Swatches: Barielle Shades

When I first saw these in the September issue of Nails Magazine, my heart skipped a beat. Green and purple!!!!!!!

I looked all over for these polishes and finally gave up- I was never going to find them. It was all a cruel joke. I put them out of my mind...

...Until people started talking about them again! It was so mean, waving those lovely green and purple polishes in my face, knowing that I can't get them.... BUT! Some kind soul emailed me to say that they're available at CVS of all places! I know! CVS, can you believe it?!

They're also available on Barielle.com, but they cost $8 there and $6 at CVS.

I didn't get the whole collection because I'm on a polish budget right now, but the other two didn't really excite me that much. One was a pearly white, and one was a slivered brown that reminded me of Misa Earthward. Very pretty but possibly easily duplicated.

Enough babble, on to the swatches!!


Date Night. The undisputed star of the show and quite possibly one of the most perfect greens in existence. Please excuse the tipwear, I was wearing this for three days before I took the picture. This is a rich, deep, true green. No blue hints. It's lush and extravagant. I haven't wanted to wear anything but this color since I got it. If you like greens, you NEED this.


Hidden Hideway. Another unbelievably spectacular color from Barielle. A vibrant purple that's just a bit blackened. It's one of those lit-from-within colors that I love so much. The best thing about this is that it always looks purple in the middle, but blackish around the edges. I hate purples that look black, and this is not one of those! It's like Zoya Yasmeen's older, naughtier sister.


Secret Encounter. I keep wanting to call this one Random Encounter, heh. Another perfect purple shade. This one is much brighter and more on the red side. The color is made more beautiful by the incredible smooth shimmer this polish has. It sparkles with microscopic multicolored particles in full sunlight. So beautiful.


Two Timing. A beautiful shimmering coppery fall leaves type color. It reminds me a little bit of OPI Music Hall Curtain Call. It's not as red as Music Hall Curtain Call, more ambery copper, but the gold shimmer really brightens it and makes it flashy. This just screams FALL to me. Love.

I can't tell you how impressed I am with this collection. All of the colors are amazingly perfect, not a single dud in the whole collection; even the ones I didn't get were beautiful. It was like they hacked into my brain and created a collection they knew would make me freak out. And I gotta tell you, I freaked out over these!

Formula wise, I have mixed feelings. They are very thick but not difficult to apply. The thickness causes them to be mostly opaque in one coat, but a second coat is still necessary. The formula is smooth and not runny, and I like that, but they also take quite a while to dry. I always use Seche Vite on my polishes, and usually use Qtica Half Time drops on top of that, so manicures do dry quickly for me, but each polish tends to dry at their own speed.

CND, for example, takes the longest to dry because it doesn't ever actually dry. China Glaze takes the second longest, remaining dentable for a day or more. OPI is usually the fastest, mostly dry in 10 minutes and totally dentproof within a half hour... And so on and so forth. These polishes dry slower than OPI but not as slow as China Glaze. I was able to dent this polish after two hours, but by the end of the night it was completely dry. For the record, it was one coat of basecoat, two coats of polish and one coat of topcoat.


That being said, I'm still completely in love with this collection. I might even have to go get the other two polishes. I haven't been this excited about a collection in quite some time. It's perfect. Perfect! Bravo, Barielle! Great job! I didn't even know Barielle made polish, so seeing these shocked the hell out of me and made me giddy with polish-joy at the same time.

Rock on, Barielle.