Mermaid's Tale, Glacial Springs

This is Sally Hansen CSM Mermaid's Tale, and Smitten Polish Glacial Springs:

These two are not much alike, other than being in the general blue-green range and being glitters. Mermaid's Tale is a dark, almost swampy blue-green, with big glitter pieces. It's very pretty but it's darker than most "mermaid green" colors. Glacial Springs is more the kind of color I'd associate with the idea of mermaids - a bright aqua blue with a bit of green to it. It has holo glitter in it and it's very showy.

It doesn't look like it in my pictures but apparently Mermaid's Tale is most famous for being a near-dupe of Lippmann Across The Universe. YouTube nail-blogger Hannah Eve has done a dupe video which includes Mermaid's Tale; she says it's not quite a full-on dupe but it's close. I deliberately did my swatches here without any dabbing or attempt to get the glitter to show more, that was just a decision I made from the beginning of this project. But on glitters it can make a ton of difference and I think that's probably the case here. If you get it on considerably thicker than I did, then it's probably going to look more like AtU. That's my guess, anyway. Mermaid's Tale is still a current CSM color.

I went to look at Smitten Polish (although I had an idea that Glacial Springs was LE to begin with, so I wasn't expecting to find it and I didn't) and what I found out is that Smitten Polish doesn't exist any more under that name - they have changed their name to Dreamland Lacquer. The FAQ says something about trademark issues. Smitten was a pretty popular indie, I think, but I haven't especially been keeping up with such things lately, so I was surprised to hear about this. (I do have a list of indie polishes that I try to check periodically but unsurprisingly, I'm behind on it. Every list of indies I've ever seen is like that, though - it's just impossible to keep track of, really. I did go through in the last week or so and update a few things but parts of it are probably still very out-of-date.)