A Blue Bird

I am so pleased that my favorite tennis player, Serbia's Novak Djokovic has advanced into the quarterfinals of the Olympics! Unfortunately tennis matches last way too long for NBC to show it in prime time but hopefully they will show the final, which will most likely be another fantastic Nadal-Federer showdown. I'm still rooting for Djokovic to push through though! The last three nights of Olympic coverage has really focused on gymnastics, and the stuff those gymnasts can do is really incredible. I could never play a sport where you can practice so hard and do a routine so perfectly over and over and then mess up in a competition....KNOWING that you can do it is just way too heartbreaking.

Speaking of heartbreaks, let's talk polish! China Glaze's Blue Sparrow, from their recent Ink Collection, is one that kind of breaks my heart. It's sooo beautiful in the bottle, and also when you first apply it. It's a neon blue with just a cornucopia of light blue glitter. It's pretty, yes. Here it is with two coats



As with all neons, it dries matte because of the amount of pigment they have to put in it. However, the downfall of Blue Sparrow is what makes it beautiful: the extraordinary amount of glitter in the polish not only makes it dry matte, but also gives it a gritty finish. Now, I've mentioned before that my favorite topcoat, INM Out the Door is super thin. Needless to say, in order to make the finish of Blue Sparrow smooth, you will need a thicker topcoat, such as Seche Vite, Poshe, or Oh So Wet. I used THREE coats of Out the Door and the finish still wasn't smooth. I will have to try this polish some other time with another topcoat combination, because the only reason I had patience to put on three coats of freaking topcoat is because the Olympics were on.

Blue Sparrow was a pretty polish, but I was kind of unsatisfied with it. The grittiness and the overabundance of the glitter distracted from the pretty base color. Maybe with a glassier finish, it would be a lot prettier and the glitter would sparkle more. On the upside though, with three coats of topcoat the color wore like iron.

I could say a lot more about BS (bad acronym for the polish name!), but I have to get up in oh I dunno, three hours? for my flight =/. I had to get this post out though because a) blogging is quite a stress reliever and b) I will have internet in Canada but I'm not sure if I will have time to edit some swatch pics I've taken.