Prehistoric Polish- Zoya Edition.

I thought it would be fun and interesting and hopefully helpful to swatch some old polishes. I'll be adding installments to this topic every so often. 

The thing with really old polish is that when you find it at beauty supply stores, salons or flea markets you really have no way to fact check it. What I mean by that is, there are usually no swatches or references online to compare your polish to in order to find out if it has been frankened, or what exactly has been done to it.

It's insanely common for nail salons to franken polish. They aren't being malicious or trying to decieve you, they simply want their polish area to look nice and they need to make room for more colors so they often pour mostly empty polishes into one bottle and stick it back on the shelf. This normally isn't a problem for everyday salon goers. They like a color on the rack, get a manicure with it and don't care what the polish name is or even think about whether it's a franken. 

The problem arises when a salon has a nail polish sale and a nail fanatic finds a hidden gem of a rare or discontinued polish on the racks, takes it home and looks it up to find it is not what it is supposed to be. Even worse, a blogger buys a franken, and brings it home to find there are no swatches of it, so puts her own swatches online and the whole nail comunity ends up with an incorrect reference.

There are lots of things that can happen to your polish before you buy it. It can be thinned, frankened or even straight up replaced with something else. So, for this reason please keep in mind that I have NO IDEA if the polishes and polish names I am showing when I swatch old polish are correct. 

My latest find at a lightly traveled beauty supply store was a hoard of old Zoyas! They had a crap ton of them but I only got three because it was extremely clear to me that they had been thinned half to death and I wasn't sure if I would even be able to use them. The store seriously thinned them to the consistency of WATER.

I was able to get them opaque enough for pictures (FIVE COATS EACH!!!) and I have got them all sitting out with the lids off to thicken them up. I'll be going back to get one of each color soon. 


They only had very light colors like nudes and whites but it's still cool, I think. I photographed each polish outdoors in direct sunlight and in the shade. Here are the swatches. I wish I knew how old these babies are!

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Even though these colors aren't my style or taste I still think they are neat. It really is a testament to the quality of Zoya nail polish that these old polishes that have been through god knows what still held up to the test of time. They dried FAST and weren't gummy or goopey. They also had fantastic luster in their shimmer and shine.

LOVE, MM

Zoya Fire & Ice

Hellz to da yeah!

This collection is so totally completely awesome. At first sight I was very underwhelmed to say the least, but as I started looking the colors over more closely and swatching them I began to fall in love with every color more and more.

These polishes are so unique and almost impossible to describe but I'm going with "micro glitter glass fleck metallic bad assness" as my official status on the type of finish they are. It's really all about the formula and finish with this set of polishes. The colors are pretty boring and played out until you take a closer look and realize how complex and multidimensional they really are. These are basically the sparkles collection on steroids people. Even the seemingly boring reds are fabulous!

You really have to see these up close and personal to appreciate how gorgeous they are, but I have done my very best to capture their fabulousness in photos.

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Close-up of texture

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The only flaw I found with these incredible polishes is that they are pretty sheer. These are all 4 coaters with the exception of Valerie which took only 2. They are totally worth sitting through a 4 coat manicure but I recommend using this tip instead.

Love, MM

Zoya Wonderful Fall 2010

I want to start this post by saying, I love you Zoya.  When I first saw swatches of the Zoya Wicked and Wonderful Collections there was no doubt in my mind that Wicked would be my favorite.  But now that I have them in my possession, the incredible Hulk could not RIP the wonderful collection from my cold, dead, perfectly manicured hands. 

I love every single aspect of the wonderful collection except one. So, let's get that ONE thing out of the way. I don't WANT TO MENTION IT, but I have to.  I think it is so incredibly STUPID, among other adjectives, that they named all 12 new wicked and wonderful polishes after the Dancing with the stars "characters" that it makes me ill.  I would almost rather ignore it and act as though it had never happened, pretend that Zoya, my beloved, had never done something so incredibly gay and then stab anyone that reminds me about it as I go along my merry way. But I can't, it's just too dumb to ignore.

Anyhoo, I adore the Wonderful Collection. It's WONDERFUL people! I love every single color, even the "pinks"! Check THIS out; I love them so much that I am not going to do my normal habit of blanketing anything with a red tone in it as "pink" and dismissing it. I know right, It's incredible.  Instead I'm going to call them by the names they actually are, like "Berry" and "Vibrant red". Amazing! Isn't it funny how something even semi unique can break bad habits like that?

Holy Mackerel the formula on these is fantastic.  Not too thick, not too runny. No streaks. No cute drag... no problems whatsoever. They dried quick too! These are not one coat wonders though, the swatches shown are all at 2 quick coats. Not freakin' bad huh?  I will admit some of the colors seemed a little run of the mill until I started painting my nails with them, but then with each color I fell in love more and more. I will wear every single one of these, for more than 5 seconds, seriously! I don't think this has ever happened with a collection before... *swoon*

On to da pictchas.

 A very wearable medium grey creme.  I love this. Do I need to repeat "I love this" after each photo?  Can I just tell you that I love them all and have that be that? No? Fine then. 

A beautiful, deep and rich berry red. I LOVE THIS. 

