This is Stone Cold from China Glaze’s Hunger Games collection. It is only the second matte polish I’ve bought (the first was an accidental purchase of OPI Russian Navy Matte – instead of the regular ol’ glossy). I think technically the shimmer in this one makes it a suede, but whatever. I’m a glossy creme person, so it really surprised me that I liked a matte shimmer so much. It’s a dark graphite base with tons of sparkly silver flakes.
This is two coats with no base or topcoat.
However, the wear on this is HORRIBLE. I know mattes are notoriously bad, but I was expecting to get at least a day out of this. The tiny chip you see on my ring finger happened about ten minutes after it dried, and within an hour, a huge chunk had chipped off of the middle of my index finger nail. I tried using two different base coats with this, but the polish just slid right off, so that wasn’t helpful at all. This does also look excellent with a topcoat (sorry I couldn’t get a picture before the disaster happened – but you can see it here), so I might experiment with that a little bit more.
Overall, love the color, hate the chips.
Do you guys have any experience with mattes? Would a matte topcoat extend the wear a bit?