Carly (and Carly vs. Jem)

Here is Zoya Carly:

Here's Zoya's description: "Carly by Zoya can be best described as a very rich, bold, red-toned dark purple with iridescent red and silver metallic shimmer and a dense foil finish. The bold color and sparkling foil finish make Carly like gift wrap for your nails."

When I swatched my top 10 Zoyas, I thought that Carly and Jem looked awfully much alike, which is why I'm comparing them here. The description of Jem is "a dark, red-toned purple with subtle gold and fuschia flecks. A bold, vampy shade that has just the right amount of sparkle!" (I had also talked about Jem back in February.)

So those descriptions do sound somewhat alike - dark, metallic, red-toned purple. The colors in the shimmer are different but it sounds like the base colors are fairly similar, in fact. However, if you look at the links to the polishes, Zoya's pictures look nothing alike - and the picture of Carly looks nothing like my swatch above, really. But this bottle is probably somewhere close to five years old and it's certainly possible it has darkened in that time. I can't say I remember it ever being as bright as that Zoya picture, though.

So here are my bottles and swatches together, for the record (in my living room, lit with daylight-fluorescent bulbs):

Jem on the left, Carly to the right in the bottles; on the wheel, Carly is #9 and Jem is #10. They are similar but they are certainly not dupes, since Jem is definitely darker. I never thought for a moment that they were true dupes, actually - it was just that they looked more alike here than I remembered (as I said before) so I wanted to take another look at them together. For practical purposes, what I'm seeing is that Jem is basically a darker version of Carly. You can see a little bit in the bottles, above, that the shimmer is different - gold in Jem, silver in Carly - so in other lights it's possible they may look more different. Mostly I'm not picking that up on the nail, though.