Football Friday: a-england Avalon and Sally Hansen Set the Stage

We're nearing the end of September, though for some reason, Seattle has decided that it's summer again and it's incredibly humid here right now. Ewww. I'm sticky and heat and gross. However, this does means that I might be able to wear shorts to the game tomorrow!

As we start conference play tomorrow, I decided to pull out a really great, true purple: Avalon by a-england. In Arthurian legend, Avalon is mysterious, hidden island where Morgan le Fey or Morgaine lived and the place where King Arthur is said to be buried. The polish Avalon is described as an "incandescent regal and royal purple". It's a simple description, but it pretty much sums up this polish in a nutshell. Avalon is extremely gorgeous, a brilliant royal purple. In some light, it just glows. There were times when I could not stop staring at my nails. I received so many compliments on this polish.

Warning: this polish did not photograph color accurately at all! Avalon has tons of little red and blue shimmer particles in there and the polish is predominantly a red-leaning purple, but for some reason my camera picked it up as a blue-leaning purple. I'm not sure why purples are the most difficult polish colors to capture accurately, but they are. Bummer for me, since I have a lot of them!

Artificial light. These pictures are probably the most color accurate ones I have. Still not quite accurate to what my eyes see, but these look realistic than some of the other ones do.

Artificial light with flash: this is extremely color inaccurate. Way too blue.

Natural light - shade:

If you look at the bottom of the bottle in this picture, you can see a little but more what the true color of the polish is. It's a much more reddish than these pictures would lead you to believe.

Natural light - sun:

I apologize for the grossness of my tips. Yuck! I had been wearing this for two days when I took that last picture. The following pictures aren't much better, unfortunately. My sincere apologies!!

For reference, here's a picture of Avalon from the a-england website. I'd say this photo is pretty color accurate-- you can really see the red in the polish, as opposed to my pictures, where the blue comes out.

Even though Avalon is a beautiful polish, I decided to get a little creative and layer Sally Hansen's Set the Stage over it.

Set the Stage is a medium gold glitter suspended in a clear base. There are very small circular particles in addition to larger hexagonal pieces. It's very pretty, but a pain in the butt to work with. It was extremely difficult to get the larger pieces onto the brush and get them placed on the nail. Very frustrating. I managed to do it, but it was a little sloppy. I used two careful coats to get some sparkle on my nails without overwhelming the Avalon.

 Natural light - shade: this picture doesn't have a top coat on it-- you can see the polish lines from Set the Stage.

Blurry picture you can see the sparkle! This has a top coat on it.

Pretty, huh? I wish the glitter was easier to work with, but I think the combination is really pretty. I can't stop staring at my nails.