Zoya Alicia

Today's polish is one where I wasn't really sold on it on the bottle, but on the nail...wow! It's the scattered holo from Zoya's fall 2016 Urban Grunge collection that I was the least interested in, Alicia.

I'm struggling a little bit with my pictures lately. What I need to do is decide on a couple of specific poses and layouts, and stick to those, but I'm very conflicted. I've figured out how to take macro shots with my phone, so a flood of gratuitous macros is to be expected (see below), but what's tearing me apart is...I'm kind of liking my phone pics better than the pics I take with the DSLR, which seem kind of washed out. The swatch above is taken with my phone (it's a ZTE Axon, in case anyone was wondering), and aside from the radial blur, I like it better than the swatch in the below collage, which was taken with a Canon Rebel T2i. Oh well, I'll work it out. 

 Now to actually talk about the polish: it's great! Alicia is large holo flakies suspended in a clear base with a pronounced yellow-gold (heavy on the yellow) shimmer. The charred edges of my nicotine-stained ex-smoker's heart just lit up when this baby hit my nails. A yellow-gold shimmer in a silver flakie polish is an edgy element that's actually perfect for a collection called "urban grunge." I used three coats, as usual, for these pics, and you can still see my nail line because the flakes are so big; however, like with an ILNP Ultra Holo, the sparkle in this is so pronounced that the sheerness isn't noticeable in person.

Alicia is sheer enough that I'm wondering if it could be used as a topper. I think it would look really cool over a lot of different colors, especially greens or warm nudes. I didn't think to try it when I was swatching, but hopefully I'll give it a shot at some point. Come back tomorrow and see what kind of nail art I decided to do using this week's polishes!