Selections from SpaRitual Wander Collection

Standing at Ulta looking at the display for the SpaRitual Wander collection for fall, my first instinct was of course to grab one of each color and go check out. My next instinct was to get none of them because they weren't on sale and I didn't have a coupon (or not a good coupon; I don't recall exactly since I'm at Ulta so much the trips tend to blend together). Then I managed to find that underutilized part of my brain that practices moderation and picked my three favorites and bought those. Left to right: Starry Night, Arroyo, Nomad.

I started with Starry Night, a brown shimmer. I think this an overused name for nail polish, though I must admit none of the others I own are brown, so that's different. My swatch is two coats, no topcoat. The labels on all the colors in this collection call the finish "sandy matte shimmer", which leads one to believe there will be texture, but this must be the finest-grained sand in all the land, as it's hardly bumpy at all. I'd call the finish closer to satin than matte, too.

Never mind the satin versus matte issue, though, because Starry Night looks much better with a shiny topcoat, which brings out the golden/olive shimmer.

In direct low light, the shimmer pops even more:

Arroyo is a dusty rose with gold shimmer, and has the same finish as Starry Night. Again, I swatched at two coats.

The change in Arroyo with topcoat wasn't as dramatic, though it did look nice.

In direct low light, the gold sparkled quite nicely:

Nomad is an olive green with gold and pink shimmer, and is also a two-coater.

Here's Nomad with topcoat:

And here's Nomad in direct low light:

I'm happy with my choices; I can see wearing any of these as a full mani. I actually did wear Arroyo to work for a week after I did these swatches. On my skintone, it's got that almost-but-not-quite-mannequin hands subtlety, but the gold shimmer adds enough interest that it didn't bore me after a day.

You can see swatches of the whole collection at The PolishAholic.