Maybelline Clearly Spotted

Today I have a relatively new polish to share with you-- and one that I had actually been stalking the local drugstores for. This is Maybelline Clearly Spotted, which is part of Maybelline's Polka Dots collection, which is a collection of five black and white glitters in different bases. I really wanted Clearly Spotted because it was the one with a clear base (the others all have colored bases, which seem fairly easy to duplicate). It seems like a lot of mainstream brands are following the footsteps of indie brands and trying to make some more unique polishes-- there are a lot of black and white glitter polishes out there, but they're each a little different. It's nice to see the bigger brands doing something different. In any case, as I was stalking various drug stores, I saw a lot of miscellaneous bottles from the collection, but I had to wait until a brand new drugstore opened up two blocks from my work location before I managed to get this.

As I said, Clearly Spotted is a mix black and white glitter (large and small hexes) in a clear base, so you can wear it over anything. Here I have it layered over my Essence Cafe Ole and Cult Nails Mayhem manicure. Here I used one coat, and that was good enough to get plenty of glitter onto my nail. I found this polish to be generally easy to work with, though the larger pieces of glitter did want to migrate around on my nail so I had to be careful of that. This also was a little bit of a top coat eater-- I used one coat of Sally Hansen Insta-Dri and when it dried down it wasn't completely smooth-- but definitely not lumpy or textured enough to really bother me, so I only used one coat. This might not be an issue with other top coats, but just a head's up.

Artificial light - flash:

Natural light - shade:

Natural light - sun:

This is actually my first black and white polish, and I'm glad I finally managed to snag one. This probably won't be my last, either! I really like this over the neutral base color, and that some of the holo sparkle is still visible! Plus, it was a nice way to perk up my mani and make it last a few more days. What's really great about these black and white glitters is that they are extremely versatile, so I'm looking forward to trying this out over other colors.