NOTD: Sparkling Garbage over Merida

I reported last week that (somewhat to my surprise) I fell in love with Dream, and so I was expecting to fall in love with Merida too, since it's just the green version, and I love green.

Well, not so much.

I don't really know why it failed to grab me - it just seemed kind of... ordinary, I guess? It doesn't look ordinary in Zoya's pictures (that's the link just above) and I thought it looked fine on the nail wheel but on my nails it just felt like your basic holiday green, to me, except with the holo stuff like Aurora and Dream. I kept looking at it and waiting to get excited about it and it didn't happen. I'm sure I'll give it another try later, but meanwhile, I wasn't feeling any oomph and I had that bottle of Orly Sparkling Garbage that I got from Amazon (I may not have mentioned that here before, come to think of it, because I kind of half forgot about it between the time I ordered it and the time it showed up) so I added that on top.

And ok, now I am in love:

(I don't know if you can really tell the difference in this picture. I didn't take one with just Merida, but my nail-wheel swatch is here.) It's still more or less the same color as Merida - maybe a little lighter, but seemingly not that much - but now it's got microglitter and I feel like I see the holo stuff from Merida pop out now and then, as well, and yeah, it's oomph, alright. But it's still not so out-there glittery that it annoys me. Sometimes there's a fine line about too little oomph and too much, and for me this totally hits that.

This is two coats of Merida, one coat of Sparkling Garbage, and no other top-coat. (And NailsInc Superfood underneath, almost forgot that part.) This was taken under the fluorescent lights at work.

(I did some wheel swatches with Sparkling Garbage, too, I'll get that up within the next couple of days.)