Zoya Gems and Jewels Collection Holiday 2011 Swatches and Review

My first Holiday collection review of the year! And it's a good one. Lots of bright color and sparkly glitter. Zoya's Gems and Jewels collection is a set of six shades: three foily/metallic shades with three coordinating glitters that can be used for layering or worn by themselves.


Holly. An amazing bright green metallic. Not quite a foil, but more metal looking than your average shimmer. The shade on this one is perfect- very bold yellow-toned green. This is exactly the kind of green I'm usually looking for!


Izzy. A bright magenta foil. Extremely colorful. Very bold looking with the foil finish.



Noel. A light denim blue foil. This one looks a little similar to Crystal but they're definitely not the same.



Kissy. I think this is my favorite color in the collection. It's a really awesome glitter and I don't own anything else like it. It's a combination of red, pink, purple and silver holo with traditional tiny round glitter and larger bar glitter. I love bar glitter. It's very rare to see anyone do bar glitter these days, so I'm really happy about this.


Rina. Rina is all green. Greena Rina. Bar glitter and regular glitter with just a hint of hologram bar glitter to add depth. Doesn't this look like a pile of pine needles? Love it.



Twila. This is a light blue round/bar glitter combination with only a little holo bar glitter. The holo glitter really blends in against the blue base so it's hard to tell it's in there.

Those were the colors alone, but glitters are great for layering, so here's what they look like layered:

Kissy over Holly. If you enlarge these, you can see the pretty red glitter that's in Kissy.


Kissy over Izzy. In my opinion, these glitters look best layered over their coordinating base shades, or at least over a base color that's not too different from the color of the glitter. Doesn't this look great? When the base color is too different, I find the glitter to look splotchy and patchy.


Kissy over Noel. Love that red glitter.


Rina over Holly. Green on green. Looks so festive.


Rina over Izzy. Very Christmassy, but I still think it looks splotchy... Doesn't it?


Rina over Noel. Doesn't look so patchy over a similar base color, though. The blue and the green play well together.

Twila over Holly.

Twila over Izzy.

Twila over Noel.

The formula on these was great. The foil/metallic shades applied like a dream, no problems there. The glitter shades were a little thick but otherwise good. The glitters thickened a lot while I was using them, especially around the neck of the bottle, so I'm thinking I may need to thin them eventually. All shades were nice and opaque, I did two on the metallics and three on the glitters. The glitters are surprisingly dense and can easily be worn alone. Dry time was good. The glitters dry rather textured and they definitely need a thick topcoat. They also seem to eat topcoat as some glitters do, so two coats of topcoat would be even better.

One thing worth noting about these is that the glitter is extremely shiny. I was noticing how shiny it was when I was out in sunlight for some of the photos... They looked alive! Sparkling and twinkling all over the place. Very pretty. I like these glitters a lot.

My favorites are Kissy and Holly, but there's not a bad polish in the collection. I think the glitters look better over a similar base color for layering, but they're amazing by themselves. I haven't tried them over black yet, but I'm going to do that soon because I think it will make the different shapes of glitter really stand out.

So happy to see bar glitter. Very cool, Zoya.

(These were sent to me for review.)