Indie: Crowsmas is here early! Crowstoes Christmas 2012 Collection swatches

Disclosure: The following polishes were provided to me for swatching/review purposes.

Come, gather 'round mah glitter addicts. Crowstoes sent me her Christmas collection, and it has really put me in the mood for the holiday season! *pushes Halloween and Thanksgiving aside*

This collection is all limited edition for the holidays, and they will be available from Llarowe and Overallbeauty. Each retailer has a couple of exclusives, as follows:

Llarowe's exclusives are:
A Christmas Crow
Her Goose Got Cooked
Jingle Balls

Overall Beauty's exclusives are:
Bah-f!@#$%g-humbug
Blue Christmas

The polishes should be available mid-November-ish. Here are the direct links to the Crowstoes at Llarowe and OverallBeauty:

Llarowe CrowsToes
OverallBeauty CrowsToes

The Halloween collection colours are core, so don't worry about those! :)

Overall, I found the chunky glitter formulas to be quite good. Loaded with glitter, and they look great at just 1 coat, but I went with an extra half to full coat of glitters in the swatches below. For the smaller glitter polishes, they had great coverage, so you can build them to opacity within 3 coats, or wear them layered.

From swatching, my favourites are Her Goose Got Cooked, Holly and Hellfire, Jingle Balls, and Maxxed Out. Ok... that's half of them.

More swatches at Em's blog, here: Canvas Nails!

First, the bottle pics - Oh! The labels shown here are not the official ones! You'll get the regular labels on all yours :)

A Christmas Crow, Bah F@#$%*G Humbug, Blue Christmas, Her Goose Got Cooked


Holly and Hellfire, Jingle Balls, Making Christmas, Maxxed Out


A Christmas Crow - 3 coats on its own. 4th pic under normal lighting, no flash. I don't even know how to describe this one. Dark brown jelly with duochrome goodness? I think this one is terrific for fall.





A Christmas Crow over black jelly franken - 1 coat over base. 4th pic under normal lighting, no flash. In case you wanted a quicker application, you could layer it over something else!





Blue Christmas over MAC Ming Blue - 2 coats over base




Blue Christmas over black jelly franken - 1 coat over base




Bah F@#$%*G Humbug over Essie Go Overboard - 1-2 coats over base




Bah F@#$%*G Humbug over black jelly franken - 1-2 coats over base




Her Goose Got Cooked over Revlon Sublime Strawberry - 1-2 coats over base




Her Goose Got Cooked over ChG Riveting - 1-2 coats over base




Holly and Hellfire over a-england Perceval - 2 coats over base




Holly and Hellfire over OPI Barre My Soul - 2 coats over base. To show the coverage of the glitter, I'm not loving this combo though lol




Jingle Balls over OPI DTMT - 1 coat over base




Jingle Balls over a-england Perceval - 1-2 coats over base. Two stars came out on their own onto the same nail!




Jingle Balls over Illa Rampage - 1-2 coats, I think this is my preferred combo. I found the star on the stem of the brush, so I placed that one onto the nail




Quick comparison with Darling Diva Mitochondrial Eve, in case you had that one.


Differences that I can detect:
- CT has one smaller set of green hex that DDP doesn't
- CT has medium red hex, while DDP only has green
- DDP has two varities of green glitters, one in common with CT, and then a more yellow-green variety of large hex
- CT has holo bar and star glitter, while DDP has additional medium/large hex and square glitters in red, purple, pink and yellow.
- Both have medium and large blue hexes

Making Christmas - 3 coats on its own, very full coverage glitter




Making Christmas - 2 coats over a-england Perceval. I imagine this would look good over a silver foil, too... but I don't own a silver foil anymore XD




Maxxed Out over OPI DTMT - 1-2 coats over base




Maxxed Out over OPI Barre My Soul - 1-2 coats over base, I really like this combo




Maxxed Out over Orly Luxe - 1-2 coats over base. Super blingy IRL




Maxxed Out over Essie Who is the Boss - 1-2 coats over base. I wanted to try a more unconventional base colour here, but I don't really love it :p





I hate it when I get glitter stuck on my cuticles, but they are so hard to remove! So sorry about that! *wipes glitter off my face*

Hope you all have a great weekend!