SpaRitual Wilde Collection Fall 2011 Swatches and Review

It's been a long time since I've had SpaRitual on here... And what better way to break the silence than with their fantastic Fall collection, Wilde. This is the best collection I've seen from SpaRitual to date. Have a look.


Howl. My favorite of the bunch. I love these types of browns, especially in fall. It's a dark neutral blackened brown base with warm red/pink, gold and chocolate shimmer. The shimmer is really fine but bright so it looks like the center of the polish glows against the blackened base. It's what I was wearing here:The flash in this picture brings out the warm tones in the shimmer. So gorgeous. Can never have enough vampy shimmers.

Instinct. This one didn't want to show its true color in my photo. It's much more magenta, less blue in real life. It's a red-purple shimmer with blue-purple flash. Sadly, it's the only one in the set that I wouldn't recommend. The formula on it was nearly unmanageable and the color was inexplicably sheer and watery- this is five coats! I don't know if I got a bad bottle or what happened with this one... All I know is this is not the type of color that's worth the extra coats. Lots of similar colors out there.


Rhythm of Life. This is a really festive, Christmassy looking green. It has a blue toned emerald base, but some more yellow toned leafy green shimmer mixed in, giving it a near-duochrome effect. Plus, the finish is so shiny and shimmer, it's almost foil-like in texture. Very beautiful.




Sacred Ground. Sacred Ground is a very special polish. The base color is grey, medium bordering on dark. But when you look closely, you see what's so special about it. It's filled with multicolor shimmer! There's pink, blue, yellow/gold, silver/white, purple and even a little green. The shimmer particles are very large so you can actually pick out all the different colors when you're wearing it. Super cool and totally unique.


Running With Wolves. If this doesn't say autumn, I don't know what does. It's a brown-based coppery shimmer. It looks like molten metal but without the streakiness and flaw-enhancing properties of a chrome. It has that light-in-the-middle / dark-around-the-edges look that I'm a huge sucker for as well.


Spirit Child. This one is really deceptive. In the bottle it looks like a warm red with gold shimmer. The minute I put it on my nails, I realize it's actually a cool cranberry red with pink shimmer. At certain angles it does look warmer and some of the gold seen in the bottle comes out, but in direct light it's a very pinky red. Reminds me of Thanksgiving.


The formula on these was decent. In the past, I've found SpaRitual's formula to be thick and hard to work with, but this batch is a definite improvement on the last SpaRituals I tried. It's thick, but not sticky thick. It spreads easily enough and doesn't run much. Drying time even seems faster in this set than in previous colors. They don't wear particularly long, though. I experienced chipping on day two every time I've worn these.

Overall, I'm thoroughly impressed with the colors in this collection. I don't really care for Instinct because of the poor formula, and Spirit Child is not a type of color I'd normally wear, but the rest are fantastic. The formula seems to have improved since the last time I used SpaRitual, so now I don't have to wait six hours for them to dry.

I do have one complaint not related to the collection. The polishes are pretty hard to find without resorting to ordering online (and very few places besides eBay seem to sell the brand). Heaven help you if you try to contact SpaRitual's customer service about it because they will never, ever respond no matter how many emails you send them. Why bother having a customer service contact at all? I don't get it.

But... despite the bad customer service, these colors are gorgeous. Like I mentioned before, this is (in my opinion) the best, most interesting collection of colors I've ever seen SpaRitual release.

(This was sent to me for review.)