Old Favorite

I decided to cut off my nails last week. It wasn't a problem of nails breaking or splitting; Orly Calcium shield does a great job of keeping my nails healthy. I did it because I'm going back to my shamisen classes.

For those who don't know, a shamisen looks like this:

To play it, you can't have any nail growing below your nail bed. It sucks, but it's impossible to play with even a little white showing on your nails.

This doesn't mean I'm giving up on this blog or nail polish, though. It just means this blog will be more geared towards short nails (or stubbies, as they are often called). =)

I was feeling a little down with the short nail situation, so I pulled out an old favorite of mine that I haven't blogged about before. KOH's Blue Universe.

Blue Universe is a dark, denim blue with silver micro glitter and multi-color shift flakies. The formula is a bit thin, but two coats is enough to make it opaque. It also looks good layered over other colours. You can click on the pictures below to see them full size.

Stunning, isn't it? I remember when this first came out and bloggers worldwide were dying to own it. Since I live in Japan and had no hope of buying it here, I braved the Dutch version of KOH's website (it's now available in English and Japanese) and ordered it from them directly. 

Would you like some photo spam of the bottle? Done!

One thing I really love about Blue Universe is that the flakies aren't just two colours. They look red when you see them head on, but they shift to gold, orange, green and even turquoise and cobalt blue. Awesome, right? The only other flakies I've seen with this much colour shift are the ones that Nfu Oh puts out. 

The polish was about € 14,95. That's about what I'd pay for a Deborah Lippmann here in Japan, so I didn't care so much. What DID bother me was that the shipping cost more than the nail polish. I think shipping came out to over 15 euros. I'm still glad I bought it, but wish I'd bought a few more to make the shipping worthwhile. 

So lovely. I could look at it all day! 

Please excuse the bad cuticles. I've been too busy to keep up with cuticle maintenance lately. =) Here you can see some of the colour shift of the flakies. I must say though, that you do lose some of the colour on the nail. The flakies tend to look predominantly red. You only get flashes of gold, orange and green at extreme angles.

Here you can see a little of the gold and orange shift.

The flakies also tend to reflect back the colour of whatever you're wearing or what they're near. I had on a blue/green top the other day and could see the green of the flakies clearly on the nails.

If you don't mind paying the shipping, or know someone in the Netherlands, I recommend this brand. The quality is excellent and the colours are beyond beautiful. KOH always sells their nail polish in a sort of case that looks like a lipstick case. They change the design every so often. Mine was plain white, but I've seen ones that were red with ribbons, black with white embroidered flowers, green, etc.  It's always a fun surprise to see what you'll get!