January Julep Maven - It Girl

This month's Julep theme was Neons & Nudes - neither of which are my favorites - but I liked the It Girl offerings so I made a switch from my usual American Beauty.

Inside were three polishes (2 neons, 1 nude), a sheet of the new "swatch me" stickers, and three neon pony tail holders. The bottles also have one of the stickers on the lid, which is a new feature from Julep that makes it easy to swatch the top of each polish bottle so you can easily see which bottle is which color when they are stored standing upright in a drawer or container. I love the concept, but I already swatch my bottles with contact paper and a hole punch (paint the polish on the contact paper, and when it dries punch out a circle to stick on top of the lid) so the extra sheet will likely never get used. I've read that they will be including the stickers on all new bottles from now on,  so we'll see if my compulsion to have everything match will get the best of me since the stickers are difficult to remove! Yep, I might be a little C-D-O (like OCD but with the letters in alphabetical order - as they should be!)

Quick swatches of the new polishes:
2 coats of Amelia
3 coats of Nina
3 coats of Nikki
2 coats of Color Club's Tweet Me (since it arrived the night before)

Nina and Nikki both tried to a satin finish, not quite a matte but not the usual Julep shine either. They are not nearly as NEON as I was expecting, and I'm honestly quite happy about that fact as I wanted more bright cheery color than in your face, day-glo 1980s style so they work quite well in that regard. I'm interested to try them over white "undies" to see if that makes the color pop more as well as to avoid having to do three coats - especially since Nikki still has a visible nail line after three coats in the swatches above. The only minor complaint I have at this point is that I had painted my toes with Nikki and the removal left a pale yellow tint all over, it looked like a highlighter had leaked all over my fingers! Nothing that a good scrub with soap and a nail brush couldn't fix, but it took a surprising amount of remover to get the bulk of the color both off my toes and my fingers from using the cotton balls. I'll be sure to go with my usual method of soaking small bits of cotton in remove and leaving on each nail for a minute method, rather than trying to use one cotton ball for more than one nail, as that's how the transfer occurred.

Since receiving this order I also got my "end of the year" sale order of Olivia and Mischa, so expect more swatches soon!

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