Capturing sunshine in a bottle

I have tried many of the a-england holos, and they are beautiful.. but I wanted to try a real, super-shiny, super holo polish.  I had seen swatches of Layla before, but at $15 a bottle, I didn't want to go there.

Enter Ulta, with a 20% off coupon.  I bought two.  This is Retro Pink 03.

First lesson.  I had heard that you can't use regular base coat with a holo, and I didn't have a special one.  So, I thought I would try layering it over a light pink polish from Essence.

Um, no.  You can see the big hole on my thumb nail where the polish dragged, and all the nails have similar problems.  So, either get a matte or special base coat, or just layer it over itself on a bare nail.

It does tend to get dull if you don't use a base coat - it looks like it soaks into the nail or something.  I used two coats to mitigate that.  It was almost painful to do so because the bottle is so small... only 10 ml.

But boy, is it pretty.  oooh, shiny.  This is indoors, at night, with ceiling light.

I felt like playing around with some tape and Revlon's Naughty.  I like the effect, can't wait to try it with real striping tape.  I freehanded the tips with a striper brush.  Only the thumb has topcoat.  You can tell a little bit that it affects the holo.

Here's my right hand.

The next day, I took a couple of pix in the sunlight to try and capture the holo effect.  It was crazy in RL, but of course it doesn't really show much in the pix.  If you like holos, you need a Layla holo.  It will make you happy.  Maybe.  It made me happy, anyway.