‘TIS THE SEASON OF SHIMMERY ORANGES AND I’M HERE FOR IT.

We’re full on in the fall and Halloween seasons, and I’ve been loving it. It’s fitting that everyone has been putting out lovely oranges in their collections, and I say keep ’em comin’. And Pure Ice did not disappoint.

Pure Ice is a brand exclusive to Walmart, and honestly I haven’t been really found a terrible formula in their polishes. It can be expected, since these polishes are only TWO DOLLARS, but they don’t feel like it. So when I saw advertising for their Halloween polishes I had to hunt them down.

It’s a 5 piece limited edition collection, and each bottle cap has an orange “Limited Edition” sticker on it. There are 4 polishes that stand on their own, and then one topper.

They also had a glow in the dark polish on the display, but I’m honestly not a fan of glow in the dark polishes, so I skipped on it.

So let’s get right into the swatches (and a couple comparisons)!

Up first is my favorite of the color honestly. This is ‘Gourd-geous’ (I see what they did there) and lemme tell you, it is gorgeous (I didn’t continue the joke, sorry). This is a beautiful orange cream base with gold-green shimmer. That shimmer is just so apparent on the nails and gives the color a beautiful glow. This was an easy 2 coats and can almost be opaque on just one. It’s super smooth and easy to control, and the shimmer layers nicely with the 2nd coat.

This is for the glam Halloween of your dreams.

Up next is ‘It’s Alive’. This is a red jelly base with lots of metallic shimmers and flakies. This is a little thicker jelly formula and it could be good on 2 coats. Up close I still had some visible nail line, so I added a 3rd. Based on how it looked in the bottle, this surprised me by having a more pigmented base than I would have guessed. Shimmers layer nicely on themselves and add a cool dimensional look.

‘Dark Arts’ is a dark blue base with beautiful green shimmer. Another thicker jelly formula, this can almost be opaque in 1 coat. Adding 2 deepens the color and adds more of that beautiful shimmer. This reminds me of a polish from the Sinful Colors Halloween collection last year (and a China Glaze polish as well), so I’ve compared the two down below! A nice vampy color for fall.

‘I Want You to Haunt Me’ gets points for the name, and loses a little on it’s formula. This is a shimmery dark purple base with purple flakes that blend in with the color. This had a patchy first coat, but was good in 2 coats. I found with this one using thicker coats was easier, since it was a thicker formula. If you didn’t have enough on the brush, it can stick and get a little uneven.

As you can see it almost dries with a more chunky feel because of the flakes in it. As I was cleaning it up, the flakes were being kind of pushed around and weirdly uneven a little. Because of the thicker formula, I didn’t love it completely. But it’s honestly not terrible, and can be a fun Halloween mani. A good top coat will help out with the chunkiness. (I also compared this polish with a Sinful Colors polish below).

Last but not least we have the topper ‘Smouldrin’ Cauldron’. This is metallic purple glitters and iridescent flakies in a jelly base. This was 3 coats, so obviously it can’t be totally built up on its own. The base does have a black tinge to it, that will darken the base of lighter polishes you put it over, which I showed below. There’s good pickup and coverage of the shimmers and flakies.

Here’s 1 coat over black. As you can see from my ring finger, the iridescent flakies can get a little stuck and chunky, so just make sure to spread them out evenly. The colors pop more on black. It reminds me of Ursula from the Little Mermaid. Just me?

I also put it over white, and here you can see how the black tinged base can change the color underneath. This was 2 coats over a pure white, so it took it to a stone gray look. The color is pretty smooth, and I was surprised at how much I ended up liking this! Definitely a unique mani I wasn’t expecting.

And now the comparisons! As soon as I saw ‘Dark Arts’, I knew I had seen it before. And I wasn’t wrong. I compared it to China Glaze’s ‘Blue Ya!’ from their Fall 2016 collection and Sinful Colors’ ‘Nice Guise’ from their Halloween 2016 collection. If you’re being super technical, ‘Blue Ya!’ has a bit more of a blue tinge to the shimmers to it than green. But ‘Dark Arts’ and ‘Nice Guise’ are practically identical.

In fact, they’re all similar enough that if you’re not a crazy collector, you only need 1. Formula wise, there wasn’t enough difference to prefer one over the other either. Fall is just the time to bring out the blue with green shimmer polishes.

The other comparison is between ‘I Want You to Haunt Me’ and Sinful Colors’ ‘Couture For Sure’ from their ‘Luxe Fragments’ collection from last year. ‘Couture For Sure’ has more of a purple shimmer, and brighter purple base than ‘I Want You to Haunt Me’, but they both have those chunky flakies and can look very similar in different lights. Do you need both? Well, ‘I Want You to Haunt Me’ has a better, thicker formula, needing only 2 coats, while ‘Couture For Sure’ took 3-4. If you missed out on ‘Couture For Sure’, ‘I Want You to Haunt Me’ can give the same effect.

And that’s your Pure Ice Halloween collection! Are you spooked yet?

There’s a nice variety of finishes, and I like that they did some unique things here! Maybe there’s something here that’s perfect for the costume you had in mind. If you get only one, grab ‘Gourd-geous’. Because, well, it’s Gourd-geous.

 

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