Hi Goddesses
A long time ago, in a blog post far, far away, I promised to compare 2 red-purple duochromes. Although I loved both polishes, I loved one a little bit more, which meant fans of the other one kind of dared me to prove it lol. Well, yeh, I forget to do things, so here, finally, we are.
First off, let me say this. Both of these polishes ROCK. They are both too cool for school. They are both red-purple duochromes, and once upon a time, I would have said red-purple duochromes could do no wrong. However, that is no longer true, as these 2 polishes have raised the bar sooooo high, any other r-p-d, has a lot to contend with.
So let's start with a couple of swatch photos of Crows Toes Indian Summer -
and a couple of Nire's Desire Prana -
Do you need to own both? No, I don't think so. They're not utterly identical, but they're not so different you need both. Let's look at them side by side. In all the following photos, Indian Summer is in the middle (middle and ring fingers), with Prana on the outer fingers (pinkie and index).
Just one word before we start splitting hairs. I think it was a mistake to paint my nails in the order that I did - I think they should have been alternate. As you will know if you are a duochrome lover, the movement of the light alters the polish across your fingers, so I think if I'd painted P-IS-P-IS, we'd have gotten a better comparison.
That said, there are only 2 differences to my eye -
* Prana has more red. This was the main reason it was my preferred polish. I felt the duochrome was more finely balanced, and I liked that I saw more red. For me, IS leaned much more purple
* Indian Summer has a "coarser" appearance - and I don't mean that in a negative way. If you look closely, you can see shimmer in there too. So IS actually has more complexity than Prana.
So I am sorry if I sound like I'm sitting on the fence, but I love them both, I do. For me and my skin tone though, Prana just nudges it.
And this is where I come off the fence. There have been other red-purple duochromes. My favourite USED to be this one, by HITS, called So Unique. This has a holographic "dust" to it -
Then there's this Rimmel one, Purple Reign - clearly a second rate companion -
And then finally, ILNP Undenied. Not *quite* the same as the others, and I can't decide whether it's deliberately different, or just poor. Either way, it's too brush-strokey for me, and just not special.
So there you go - 5 polishes, 2 of which are utterly epic. I'd love to know your thoughts in the comments.
