthday month, mostly because it has been my last-ditch validation for all of my makeup shopping :)  As a result of Birthday Month activities, I have lots of fun new stuff to show you before I become bogged down with thesis research next week.  My fall collections packages have begun arriving *today* so while I'm swatching those like crazy, I wanted to share with you part of a collection that has come as a pleasant surprise to me: Enchanted Halloween!!

Wet n' Wild : Enchanted Halloween

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Happy Hour Hop

"Happy Hour Hop" is an enchanting iris purple illuminated by candlelight gold flakie shimmer.  This polish is positively bewitching.  I almost fell over when I saw it on the Wet n' Wild display for $1.99; this honestly has to be the most beautiful two-buck nail polish ever made.  Granted, Sinful Colors "Cinderella" could make a play for that one too, except that "Happy Hour Hop" has a significantly better, more opaque formula, which is a beautiful thing so ha, still wins.  It makes me think of Arabian nights, of gilded gold and sand dunes bathed in moonlight.  I do think "Happy Hour Hop" is kind of an uninspired name for such a magnificent color.  Is anyone else sick of the incessant partying/celebrity/club themes for everything ever sold anymore?  Do we really need anything else named "VIP", or whatever?  It just doesn't capture the glorious spirit of this lacquer.

Wet n' Wild "Happy Hour Hop"

Wet n' Wild "Happy Hour Hop"

I'm wearing three coats in these swatches, though if you wanted to stop at two it reads as opaque in real life.  The color does intensify beautifully with the third coat, but it's nice to get away with less if you're in a hurry.  Like most flakie shimmers, this polish is dynamite with a matte top coat.

Wet n' Wild "Happy Hour Hop" + matte top coat

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Roadwork

"Roadwork" has an ebony base that is veritably flooded with silver metallic shimmer, with the ultimate appearance of metalized graphite.  It has that awesome chemistry of edgy and glamorous that toughens up a girly look.  The interface of black and silver reads essentially as a gunmetal foil.  I'm not into rock n' roll culture, but I was roped into attending a ZZTop concert in August, and if this had been in my collection at the time it would have been my rock concert manicure.  It may not be my scene, but I can appreciate its acceptance of the wild hues and fabulous glitters that I love but don't have much occasion to wear out (not all together, anyway).  As it is, since I'm not a rock girl I'm choosing to interpret this color as a sexy, deep metallic that is spook-tacular for autumn :)

"Roadwork" had a great formula, especially for the price point.  Nice and even application, and opaque in two coats.  If I had thought about it, this one would have been stunning with matte top coat also.  "Happy Hour Hop" as a name annoyed me, but this one is truly terrible.  Who names a legendary, glam polish like this after one of the most irritating, wearisome, mundane, exasperating conditions of an autocentric culture?  I do understand the imagery- this kind of reminds me of crystallized asphalt- but I think something more along the lines of black magic or the Dark Arts might have evoked imagery more aligned with the expressive quality of this polish, or at least a feeling other than tedious annoyance.

Wet n' Wild "Roadwork"

Wet n' Wild "Roadwork"

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Pot of Gold

"Pot of Gold" is a molten cool gold blended with metallic silver chrome and sparkling faintly with tiny gold metallic flakes.  I thought that this was so pretty in the bottle but it applied like a disaster; streaky, bubbly, slightly sheer, and a bit slow to dry.  The streaks can be mitigated with a matte top coat as seen at the end of this post, but bubbles and dents are just insufferable.  I would take a pass on this one unless you're very patient and want to wait like a hour between coats (I needed three for opacity), which might help evade the bubble issue.  But in the words of the good woman Sweet Brown, ain't nobody got time for that.

Wet n' Wild "Pot of Gold"

Wet n' Wild "Pot of Gold"

Wet n' Wild "Pot of Gold"

Wet n' Wild "Pot of Gold" + matte top coat + glossy top coat

Wet n' Wild "Pot of Gold" + matte top coat + glossy top coat

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Under Your Spell

"Under Your Spell" is a sultry black cherry burgundy shimmer with a slight fiery gold-burnt orange-cranberry edge in blackened smoky jelly base.  Holy smokes, this here's a hot one.  Autumn has hit me with a craving for vampies, so no, little nail polish, I'm under YOUR spell.  Something about the satin sheen of the fine blood red shimmer, glowing like wicked embers through the smoky quartz base, is so mindblowingly seductive.  It's such a perfect vampire red, it actually demanded that my skin turn vampire white in complement.  No but seriously, how weird is it that my camera would only take capture images with a dramatic overexposure on just my skin... it's like I instantly became a Cullen with this polish on my nails.  

 

Wet n' Wild "Under Your Spell"

Wet n' Wild "Under Your Spell"

After the first coat I thought that this was going to be crummy and sheer, but magically it becomes functionally opaque after two.  I used three coats for depth and intensity, and so that it wouldn't look patchy on camera, but you could really get away with two if you felt like it.  I love that it's so versatile to be sheer and then not; it's the perfect mysterious jelly sandwich lacquer!  I did one with one of Wet n' Wild's new Mega Rocks, "Creative Control", full of large bright magenta hex glitters.

Wet n' Wild "Under Your Spell" + "Creative Control"

Wet n' Wild Enchanted Halloween is a Walgreens-exclusive collection, although "Under Your Spell" is also a core color and "Creative Control" is part of another collection so they can be found anywhere.  Wet n' Wild Megalast polishes retail for a mere $1.99, though they are all 25% off this week at Walgreens, yay!!  "Happy Hour Hop" is an absolute must-have IMHO.

What is your favorite polish for under $2??