Smitten Polish Hocus Pocus

This is a new indie brand for me, Smitten Polish, offered at both Llarowe and their Etsy shop.  I am absolutely "smitten" with this polish, Hocus Pocus, and more importantly their gorgeous Adeste Fidelis polish, which is the perfect Valentine's Day polish.  I will have swatches of Adeste Fidelis for you when I wear it next week.

More pictures after the jump!

If you loved the Zoya Ornate 2012 Collection, Hocus Pocus is the baby of Zoya's Blaze and Aurora.  You can definitely tell it is Aurora's baby since it is a very pigmented purple jelly base with purple and red and rainbow holographic glitters.  The red holographic glitters look like Blaze had some say in it, but it is mostly a brighter, more energetic Aurora.

This is 3 thin coats, but you could definitely do 2 thicker coats or even 2 thin coats and have no vnl (visible nail line).  In doing the 3 thin coats, they dried super fast as I was applying, so keep that in mind if you are a slower painter you may want to do thicker coats to give yourself more time.  I am a bit slow, which is why I did a third coat to cover up a bit of the areas where I dragged the brush over parts that had already dried mid-coat, which had become a tad bumpy.  Still very easy to apply, even if you are a slow painter like me.

The two pictures above are very blue purple looking.  It is not really color accurate, but I wanted to show a picture under a lamp to get all the sparkle to come out.  The rest of the pictures were taken outside in natural sunlight and they are very color accurate.

The wear was not so good, but I am not sure if it is because of the polish or because I applied it right before a shower and on a base coat that had been on my nails for a day already. I was still surprised to see large chunks chipping and peeling right off though, which shouldn't happen. It may have just been the hot water of the shower preventing it from bonding to the based coat completely. Not sure. 

Overall a great polish to work with.  Amazing pigment on a jelly holo - the formula is really very similar to the Zoya Ornate holos Blaze and Aurora.  If you love Aurora and love a bit of brighter polish every now and then, this is the polish for you!

I say holo because they have lots of holo glitter, to the point that they look like scattered holos (not the classic linear holos) - are they actually scattered holos, is this Hocus Pocus a scattered holo?.  There are definitely some differences in opinion as to what exactly defines a holo and the types of holos, but lets just say these have holo something to them and leave it at that.


Puppy time!  Here is Kairi with our mascot, Buzz!