What a difference a brush makes

I was looking at some of the colors in my Zoya Flash Collection and deciding what to swatch next, when I thought one color looked very familiar.  Sure enough, Jolene is a dupe for Cotton Mouth from Wet n Wild’s Spoiled line.   I swatched Cotton Mouth here, earlier this year.

Both are bright, bold, Barbie-pink cremes.  Cotton Mouth is $1.99 at CVS Pharmacy (used to be a CVS exclusive; not sure if that’s still true) and Jolene has an SRP of $8.00 but I get most of my Zoyas directly from their web site when they’re on sale.  Jolene was $6 because I bought the whole Flash sampler, six polishes for $36.

I liked Cotton Mouth well enough when I swatched it in January, but at the time wasn’t really in the mood for a summery hot pink.  It covered well in two coats and was very glossy.  Jolene needed three coats for the best coverage and was also extremely glossy.  Here it is in indirect outdoor sunlight:

And with the flash:

To really see the colors side by side:

Yep, they’re dupes, all right!

But there was one big difference in the two brands, and that was the brush.  All the Spoiled polishes I’ve tried have extremely large and uneven brushes.  They are the spatula-style, which I like, but they’re so big that they’re awkward.  I feel like I’m holding a paintbrush.  I have fairly large hands and nails and don’t see how anyone with tiny nails would manage a Spoiled brush.

Really, the polish itself seems similar although I haven’t done a wear comparison.  If the price is your deciding factor, then Cotton Mouth is much cheaper.

If you look closely at the last photo, you may be thinking that the application actually looks better with the Spoiled polish, and I agree.  But I remember that I had to take a cotton swab dipped in polish remover and do a fair amount of cleanup with that one.  Here are the brushes side by side, the Spoiled brush on the left and the Zoya brush, which is a very typical one, on the right:

It’s HUGE!  Let’s look at the Spoiled brush up close:

See how unevenly trimmed it is?  I really hate working with brushes like that.  This one is so big it’s the Godzilla of nail polish brushes.  No, wait, I take that back — since it’s hairy and shaggy it’s the King Kong of brushes.

And with that alarming visual, I’ll say bye for now!

Barbie dolls and bubble gum

After my last manicure of black polish and multicolored flakie topcoat, I was in the mood for something brighter and more cheerful-looking, so I reached for my go-to color, pink.  And by the way, I ended up not liking that dark look as much as I thought I would.  With some colors, the longer I wear them the more I like them, but the opposite happened with the black.  Even with the bright flakes, I think the dark polish really made my hands look older.  Plus the flakes were devilish hard to remove.

The pink I picked is a creme shade from the new Spoiled line from Wet n Wild (CVS exclusive, $1.99) called “Cotton Mouth.”  Now why someone would name a happy nail polish color after a swimming poisonous snake is beyond me.  When I was growing up, the surest way to keep us kids out of a pond was to spread the story that there were cottonmouths in it.  Maybe the name is supposed to suggest how you look after you eat cotton candy.

Like the other Spoiled polishes I’ve tried, the brush is wide and thick.  I like wide spatula-type brushes because they cover my nail in just one or two strokes, but this brush is so thick it holds too much polish.  I had to keep scraping it off against the bottle opening, and still had too much.  It left a few tiny bubbles which are visible in the photos.

It does cover well and dries very glossy.  Here are two coats with no top coat, in diffused outdoor light:

The color reminds me of the pink plastic furniture that Barbie dolls tend to acquire.  Or bubble gum.  I love pink but I don’t think this is the most flattering shade for me and that it makes my skin look a little yellowish.  Here it is in direct sunlight:

And with the flash:

I thought about what I could use to change the shade, and got out the Sally Hansen “In a Flash” sheer beige shimmer that I swatched earlier.  As a reminder, here’s what In a Flash looks like by itself:

One coat over Cotton Mouth gives a whole new look.  In diffuse light:

I LIKE it!  Here with flash:

And at a different angle with the flash:

This is a great example of how a sheer tinted top coat can give another polish a whole new look — depending on what you pick, it can brighten, tone down, give a different hue.  Cotton Mouth by itself is bright and pretty but it’s not what I’m in the mood for right now.  I may feel differently in a few weeks or months, though, so it’s a keeper.