Layering that doesn't quite work

This is the first picture I've taken in a while under the fluorescent lights at work, and it has the usual lobster-hand sort of problems that I always complain about, but I've seen worse, so here you go:

This is blown up extra-large because I want you to be able to see what I'm talking about. This is a weird mani, but it photographed weirder than it really looks in person. I was experimenting, and I had that brown/tan-colored Square Hue polish, Via Sant'Andrea, sitting here on my desk, and I thought, I wonder what Travel in Colour would look like over brown. Well, here's the answer, sort of. Actually, if you look closely at this picture you can totally see the brown on the sides and at the bottom, but the thing is, it doesn't look like that in real life. You can maybe see it around the edges if you look really close, in real life, but it's not at all as noticeable as it looks in this picture. So it's weird.

Anyway, I wouldn't call Via Sant'Andrea a big win with TinC over it. It looks alright, but it just looks sort of shimmery and pinkish like TinC always seems to look to some degree, and it took 2 coats to get it to that. I wish I'd taken a picture after the first coat to see what it looked like, but I didn't - I just thought it looked kind of odd, and so I added another coat. So this is 2 coats of Travel in Colour over 2 coats of Via Sant'Andrea, plus the usual base and topcoats which I can't really even remember what I used. (I really should start writing these things down.) Added: I wasn't really worrying about the topcoat question because I don't usually think it makes much difference, but then I remembered what I used and it does make a difference, in this case, because I used matte topcoat. NYC, to be exact. I believe that after the second coat of TinC I decided it could do with toning down the shimmer a bit.


On a completely different subject, another thing I apparently forgot about when I was talking about that Llarowe order from a couple of weeks ago was that it included one more Chick Polish - Moss. At the time, there was another green on Llarowe's page (and I notice that the remaining colors are now $2!) which is now gone, but I decided I liked the look of Moss. (The other one was described as an "emerald matte neon" as I recall, and I found some reviews from people who really loved it, but I decided that I have emeralds out the wazoo already and I don't even like neons, so it didn't seem like it was meant for me.) And I think now I've probably ordered all the Chick Polishes I'm going to order. Maybe.