Sally Hansen Lustre Shine Copperhead

The last two weeks were very full on with the end of semester and I must say I am glad it is over! I can get back to blogging without having to feel like I need to have my head in a book. Yay! I'm sure you are here to listen about polish and not my rants about uni so I'm just going to move on right about now...

If you've kept an eye out for sales in the last month or so, you may have noticed the Sally Hansen range has been offered, at different times, at half price at Priceline and Chemist Warehouse. I made a quick trip to Chemist Warehouse and found the Lustre Shine for $4.99. When I swatched Lava, I mentioned none of the other colours really caught my attention but at that price, I could really afford to get a closer look. I ended up getting Copperhead and Scarab hoping I would fall in love as I did with Lava.

I wanted to show Copperhead first because it really wasn't what I expected and not in a bad way. Copperhead is a, well, coppery brown shimmer with green and blue undertones throughout, you could even call it a duochrome. The formula for this polish was rather impressive, it spread like butter, it dried a lot quicker than Lava and it was almost a one-coater with very little brushstrokes that can be characteristic of this sort of polish. I used two thin coats and one of Seche Vite for the photos in this post.

Now the unexpected part. On the photo above you can't see the green or blue shimmer and it ends up showing as a pretty average darker coppery brown.  The minty shimmery swirls and blue duochrome did not translate to the nail. The look on the bottle was what got me to buy this polish so I was a tad disappointed. 

Look at all those pretty colours

I applied Copperhead last night but waited until there was sunlight to photograph it. I noticed the polish can have different tonalities and sometimes have a pinkish undertone in shaded natural light, incandescent light makes it look more gold/orange and darker and fluorescent lighting brings out the green undertone very, very little. 

Either way, I couldn't really see any of the colours from the bottle. In a closeup, however, you can see the green particles meshed up in between all the copper. 

Am I imaging it? Maybe. I've been looking at this polish for the last day and I would like to think there's another colour there. It may also be possible that in a very small numbers of occasions the duochrome may actually show. Can you see it in my pinky below? Yes, it's blurry but it's there. No? Ok. 

This is where the fun part begins. I was checking out my nails last night and saw the blue shimmer finally make an appearance. Basically what I had to do to see was:

1. Face a source light.
2. Hold hand up between face and the light source. Let's pretend there's a line between the two for the purposes of the next step.
3. Make sure nails lay more or less parallel to the imaginary line from the step above.
4. Admire the beautiful sometimes royal blue, sometimes purple colour of the polish.

I had to go out to the garden to get full sunlight and leave the comfort of my lightbox because it just wasn't showing and I didn't have the right angle. The following photos are not flattering but they show the colour pretty well.

Next one is just a stub but the colour and shimmer are soooo pretty, right?

Finally, I took a photo in direct sunlight to see how it would look like. Dark, coppery and SHIMMERY. Ooh, yeah...

Overall, Copperhead is a pretty good polish from the formula to the subtle colour shifts. If you are looking for a darker copper, I'd recommend it highly. Especially when the Chemist Warehouse has extended the half price offer and the Lustre Shine Range is only $4.99 per bottle. Worth every cent.

Till next time, 

Laura