Hard to Find Friday: Julep Sophie and OPI The Living Daylights

Fridays are always exciting aren't they?  You have a weekend to look forward to and hopefully lots of fun plans, or just the single plan of sitting at home marathoning the current city that you are obsessed with of Real Housewives, playing with some new pretty polishes, and having a nice cold cider.  At least that would be my perfect weekend plan.  :-P

Today I have two polishes for your viewing pleasure, Julep Sophie and OPI The Living Daylights.  In the strictest sense, The Living Daylights is the only HTF polish here today, but I had gone searching for Sophie on Julep's website only to find that it was sold out and on sale.  If it hasn't been discontinued already, I suspect it will be soon.  So that counts as HTF right?  Though I had originally picked it because I thought it would look good as a base for The Living Daylights.

Julep's Sophie is a mushroom gray taupe cream that was opaque in two coats from the Trina Turk Fall 2012 collection.  The second coat was mostly to fill in a couple of bald patches, but it did paint on pretty well.  I think it is a good solid neutral color to have, but it may not be all that unique.  I bet you could find something similar pretty easily, but if has not been discontinued and you can find it on sale, it would be a good color to pick up.  In case you did not already know this, Julep polishes come in .33 oz bottles which is about the same size of a normal mini polish.  The usual Julep polish runs about $14 a bottle.  Now there are ways of getting it cheaper, like Mavens get their bottles for $11.40 and they do run some good sales that leave the bottles any where between $3-5.  Normal priced, these bottles are too expensive and the Maven prices are a bit much for me.  Secret Sales are the way to go with these polishes. Julep does have some amazing one coat cream polishes, so if you are looking for any, hold out for a sale!

OPI's The Living Daylights is a glitter polish full of turquoise, silver and copper hexes from the James Bond Holiday 2012 collection.  It is pretty unique and I feel like I don't really have anything quite like this in my collection.  I got a fair amount of hexes on my brush in one go, so no fishing for glitters here!  I did find that as soon as a hex touched my nail it was near impossible to position it around my nail.  They stuck on pretty quickly so the ended up clustering on my nail a bit.  The clear base was a little bit thick, so maybe if I thin it out it would be easier to use and place the glitters a bit more to my liking.

As the usual kind reminder, these products were purchased with my own money.  I am not cool enough to have companies send me free stuff to review them. ;)

Zoya 3 Free Special: Morgan, Sophie, Ginger

Whenever I buy nail polishes, a lot of the time I pick them based on the name.  Sure I have a bunch of duochromes just because I love the color shift, and I have a ton of blues because I love oceanesque colors.  But in the end if I like the name of the color, I have to have it.  For example, I have a giant lemming for China Glaze's It's a Trap-eze, because of the internet meme based in Star Wars.  Every time I see swatches, all I can think of is Admiral Ackbar crying "it's a trap!"

The same rules apply to names.  Any and every company that has a trio of nail polishes called Morgan, Sophie, and Ginger, I have to have them.  So when I heard about Zoya's 3 Free special and I found the colors, I had to get them.

Ginger was probably my favorite out of all three.  It's a great bright orange with gold shimmer. In the picture I'm wearing two coats, only to cover a few bald spots.

Morgan is a Barbie pink creme that I wanted to love so much, but it fell a little short. It was really thin and needed three coats to cover a visible nail line. It was bright and really pretty, but it started chipping right away.

Sophie was the one that surprised me the most.  It wasn't particularly impressive in the bottle, and this picture does not do it justice, but it got onto my nail and I adored it.  It's a brick red creme, and surprisingly I do not have a color like it in my stash.  I have multiple bright reds, but nothing like this.  I painted on smoothy and like Ginger, only needed two coats.  I topped it with Sally Hansen's Insta-Dri Anti Chip top coat for the glossy shine.