 This is a very unique looking pink to me.  It almost pissed me off then I realized it's almost impossible to describe. It's not Hot pink, not a berry pink, not really a rosey pink, it's different, and I dig different. In other words, love it!

Holy bright RED batman. I am *so glad* Zoya made this color.  They were seriously lacking on true reds.  This particular red might as well be neon it's so bright and vibrant. I lubs it. 

Another unique color that's hard to pin down. Maybe if you took a milk chocolate covered cherry and tossed it in a blender it would be this color? I also really love this one because it's one of the only brownish type colors I've worn that didn't turn my hands bright red. Bonus.

Oh Zoya.  I love you so much.  You just go ahead and keep making hundreds of pinks if it makes you happy, as long as you keep giving us colors like this once and a while.  Zoya could seriously make nothing but "pink" from now on and I would still love them JUST because they gave us Ibiza and Envy and now I can add this to the list...Shawn.  OMG This green is AWESOME and I LOVE IT. 

Love, MM

Zoya Wicked Fall 2010

I have so much praise for this collection I'm not sure where to begin.  So, I'll begin with my complaints instead.  WHY do weed need 3 more red/pink shimmery glittery look alike polishes Zoya? The answer is WE DON'T.  The first three polishes in the Wicked collection are gorgeous don't get me wrong, but just one magenta or pink would have done the trick considering the name of the collection is WICKED!!! Where is the black or dark blue? Heck, I would even have been happy with a blood red instead of more pinks.  The need for three more pinks seems even tinier when you consider the fact that there are 3 more reds/pinks in the Wonderful collection.  In my oppinion Zoya missed their chance to do a jaw dropping, dark, and mysterious group of edgy polishes with the Wicked Collection.  What we got instead is a collection of HALF jaw dropping awesome, and HALF pink.

So let's start with the pinks, shall we?  

This is a dark pink with dark pink shimmer/micro glitter that almost looks blackened in the bottle, sadly that doesn't translate onto the nail.  On the nail it looks more like a plain dark pink foil. Well maybe not quite a foil, more like a regular ass pink glitter. Ok, ok, maybe it's a regular ass pink glitter with a hint of gold sparkle.

This was virtually impossible to tell apart from Kym in 99% of my pictures. In the bottle no problem, but on the nail they look nearly identical.  I had to purposefully take photos of each color under different lighting in order to get pics that look like 2 separate polishes. Even then I was second guessing myself while watermarking the photos. So, Carrie Ann is a Slightly lighter regular ass pink glitter with gold sparkle. 

Karina is at least a totally different shade of pink than I'm used to seeing from Zoya. It's a gorgeous hot magenta micro glitter/shimmer that almost looks like it has some silver in it.  Again this is almost a foil but doesn't quite translate on the nail.  This one is pretty but it certainly isn't wicked.

Now we can get to the awesome, finally.  It is almost like 2 seperate marketing teams each did half of this collection then they just shoved them all in one box.  These next three colors are freakin' KILLER and deffinately are deserving of their title of Wicked. I seriously want to make out with who ever mixed up these three beauties. 

First up on team bad ass is Cheryl. Stupid name for this incredible polish, but whatever. This color reminds me of cigars, tobacco and smoky rooms filled with mysterious men playing poker under dim lighting.  The color is a redish, brownish, burgundy loaded with brown and very dark gold micro glitter.. I adore this. 

JULIEANNE!!! OMFG. This blue based dark purple is jam packed with so much wicked awesome that I honestly don't know how they fit all the silver and purple micro glitter in there.  This polish flashes like a foil but in most lights appears to be a jelly base, LOVE. It is basically Milani's Totally cool on a serious dose of steriods. This is my favorite polish from this collection. 

Lastly, we have the shining star of this collection with its baffling duochrome, glitter, metallic, shimmer CRAZINESS. Good god is this gorgeous! Honestly I think this polish follows in the footsteps of China Glaze's Wagon trail as it isn't really a duochrome. I think it's actually a black base with charcoal/silver and gold micro glitter and glass flecks, making it appear to flash olive green to charcoal to black. Except this polish is a foil, which makes it blindingly beautiful as it changes colors. Whatever it is, this polish is totally unique and amazing.  AMAZING.

 I love so much about this collection I feel like I am going to bust at the seams! First off I love the NAME.  Wicked. It's awesome, ok. I know I'm suppost to be saying what I love at this point but the names of these polishes really piss me off.  This is the WICKED collection... where are Elvira and Morticia...and other wicked female names I cannot come up with at the moment???

Back on track, I love the finish they have created that is impossible to describe on a lot of the colors. Glass flecky, metallic, foil, micro glitter, bad ass-ness. But, what I loved most about it was the formula.

All 6 of these applied amazing. The formula was 100% consistant from polish to polish. Each and every swatch above is an even two coats, this itself is a gigantic compliment to zoya's formula.  These are highly pigmented for glitters, more like EXTREMELY pigmented for glitters.  They glide on smooth and I saw no need to use a topcoat on any of them due to graininess which was non existent. Another unexpected perk to these was they weren't all that hard to remove, actually they were very easy to remove in terms of any kind of glitter polish.  Zoya did a top notch job on the formula of these babies, I mean WOW.  Just WOW Zoya.

Love, MM