Black-based nail wheel

This whole wheel is over 3 coats of Hard As Nails Jet Black:

1. Diamond Love (Orly) (2 coats)
2. Groupie (Orly) (2 coats)
3. Disco Ball (Xtreme Wear) (1 coat)
4. Fairy Dust (e.l.f.) (1 coat)
5. Fairy Dust (Khroma) (1 coat)
6. Tilted Halo (Ulta)  (1 coat)
7. Pearl Wisdom (Orly) (1 coat)
8. Let Me Go (Sinful) (2 coats)
9. Mist You (SH Salon)
10. Jailbait (old Hard Candy) (1 coat)
11. Gray's Anatomy (WnW)
12. unnamed very pale pink shimmer
13. unnamed slightly less pale pink glitter
14. Slick Black (Color Show)
15. Big City Dazzle (NYC)
16. Strobe Light (Xtreme Wear)
17. Two-Timer Stars (Maybelline)
18. Amethyst Couture (Color Show Brocades)
19. Jewel Tone (L.A. Colors)
20. Jet Black alone (Hard As Nails) (3 coats)

(detail shots under the jump)

I don't have bottle pictures for these - if I waited until I remembered to take those, I'd never get this up at all!

1-4:

Things look so different over black. I never have liked Diamond Love (1) over much of anything, but it looks kinda cool and tarnished over black. And (2) Groupie has a similar tarnished-looking effect over black. (Ignore the marred surface on that one, please!)

(3) Disco Ball looks blue, which I've never seen it do over other colors. (It looks clear in the bottle, but the glitter is holo, so it does sparkle in different colors. But mostly it just looks like sort of a multicolor pastel sparkle.) (4) e.l.f. Fairy Dust, looks orange, but apparently it's not just me - other pictures I found show a similar effect. Apparently e.l.f. bottles are inconsistent about the labeling - mine didn't have a name on it at all. I figured it out only because it printed out on my receipt!

5-8:

(5) is another Fairy Dust, this one from Khroma. I do like it over black, but in real life I've mostly worn it as a glitter fade - it does really well for that. Tilted Halo (6) is next, and it's really thick enough that a black base doesn't do much to it. Pearl Wisdom (7) is a pearly frosty thing, and I wouldn't have thought it would look good under black, but actually I like it. It looks more silver here but more gold in the lights in my living room. (8) is another shifty one, Sinful Let Me Go, and it's still shifty here. Its mother-of-pearl-ness apparently turns blue-green over black.

9-12:

9-11 all look kind of pinkish or purplish (or orchid, it occurs to me now). Mist You (9) and Jailbait (10) both look pale pink in the bottle, and Gray's Anatomy (11) is kind of a pearly gray. (12) is one of those unnamed/L.A.Colors pinks, and it just comes out as a little bit of glimmer. (13) (below) is a glittery pink from the same bunch, and it shows up only slightly more. (It's more noticeable in the picture than it is in real life.)

13-16:

(14) Slick Black just shows up as shimmer over a black base. I need to compare it to what it looks like without a base. (15) is Big City Dazzle, and my records break down toward the end of this about how many coats this is - I think it might just be one. (16) is one I talked about in the pink entry from Friday, Strobe Light. It does look fairly pink here but outside of the picture, it's not really as pink as I expected.

17-20:

(17) is an old Maybelline, Two-Timer Stars. It's greenish in the bottle but looks more blue here. (It actually seems to have a little bit of blue-green glitter mixed into it, which I hadn't paid much attention to before.) (18) is Amethyst Couture, one of the Color Show Brocades. It's a murky eggplant sort of purple, with purple hexes mixed in. It's pretty, but much more subtle than your average glitter. (19) is L.A. Colors Jewel Tone and I'm not sure but I think this is several coats. And (20) is just Jet Black on its own (it takes 3 coats to get it mostly opaque.

Basically, it takes a pretty strong color to really hold its own with black, that's what I learned from this. A little thin microglitter is completely overwhelmed. I really like some of the multicolor ones like Big City Dazzle and Jewel Tone, but even with those you have to build up several coats for it to really be noticeable.