China Glaze Let It Snow! Collection Holiday 2011 Swatches and Review

I love snow. I'm just not ready for snow yet, seeing as we've just entered the second week of October. I can remember it snowing in October before... Funny, because right now I have China Glaze's brand new Holiday 2011 collection and all I can think is that I want Let It Snow on my nails right now, but I don't want to actually let it snow for another few months... Now I'm rambling. On to the polish!


Blue Year's Eve. Sparkly deep blue glass fleck! The base is a sheer blue and the shimmer particles are a very reflective silver/blue/turquoise duochrome. This reminds me of old-style China Glaze!



Champagne Bubbles. Speaking of old-style China Glaze, how about this one? I swear there was a polish like this before from the Gold Diggin' Divas collection. This is a light gold metallic with smooth silver glitter. The glitter is tiny but it still shows through perfectly. I'm so glad that this polish works. Usually when you combine a metallic base with a traditional glitter particle, you get a horrible, lumpy mess. Not so with Champagne Bubbles. It's smooth all over and the glitter doesn't get swallowed by a too-dense base. Good job, China Glaze.





Glittering Garland. A dark green jelly base with light yellow-toned green reflective microglitter. Not a copy of the mythic Emerald Sparkle, more like an updated version. It's basically a cross between the original China Glaze Emerald Sparkle and NYX Las Vegas, which basically means it's AWESOME.



Holly-Day. So simple, yet so good. An extremely smooth and creamy holly green creme. Flawless. The color is good, the finish is good, the application is good. Reminds me a bit of Rescue Beauty Lounge Recycle.



Icicle. Silver foil. I like silver foils and all, but do we really need another? It's really nice, very shiny and sparkly, but so easy to duplicate. Though, this one does seem more speckled than most silver foils, but still... Plain silver foil.



Poinsettia. This one is really cool. It's a bright candy red with a somewhat unusual finish. It's not a creme. It's translucent like a jelly, but it's also milky. A milky jelly. Creamy jelly? It's not dense and solid like a normal creme finish, but not totally clear like a normal jelly. I love it, it's really fascinating to look at!



Ring In The Red. A sheer pink-red base with both small and medium red glitter particles. Like Glittering Garland, this is an updated classic. It's definitely not a duplicate of Ruby Pumps, but it's not that far off, either. This one is really pretty by itself, but it's thin enough for layering. I'm really into layering red glitter over things lately... The rich red just adds that extra something, I don't know guys. I can't explain it. I just really like red glitter on things!



Snow Globe. I'm pretty sure this was part of that 50 Specialty Glitters collection from a few years back, so this might be a permanent color. But it's still cool. It's a clear base with tiny round and large hexagon pastel opal glitter. Nice alone (but be sure your nails aren't stained like mine) but great over pretty much any other color.



Tinsel Town. Ooh, this is different! Not really a Christmas-themed color, is it? It's super pretty, though. It's a smoky blue-grey sheer tinted base with multiple types of bluish silver and dark dark blue grey glitter. Closest thing to compare it to is the Milani One Coat Glitter in Silver Dazzle, but this is smoother.



Twinkle Lights. The party color of the collection. This is straight up festive fun in a bottle. It's gold, red and green glitter (small and round in shape) in a clear base. Good for layering, good alone.



Velvet Bow. This is sort of a dark wine/berry jelly... Burgundy with a bit of brown. It seems so pretty in the bottle, but I just don't like it on me! The application gave me a lot of trouble, too, so maybe it's affecting my opinion of it.



Winter Berry. Luckily, it's not berry! It's red. Medium red jelly. Every holiday collection needs a red, but this sorta just feels like filler to me. Nothing about it stands out as being different or unique, it's just... red jelly.


And some layering ideas:

Twinkle Lights over Winter Berry.


Twinkle Lights over Holly Day.


Twinkle Lights over Champagne Bubbles.


Twinkle Lights over Icicle.




Ring In The Red over Holly Day. Love this combination.


Snow Globe over Tinsel Town.



Snow Globe over Poinsettia.


Snow Globe over Blue Year's Eve.

The formula on these was mostly good. All but three were perfect. The ones that gave me trouble were Blue Year's Eve, which was too runny and gooey, Velvet Bow, which was a streaky goopy mess and Snowglobe, which was super thick, but that can be fixed with a little thinner. The rest applied perfectly even in two coats, but I did three coats of all just in case. Dry time is great. The glitters need a lot of topcoat to enhance the sparkle, but all except Snow Globe are nice and smooth.

My picks from this collection would be Glittering Garland, Holly Day, Twinkle Lights, Tinsel Town, Poinsettia and Ring In The Red. The rest are mostly okay, but those six stand out the most as being interesting, fun and extremely beautiful.

That Glittering Garland, though.... oh man. So hot. I think I need to try layering Ring In The Red over it!

(This was sent to me for review.)