Barry M Gelly Paprika Mustard and Cardamom swatch and review

Hey there!

I hope you're all doing well?  Here we are at the change of the seasons again, and we're now getting into my favourite!  The leaves are starting to turn, and whether you call it Autumn or Fall, I reckon it's the most beautiful season there is.

Having been completely underwhelmed by high street nail polishes of late, and unwilling to pay the higher prices of indies when I already have so much polish, it means I've actually bought very little lately, and that's why I haven't had very much to show you.  I haven't even done much nail art, and that which I have done has been simple dots or stripes and not really worth shouting about.

However, I was in Superdrug last weekend, and ka-pow! Some polish that made me do a double take.  In fact I might have even said "ooh!" out loud, for here were some polish colours I didn't already own, and in wonderful Autumn colours.  There were 5 or 6 in the range, but Superdrug had a 3 for 2 offer on, so I rationed myself to three.

These were the three polishes I got:

From L-R they are Cardamom, Mustard and Paprika. 

I may as well now show them to you in the same order as this picture, which is just the order I picked them up in my hand (professional to a fault hehe).

For each colour polish I've taken three pictures.  One in direct sun, one in the shade and one showing the bottle so you can see how the polish on the nail compares with the colour in the bottle.

So lets go with Barry M Cardamom.  First in the shade:

The formula was lovely, if you've used Barry M Gellies before, it's pretty much their standard formula.  This is one coat with no top coat, and it had the lovely shine as they all do.  I find that this shine doesn't last long on me and if I manage to wear it for a couple of days without chipping (I'm tough on polish) I find I want to add a topcoat at that point just to get the shine back. 

Usually by a couple of days I've chipped any polish anyway, no matter what the make.  I think it's because I wash my hands alot, and am typing most of the day.

Here it is in direct sun:

I have had to do a little bit of electronic dry skin gardening on these pics.  Not to make my cuticles look marvellous (as I'm sure you can tell) but just to make sure I don't put you off your breakfast.  They were most incredibly dry, despite me treating them better than most Egyptian princesses day and night. They're so ungrateful and insist on shedding all the expensive moisture I try to pamper them with.  Sigh.

Here's the bottle comparison:

I have to say I was a little bit disappointed in this colour when it dried.  As you can see, the colour in the bottle is a more greyed out green, which I prefer, and it dried to a kind of light British Racing Green, which is not what I was looking for.  But still, it's not unpleasant, and I do think I'll wear it.  Dry time was the usual Gelly medium-fast.

Next up we have Barry M Gelly in Mustard, firstly in the shade:

Again this is one coat with no top coat, and for a light colour it gave pretty good coverage.  The same nice formula with a medium-quick dry time.  I do find I have to be quite careful when applying Gellies to wipe the brush stalk or else there is  a high possibility of a big blob of polish making its way onto my nail (or leg, or carpet, etc, in a nail polish Russian Roulette stylee). 

Here it is in the sunshine:

You can see on this pic, very slight VNL on my index finger and the edge of my thumb, but in real life that wasn't noticeable.  Another coat would have sorted it out, but to be honest, I was too lazy.

Here it is with its bottle comparison:

Again, a little bit darker than in the bottle.  When I first applied this colour I said, OMG this does absolutely nothing for my skin tone, but it was that fugly I actually fell a bit in love with it.  Of the three colours, this is my fave, and I think it will be my go-to Autumn colour this year.  Though not really office friendly in the conservative environment at mine so I'll have to reserve it for weekends.

And onto the third colour, Paprika:

A true russet red, this one really did need two coats.  However I didn't, because I'd only done one coat for the other two colours, I wanted to keep the same for this (see also, lazy).  Same formula and dry time as the others.  Reds are not really my thing, but this one is wearable as it's definitely more in the brown family.

Here it is in the sunshine:

This picture is actually pretty spot on colour wise, and is the most office friendly of the three I bought.

Here's its bottle comparison:

Again a bit darker than in the bottle, a recurring theme.

The three look lovely side by side, so I thought I'd mix them up a bit:

I used striping tape to section off the end and middle of my nails and just using the brush from the bottle I painted between the tape.  Leaf for topical interest ;-)

It's not the neatest nailart I've ever done but I absolutely love the end result.  So much so, I took another pic haha.  This time in the sun:

It was topped off with HK Girl Glisten and Glow top coat which is my current favourite.  It doesn't go gloopy and shrink like Seche can after a while.

So there we have it, the three I bought, and I'm very pleased with them.  I would definitely recommend them.  I paid £3.99 per bottle, but as I said I got them on a 3 for 2 offer which means I ended up paying just over £2.50 per bottle.

You can see the full range of the Barry M Gelly colours by following this (link) and the list of ingredients are also there.  Barry M are cruelty free, so guilt free polishing.

The next polish on my want list will be a thermal, I've only got a couple of those and the formula of the ones I have is not great.  Do you have a favourite I should be looking at?

Is Autumn your favourite like mine, or do you prefer another season?

Until next time....

MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~