Ever since I laid eyes on Cult Nails Awakening back in May or June I knew I had to have it.  Maria of Cult Nails classed it as her “basic” polish in the collection which I loved.  I’m an absolute sucker for blue polishes and this was looked like my holy grail of dark blue cremes.  Unfortunately the same week I received my pre-order of the Hypnotic collection was also the week that the winter weather broke here in Sydney and we finally got some warm sunny days so my inclination to wear it was much lower than I expected.  So it sat on top of my helmer for a couple of weeks until last weekend.  We had a slight relapse of winter and the temperature fell and the clouds rolled back in a bit (incidentally on the same day I had organised my spring celebration BBQ for all my friends…talk about timing.  I had a very crowded house that night).  And so it was that the weather told me I had to wear Awakening.  Without further ado – here it is:

So as you can see from this photo – Awakening dries a lot darker than the polish in the bottle.  As soon as I put it on, I decided it was just too dark to wear on its own so I went and grabbed a grey and white polish to put some dotted stripes along my nails.  This was a complete fail on my part because I matched the grey but failed to remember that it also dries darker than in the bottle!  So I put some stripes in using China Glaze White on White which looked great but the grey counterparts (which is Ulta3 Wild Berry) are barely visible.  I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it either.  I used Nail Tek II Foundation for my base coat and Seche Vite for my top coat (because I was in a rush) and you can see I got some shrinkage around my tips despite wrapping them.  Sadly the next day huge amounts of this just peeled away after my shower so this mani didn’t last long at all.  Think I need to order the Cult Nails top and base coat when they’re released later this year – it certainly doesn’t play nice right now.