Barry M: Crystal Glaze review

...And we're back in business!

Here goes my first post in a little while. So happy to have the time to blog again and what better way yo start than to talk about one of my favourite brands; Barry M.

Now I bought pretty much all of the new Autumn collection as soon as they were released and have used a lot of them other the last week or so but for now we're focusing on the Crystal Glaze top coat as I've been wearing this a lot and getting lots of compliments on it. It's so pretty even in the bottle it draws attention.

Like pretty much all of us beauty bloggers I first tried this over the new Barry M shade Berry Cosmo. This looked so beautiful and gives an almost oil slick effect however there won't be any pictures as we've all seen that before by now.

First off I want to talk about the application, the crystal flakes in this spread easily and evenly on one coat, there's no pesky little flakes left sticking up they lay beautifully flat and dries very quickly. When I first tried it I was amazed at how easy it was, I've tried similar products before and had pieces sticking up and hated it but this is so simple to apply and dries pretty quickly especially as you only need a single thin coat for the desired finish.

Once I'd tried this over Berry Cosmo I started to wonder which of my hundreds of other shades this would work with and so I grabbed a nail wheel and got painting. Some of the colours I picked because they were my favourites and others because I was just curious as to how it would look.

Some of them I'm not even going to show a detailed picture with as it just didn't work. As you can see above this top coat really only works well with darker colour. With pale and pastel colours it does add a somewhat pretty accent but if I'm being honest I probably wouldn't waste the product or my time by applying this over such shades.

That said I did find a couple of amazing combinations. First up is Crystal Glaze over my absolute favourite shade from Autumn last year, Barry M's Watermelon from their Gelly collection. I'd been waiting for the cooler weather to start wearing this again and once I'd seen it with Crystal Glaze over the top I was even more excited. I don't have the best camera in the world so the pictures don't quite do it justice but you can see just how beautiful all the different colours are.

You can also see in the above pictures what I was talking about over the lighter/pastel shades. Above Watermelon I tried it with Barry M's Blueberry Ice Cream which I think was from the 2011 Spring release if I remember correctly. It does look pretty but it just doesn't allow the beautiful colours of this top coat to show as much as the darker shades do.

So that's Crystal Glaze making one of my favourite shades even better, so imagine how excited I was when I tried it over another favourite shade and it look amazing! This time was another Gelly but this time from this years Summer release, Blue Grape. I was always planning on bringing this shade through Autumn with me and now it'll be on those tips even more with this Crystal Glaze adding to it's amazing-ness.

Blue Grape is juuuuust dark enough to allow the multiple colours in this coat to really be shown off. Again, not the best picture quality but sadly until I win the lottery or marry rich this is the best I can do haha.

I hope this gives you an idea of how to best use this top coat and if you've found any other good combinations for this please leave it in the comments so I can try it out :)