And now I can die: Color Club Oil Slick multichrome nail polish swatches (with excessive photos)

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I felt like I was pretty much over nail polish after amassing a ridiculously large hoard and then purging dozens of bottles from it and not being able to find anyone to take them off my hands (pun intended?). The rejects are still sitting in a box in my closet taking up space. Anyone want them?

But then I saw photos of the Color Club Oil Slick Collection on beautygeeks, and my acquisitive drive fired right the fuck back up. Multichromes are my absolute favorites, and these ones looked as stunning as the many indie options out there, but more accessible. I've just never really got into indie polishes. There's definitely some fascinating stuff out there, but the prices and (often) the need to pounce before things go out of stock just don't appeal to me. ILNP, for instance, has dozens of multichromes - but the choice is overwhelming, and they are more expensive than Color Club. I've used and liked Color Club before, and I really hoped I would be able to find these polishes at Meijer, where I once got some of the Halo Hues (holos) for under $4. No such luck, of course.

Color Club Oil Slick collection: Cash Only, It's Raining Men, We'll Never Be Royals, and Burnt Out

I'm not impulsive. I told myself that I wasn't allowed to buy them until I could redeem 200 coins in Habitica. In the meantime, I wanted to find the cheapest possible price online. I only wanted four from the collection: Cash Only, It's Raining Men, We'll Never Be Royals, and Burnt Out. You can find them on ebay, and I'd heard that some people had picked them up there for about $6 each + free shipping. I checked several times over the course of a few weeks and never found anything lower that $8 + $3-4 shipping per bottle. Amazon's prices fluctuate, but over the weeks I was looking, they didn't go lower than ebay. I looked at several other beauty and nail supply sites, but when Color Club had a 31% off sale on their site for Halloween, I ended up getting them there for a total of about $33 including shipping for the four bottles. If you want a few bottles, I'd recommend getting them from the Color Club site, if you don't mind waiting for a sale (right now they have 25% off), though if you just want a single bottle, $10 + free shipping on Amazon is probably a better bet.

Color Club Oil Slick collection: Cash Only, It's Raining Men, We'll Never Be Royals, and Burnt Out

Anyway, enough shop(ping) talk. I have them now and they are nearly everything I imagined and we are very happy together. Some general points about the formula of all of them, and then I'll move on to photos. They are nice and opaque, so you only need two coats. If you're very good, you might be able to get away with just one coat. But all four of these polishes are quite thick, so I anticipate having to thin them sooner rather than later. That also means that you have to wipe the brush off carefully or you might end up with a big glob rolling down the wand as you're painting your nail and messing everything up. Dry time is average, but I always use a quick dry top coat, because I am not at all patient enough not to. I used Orly Polishield (reviewed here, but I've found recently that I like it much better when I use a thick coat of it) for all the photos below. I applied Cash Only without a basecoat and it chipped the next day. For all the others, I used Orly Bonder basecoat and went at least two days without chipping (it's rare that any polish lasts much longer than that for me).

So let's get on with the swatches. It's impossible to capture all the shifting colors in photos, because it's really movement that brings them alive. I did my best with my mediocre camera. I exercised almost no restraint, so I've put many, many photos below the cut. Indulge me! I haven't been this excited about nail polish in a long time.

First up: Cash Only. This was a surprise. I hesitated about getting it, but it turned out to be my second favorite of the bunch. It's really amazing and not like anything else I've seen. It would be hard to name all the colors in there. It goes from rosy beige, to gold, to steel grey, to silver, to lavender, to blue, to green, with a bunch of other shit in between.

The photos below are in all sorts of different lighting, and let me warn you one last time that I went overboard with the number of photos here (you can enlarge them by clicking on them). But they're all different! All equally important.

Right??

Okay, now for the one in the bunch that I think I could have skipped: It's Raining Men. It's a gorgeous blue, and I do love my blues, but it's not nearly as shifty as the others. It mainly goes from navy to cobalt blue. You only get a hint of purple shift, usually in lower light, though if you look closely, you can see some purple/pink shimmer most of the time.

Here's a comparison with an excellent blue shimmer: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Co-Bolt Blue. It's very close in most lighting, though Co-Bolt has no shift. I also wondered how similar it would be to Max Factor Fantasy Fire layered over Co-Bolt. Verdict: not very.

It's Raining Men is on my middle and pinky fingers, Co-Bolt alone is on the index finger, and Fantasy Fire is layered over it on my ring finger. (Excuse the lack of cleanup. I was rushing to take these photos before what was possibly the last real sunshine of the year went away. Also, it turns out that taking a photo of my right hand is very, very hard.)

Next up: We'll Never Be Royals. Love it, though it's not quite as shifty as Cash Only or Burnt Out. 

And the best for last: Burnt Out. Like Cash Only, it's super shifty with tons of colors in it: red, orange, brown, green, gold. It's really worth seeing in motion.

One of the reasons I wanted Burnt Out was that I hoped it would be a dupe for my favorite nail polish of all time, the long discontinued Sally Hansen Nail Prisms in Amber Ruby. The tragic tale is that, years ago, before I realized that nail polish lasts forever and ever through the magic of nail polish thinner, I threw out a bottle of Amber Ruby that had thickened up too much. Then I stole borrowed my mother's half empty bottle and have been rationing it ever since, hoping for dupe to come along.

Here are comparison swatches, with Amber Ruby on my index and ring fingers and Burnt Out on my middle and pinky fingers (again without cleanup because I was chasing the daylight):

It's a dupe!!! In fact, Burnt Out is slightly better, because it's more opaque and less streaky than Amber Ruby. I never thought I'd see the day. Now I can very magnanimously return what's left of my mom's nail polish to her.

Well, that's it, and now I never need to buy another bottle of nail polish as long as I live, right? But if you also love multichromes, I highly recommend these (especially Cash Only and Burnt Out) (and, yeah, okay, We'll Never Be Royals too). I hope you find looking at swatches of nail polish as soothing as I do, because that was a lot of mostly identical totally different photos of these polishes you just scrolled though. Can you believe that I actually went back and removed some I'd originally included here? I'll stop now.

Okay, one more.