L'Oreal Femme Noir

Two days ago was the first official day of summer - one of my absolute favorite days of the year!  I'm a summer girl, so I spend all winter cursing the cold and dreaming of when I can wear flip flops again.  Somehow I didn't even realize the summer solstice rolled around, so ya know what I did?  I picked just about the darkest color possible for my manicure.  Yeah...I wore a vampy on the first day of summer.  D'oh!

My color blunder was L'Oreal Femme Noir.  It's hard to pinpoint exactly how to describe this one.  Under more direct lighting, it looks like a deep blackened "lit-from-within" red shimmer.  My photos show exactly that.  It's literally like this stuff is glowing red.  In most other lighting, it shows more of an espresso black-brown with subtle brownish-red shimmer.  The application wasn't my favorite, but it wasn't impossible either.  I think the L'Oreal brush is just not a great brush, but the pigmentation was great.  Two coats was all I needed!

(click to enlarge)

 (click to enlarge)

Femme Noir...what a name, right?!  Love it!  Reminds me of a Bond girl or something.  It was released with L'Oreal's Midnight Muse collection from last fall, and it was crazy popular on MUA.  It was also crazy hard-to-find, because L'Oreal only put two of them in each display!  I'm always on the hunt for my perfect vampy polish, so I wanted to give this one a try, but never managed to find it myself.  I actually got this one in a swap with a lovely lady in my area (Hi, Anne!!).

Alas, I don't think Femme Noir is my perfect vampy.  If it looked like it did in my photos all the time, I think it'd be a match made in heaven.  Unfortunately, that's just not the case.  I think it's "typical" showing is pretty, but nothing special.  Any old deep shimmery brown would do the job.  Sigh.  One day I'll find you, Perfect Vampy (and your little dog, too!)!  Maybe you're in hiding with Perfect Nude???

The good news?  I promise I changed into a more summer-appropriate mani for the weekend!
;-)