My Picks From The Barielle Karma Collection – And An Announcement!

Hey Everyone!

I apologize for my sporadic posting schedule as of late. Between working my regular midnight shift job and doing the nail tech apprenticeship (sometimes both on the same day!) I’ve had a hard time fitting in any swatching for my poor neglected blog. The apprenticeship is going well! I’ve been able to apply my current knowledge and I’m still learning new techniques daily with my coursework. Today I’ve got three polishes from the Summer 2011 Barielle Karma Collection to share with you all. I was given the opportunity to try out some of Barielle’s polishes and I ended up picking out Buddha-ful, Do Unto Others and Gotta Have Fate. I was also given their 60 Second Mani-Pedi scrub to try, and it’s AMAZING but I’ll be talking about that one in full detail on another day.

I used Seche Vite and Sally Hansen Nail Quencher as my base and top coat combo for today’s swatches.

Do Unto Others

Do Unto Others is a bright turquoise blue creme. This one had a decent formula that was opaque in 2 coats, though I had some issues with it leveling on its own. And it does stain your nails a little bit, so you might want to double up on your base coat with this polish.

Gotta Have Fate

Gotta Have Fate is a gorgeous coral jelly-creme hybrid that seems to change from orange to pink leaning depending on your skin tone. A lot of swatches that I’d previously seen of this polish are much more pink leaning, but on me Gotta Have Fate almost looks like an orange neon! Which is fine by me because I loooooove orange polish. This is 3 thin coats and it does dry semi-matte so you’ll need a top coat to make this one shine. ^_^

Buddha-ful

Buddha-ful is a sheer pinkish beige that’s filled with iridescent blue-green flakies! You definitely would be better off layering this one though. What you see above is 4 thicker coats of Buddha-ful by itself, and there’s STILL a ton of VNL!

I layered Buddha-ful over some other polishes here, nothing better than a flakie layering fest!

Pointer: 4 thick coats of Buddha-ful alone
Middle: 1 coat of Buddha-ful over Gotta Have Fate
Ring: 1 coat of Buddha-ful over Do Unto Others
Pinky: 1 coat of Buddha-ful over Black Creme by Wet n Wild

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Final Thoughts:

Overall I’m happy with the polishes I chose from the Karma Collection. I think that if I use 2 layers of base coat the next time I wear Do Unto Others then I won’t have any staining issues. And Gotta Have Fate and Buddha-ful are fun polishes, I love how they look layered with one another!

Purchase Info:

You can purchase the Karma Collection polishes from Barielle’s website. They retail at $8.00 per .45 fl oz bottle of polish, but they have a constant “Buy One, Get One 50% Off” deal running on their site.

Barielle has also released about 393485.5 new shades so check those out too!

♥

Annnnnd An Announcement!!

Starting on April 1st (for serious, no jokes here!) I will be doing another nail art challenge with Cris of LTHP and Sam the Nailasaurus!! This time we’ll be joined by some other great bloggers: my pal Esther of Fab Fingertips, Stephanie of Sincerely Stephanie and Emily The Lacquerologist.

We’re doing the Black & White Nail Art Challenge that was created by Mateja.

Since the original challenge ended this month, we’re modifying the dates to fit for April as follows:

I can’t wait to see what the other girls come up with! ^_^

* The product(s) in this post were sent to me for unbiased review consideration.