Viva La Diva fall 2011: Live It - Love It

Trying to make up for my blogging absence by showing some fall news - the nail related products from Viva La Diva's fall collection Live It - Love It landed in my mailbox the other day. Check them out.

First, the full size lacquers. They are four:

131 Fame, 132 Fortune, and 133 Golden Globe are all metallics, while the copper brown 134 Casino Royale doesn't qualify as one, but rather a shimmer. 131 is the trend appropriate take on Chanel's Graphite, but much smoother; a gunmetal grey with gold flecks.

On wheel. The first three are two coats, very well pigmented, while 134 really needed a third coat as it's somewhat sheer.

On to the mini bottles:

31 Trophy, 32 Drama, and 33 Groovy are marketed as "soft mattes". 32 and 33 are practically identical to two of Depend's fall colors. 34 Red Carpet is a bright red with sparse silver shimmer, or perhaps micro glitter, 35 Crystal is a white glassfleck, and 36 Empire is a metallic silvery gunmetal grey.

On wheel. The soft mattes were a bit troublesome to get on the plastic and took three coats, the ohers are two.

Viva La Diva is also launching a line of foil stickers.

Three out of four designs I got to try out - the fourth one I'd already tried on when I took these photos. (Typically me.)

New also is a line of treatments.

Nail hardener, cuticle remover, Calcium gel and oil. I have tried three of these already, but not enough to be able to give a decent review, except for the cuticle remover, which is supposed to be gentle with its Aloe Vera content, but really doesn't do much at all. The calcium gel gives a slight white tint to the nail, but is a bit hard to distribute evenly, and the oil is scented with rose, and contains wheat germ oil. Though... Occasional typos and ancient spellings on these. "Calciun"? And from what I understand, no one has spelled vitamin with an e at the end since about 1912. I realize I'm not very nice when it comes to these things, but if you can't handle spelling in a different language, just use your own.

I'll be back with some swatches of these later on (feel free to make a wish or two), but in the meantime, my overall impression is this: Viva La Diva makes way better fall/winter colors than they do spring/summer, and I think these is a vast improvement from the last collection I reviewed. Not all colors are that original, and just like last time, some are even dead on dupes to colors that Depend managed to put out a few weeks before Viva La Diva, but I do think these are nice, fall appropriate colors. There's the take on one of the most popular high end fashion house colors, the subdued greens and greys, a fallish copper brown, a snow like color and one bright, christmas-y red. To quote my five year old daughter: "Where are the pinks and purples?!" Personally, I don't miss them. Most other brands see to that we get those, to seemingly no end.

My favourites are 131 Fame, 36 Empire, and 34 Red Carpet. I can never resist a good gunmetal, and the silver in the bright red is cute.

Now if I can only recover from the head cold I got after my previous set of graveyard shifts, I hope to be blogging a whole lot more!

Swedish word of the day:
leve -interjection may he/she live
Viva in some other languages.