Star Kin - Team Buddy Swatches & Review (Plus Gradient With Mint To Be Buddies!)

Purchased by me

Hey lovelies,

I must preface this post by apologising for the quality of the photos. The polish colours are mostly colour accurate, but a little bluer than I'd like. Summer has ended with a resounding crash, it's been raining all week. I've been playing around with my lightbox but the bulbs in my lamps are the wrong colour temperature, I think, so I've ordered more. Mike has ordered me a softbox light stand for my birthday too so I hope to get that set up for colour accurate makeup swatches and FOTDs year round :D It will be so nice to not be a slave to natural light anymore, and to get more consistency with my images.

Okay, onto the polish!

I got in touch with Ami at Star Kin a short while ago to fulfil my latest custom polish craving. I wanted a white crelly with mint glitter, but mint glitter is pretty hard to come by, so we ended up creating a duo. Team Buddy, a white crelly with varying shades of green glitter for an overall minty feel and Mint To Be Buddies, with the same glitter mix but in a minty green base. I absolutely love them both, Ami is fantastic at transforming ideas into reality, and I'm so pleased to report that Team Buddy made the cut for the April line up of Star Kin polishes. You can find the Star Kin Etsy store here.

Curious about the names? Well, Ami has already made custom polishes inspired by my sons Noel and Patrick (see them in my Star Kin masterpost here) so I wanted something named for my partner Mike this time. Mike and I call eachother 'buddy', which stems from a shared love of The Brak Show, and now the boys get called buddy too, and the family as a whole is Team Buddy (it's also my username on Instagram!). So that's how Team Buddy came about, and Mint To Be Buddies is more for Mike :)

OPI - Nail Envy

Star Kin - Team Buddy, 3 coats

The formula on Team Buddy is fantastic, Ami rocks a white crelly like nobody's business. It built up easily in three coats.

With flash

I added a gradient with Mint To Be Buddies, nothing fancy, just graduating two layers with the polish brush, but I really love how it turned out. I topped it with a coat of Glisten & Glow HK Girl and it's stayed on my nails since Thursday! Pretty rare for me, because I get bored with a polish quickly and everything chips like a mofo on me, but this is still looking pretty damn near perfect. Just the most minimal tipwear.