Nfu Oh #54 – review and swatches
At first glance, it looks like #54 has a clear base. But just like how #49 may look transparent if you're not watching it too closely, and then turns out to be a very sheer pink on your nails, #54 actually has a very very sheer greenish base. Thanks to this... I don't like the way it looks on its own, at all. If you do a couple of coats to get a good amount of flakies, you get a base colour that's not quite transparent, but doesn't qualify for the name "green" either. It's a green so transparent that it seems to blend with the pink of my nails and turn into a murky greyish brownish colour. Frankly... it makes me look kind of dead. Except with shiny flakies. And while Sparkly Zombie Polish is kind of cool in concept, it's not quite what I was going for.
Over black, though, it's a different story. Then the green is sheer enough not to show up at all, leaving you with shiny black nails with pretty duochrome flakies. The flakies in #54 are green to bright aqua blue, quite a pretty colour. This was fairly easy to apply, as it's relatively thin for a flakie polish - not as thick as #51, for instance. I've heard some people say that drying time for these polishes tends to be quite long, but I always use a fast-drying top coat and haven't had any problems. Base coat, 1-2 coats of coloured polish and 2-3 coats of Nfu Oh dries in a good 5 minutes with Seche, which I think is pretty decent.
China Glaze Beauty and the Beach is pretty much an exact match for the flakies in this. Applying the polish on top of that makes the aqua blue look more textured and kinda glittery, but you can hardly see the flakies at all!
Time for some swatches!
On its own: three coats of Nfu Oh #54 over Trind Nail Repair as a base coat Sparkly Zombie Polish. Alright, so it doesn't really show in the sun. And in this photo in the shade (top one), it doesn't really show either, but it really was a brownish/greyish colour.
Two coats of Nfu Oh #54 over three coats of China Glaze Beauty and the Beach (whoa, this shade is way more sheer than I expected from the look in the bottle). Top: shade, bottom: sun.
Two coats of Nfu Oh #54 over one coat of Midnight Ride. (Yeaahhh you've seen this one before in my original Nfu Oh post. I'm kind of cheating here :P)