SquareHue August 2015 Swatches, Comparisons, and Nail Art

Hi everyone! Today I’ve got my SquareHue August 2015 box (the 1970s) to show off on the blog…most of the way through October! I wasn’t able to get around to this post in the past few months because I have been quite overwhelmed by work and life. But nevertheless, I couldn’t NOT do a SquareHue box post! So here it is: the SquareHue 1970s collection!

Here’s an unboxing photo! When I saw the colors for this month, I was a little surprised at the color scheme choice since it didn’t really remind me of the ’70s in particular. Instead, I was thinking that blue + white + silver = inadvertent Jewish holiday collection. Thanks to SquareHue, now I finally have the perfect group of polishes to pull out when Chanukah rolls around again!

iPolish is a plain, stark white creme. So minimalist – very Apple. When I first saw it, I was initially uninterested, since it is a plain, stark white creme. As it turned out, this is the polish that I always wanted, but could never find. This plain, stark white creme is completely, 100% opaque in ONE COAT. ONE. COAT. One, completely smooth coat! Previously, I thought this was impossible for a plain, stark white creme, but SquareHue iPolish has proven me wrong! FINALLY a white polish I don’t have to fuss with! YES!!! I am BEYOND happy with this one ❤ Fun fact: even though I grew up within spitting distance of Apple HQ, I don’t actually own any Apple products.

While SquareHue iPolish has a zillion dupes since it is a plain, stark white creme, I compared it to the two whites I use most frequently. Both Covergirl Snowstorm and Julep Brigitte are much less opaque (both require three coats), but just as plain and stark white.

Night Fever is a glitzy holographic glitter polish that seems obviously inspired by the flashiness of disco. I actually predicted this last month, so I was happy to learn that I was right! Anyways, this polish has a bunch of silver holographic glitter in a clear base; the glitter is mostly tiny glitter, but there are also some medium hex glitters in there. One coat looks great on its own; the glitter distributes so nicely, and the glitter density is perfect.

I compared SquareHue Night Fever to Zoya Cosmo, even though they are quite dissimilar polishes. Night Fever is a glitter topcoat, whereas Zoya Cosmo is intended to be a full-coverage textured polish. While Cosmo isn’t opaque by one coat, there is a dense amount of silver metallic microglitter (not holographic) in the polish that gives much more coverage than Night Fever because, well, it’s intended to. I just couldn’t find anything that similar in my stash to Night Fever, so this was the best I could do.

Watergate is a vivid blue glass fleck polish that’s very sheer and good for layering. The intensity of this cerulean blue combined with the microglitter makes it look absolutely gorgeous – like light bouncing off of a deep swimming pool (I guess that’s why they named it Watergate…). While the polish is gorgeous, it’s rather sheer and requires several coats to become opaque enough to look like the color in the bottle. I swatched Watergate at one, two, three, and four coats to show how it builds up:

The plus side of being sheer, though, is that you can layer one coat of Watergate on top of other polishes to create completely different looks; most likely I’ll wear it this way in the future. Putting it on top of a dark color like navy or black might be interesting! Anyways, the formula of this polish is quite easy to apply aside from the sheerness, and, very fortunately, it doesn’t stain upon removal!

I compared SquareHue Watergate to Zoya Oceane and Sally Hansen Triple Shine – Wavy Blue. Zoya Oceane is a similar color to Watergate, but the finish is much more shimmery/metallic and opaque. Wavy Blue has a similar microglitter finish to Watergate, but is darker, bluer, and more opaque.

While this collection immediately gave me a Jewish holiday vibe, I ended up wanting to do something geometric and funky with these colors. I don’t exactly know how I arrived at this particular curved nail art design, but that’s what I went with; I’m going to call it “disco circles” because the blue squares remind me of a disco ball.

To make this design, I started off with a base of iPolish; I used two coats to make absolutely sure I had an opaque base. Then, I freehanded on two arcs on each nail, one with Watergate and one with Night Fever. Since both polishes were kind of sheer, I had to do a couple of layers of each polish to build up the opacity to my satisfaction. I decided to alternate the polishes on each nail, but keeping the same design on each nail would have probably been nice too. Finally, I broke up the blue arc into squares by drawing very, very thin lines through the arc using a tiny brush and iPolish. And done!

I’m not really sure how much I like this design in particular, but it’s kind of intriguing. I probably would have been more satisfied with it if the arcs weren’t so bulky compared to the base, but it was necessary to make them that way in order to get the arcs to be opaque enough. Maybe I’ll try this design again in the future, but with different colors so that I can improve the execution. In any case, the colors were gorgeous, and I look forward to pulling them out again for Jewish holidays!

I hope you’ve liked my post! Now I only have four subscription box posts left before I catch up…ugh I am so behind… Well, thanks for reading!

– Emi