Twinkling Hot Tamales

First off ... whoa, what is up with the new posting feature?? Was anyone else horribly confused and panicking a bit? I thought I pressed the wrong button or something!!


Right, onto the post. I'm not sure how long I can keep this daily posting up. Maybe another day or so if I'm not too lazy to paint my nails today, so enjoy it while you can! Today, I bring you Twinkle and Hot Tamale both from Pure Ice.

This alternating mani is two coats of Hot Tamale, the darker polish, and two coats of Twinkle, the lighter polish. I'm just noticing now the slightly visible nail line on some of them. They could probably use another coat or three. I guess this means they're more sheer than I thought.

Twinkle showed up fairly dark in most of the pictures I took. I managed to find a handful of true to color. Twinkle is a simply lovely shade of coral pink or maybe a salmon. It contains a slight hint of orange but I'm not sure if that's just the gold shimmer playing tricks on my eyes or not.

Hot Tamale is a darker color that I think nearly overwhelms the delicate Twinkle. The closest I can come to describing Hot Tamale is an off shade of vermilion, sometimes known as cinnabar. I think this shade works best because vermilion is described as being similar to scarlet but with more orange and less red. Hot Tamale certainly has it's fair share of orange and mixes nicely with the gold shimmer the polish contains.

 Twinkle and Hot Tamale close-up shots.

You really get to see the true shades of these colors up-close in direct sunlight.

Hot Tamale shows it's gold shimmer much less than Twinkle. The gold shimmer blends too well with Hot Tamale's metallic finish to really pop. That certainly doesn't mean Hot Tamale doesn't pop all on its own. While pink is my favorite color I don't think I can wear a shade as delicate as Twinkle ... at least not without Hot Tamale to carry it along.


What I didn't know while buying this polish was how closely Hot Tamale resembles Riveting from the China Glaze Hunger Games collection. Riveting has slightly more depth to its color; the metallic finish of Riveting shifts subtly darker than Hot Tamale. However, Riveting leaves Hot Talame in its gold shimmering dust. Riveting has a much, much more present shimmer. The gold flecks are also bigger and brighter; they really shine out of the polish. As you can see from the picture below, Hot Tamale is not an exact match to Riveting but you might be able to make a fairly passable fraken dupe out of it by adding a thicker shimmer.

Will any of you be trying Hot Tamale in place of Riveting? What about Twinkle? Will it work better with your skin tone than it does mine?