Zoya Yasmeen NOTD: Fulfilling My Nars Purple Rain Lemming

With all the hype going on about NARS' Purple Rain, you'd think that in addition to making your nails look great, it would also do your dishes, vacuum the floor, do your laundry, and buy you flowers and chocolates on Valentine's Day. But nah, it does none of these things - other than making your nails look fabulous, that is. And so, it's not worth all the hype, and the money. At least, that's what I tell myself over and over. It's not that great. You don't need it. It's expensive. And goodness knows I have a gazillion purple nail polishes in my stash. (I happen to have a thing for purples. And taupes.)

So, I told myself, there must be a substitute for NARS Purple Rain. Not a dupe, definitely, but maybe something in the same glowy-purple-with-shimmer category. And since I have a gazillion purples, I probably already have it in my stash. Thus, I dug around in my stash, and found this beauty called Zoya Yasmeen. It's currently my NOTD, and although it's not at all a dupe of Purple Rain, it's utter gorgeousness is making me forget about NARS.

I'm sorry if application was a bit sloppy on this one, I did my nails at 3am in the morning (there's a reason for that, and if you were following me on Twitter, you'd know why. LOL. But if you're curious, you can read the relevant tweets in order: here and here, followed by here and here, then here and here, and finally here and here. As you can tell, I reeeaaaalllly haaaate having my sleep interrupted. All my classes are early in the mornings this term, and as a result I don't get much sleep on weekdays. So catching up on sleep during the weekends is really important to me.)

Here it is in natural light. Please forgive the watermarking, there are reasons for it. The first reason is that lately, commercial sites have been stealing nail bloggers' pictures (and for some reason nail pictures get stolen a lot more than makeup pictures), and they even crop out watermarks, so if you want to prevent photo theft you really have to watermark the entire picture, like I'm attempting to do. The second reason is that my friend has installed GIMP in my computer, and I'm having a lot of fun attempting to use it to watermark my pictures. LOL. I've no idea how to edit colours etc though, so it's primarily a watermarking tool for me, since previously I was using Paint to watermark my pictures.



I love how Yasmeen has this glowy look about it that makes the colour look half-alive. It's darkened at the edges, but it's still visibly purple in all lights, and it has the most lovely gold (or is it gold? I can't quite tell...It might be multi-coloured) shimmer. I really love this one, it looks pretty both indoors and out, unlike some polishes which look nice outdoors but flat in indoor lighting and vice versa.

Here is a not-too-great photo of Zoya Yasmeen indoors. You can really see the gold (or whatever colour it is) shimmer here:



As you can see, the shimmer is really a lot more obvious indoors. It doesn't really look like shimmer though, instead the effect is more of a glow, which I really like. Yasmeen also applied beautifully, like most Zoyas do, and very little cleanup was required. However, despite the depth of colour, it was only semi-opaque in one coa, so two coats is still necessary for full opacity. Wear time is pretty decent, too. There's nothing I don't like about Yasmeen.

So Zoya Yasmeen isn't anywhere close to Nars Purple Rain. But it's pretty in it's own right, and it has this lovely glowy shimmer that the NARS doesn't, so I'm pretty happy. To paraphrase the proverb, a nail polish in the stash is worth two in the store. LOL.