The Happiest Manicure Ever

R.E.I.T. and I live in Michigan, and as you probably know, Michigan is the single darkest, coldest, most depressing place on earth during the winter. It's wet and dank and gray all the time, from about November to about May. But then this week, a miracle happened! The sun came out, in February! And the temps were in the upper forties! I went outside without a coat on!

To commemorate this amazing occasion, I crafted the funniest, sunniest, most happiest manicure you've ever seen:
Two coats of Pure Ice "Superstar" (white) as a base for two coats of Studio M "Neon Caution", topped off with a coat of Milani "Gems". Super sunny and bright, perfect for these precious few sunny days.

Everbody wants to be Deborah Lippman.

"Inspired by" polishes seem to be out of control lately. We can't have been the only ones to notice this.

Last week, I picked up the much more reasonable alternative to Deborah Lippman's "Happy Birthday", a twenty-dollar polish that I just cannot bring myself to purchase. At just under four dollars, Milani "Gems" was a buy I could live with.

But after I picked that one up, I noticed Wet N' Wild had their own "just like but not quite" version of "Happy Birthday" in "Party of Five Glitters".

These are incredibly difficult to photograph in the bottle because they're so intensely shiny. It's also difficult to tell the difference between them until they're on the nail:

Top to bottom: "Gems" "Party of Five Glitters" "Gems" "Party of Five Glitters" over Sinful Colors "Black on Black"

As you can see, the biggest difference between the two polishes is distribution on the nail. This could be a result of the brush design. The Milani brush is much thinner than the Wet N' Wild brush, requiring more strokes for coverage. This deposits more glitter on the nail.

The only other differences I could tell was that "Gems" includes orange and gold glitter, which are absent from "Party of Five Glitters". The green glitter in "Party of Five Glitters" is smaller than the green glitter in "Gems", and that's about it. They're both incredibly similar, and I wore them for two days before they actually started to look dissimilar.

I don't have Lippman's "Happy Birthday", but at this point, I don't think I need it. I've got two "inspired by"s right here! As R.E.I.T. says, "Is sfarkaly!" ("It's sparkly").