Pandora

Here is the third polish from the Zoya Touch Collection, Pandora:

Zoya Pandora

Zoya describes Pandora as "a medium pink-beige nude with blue and mauve undertones and a hint of pearly silver shimmer."  It is meant to work well with cool toned skin.  In my picture, the color looks somewhat darker than it is in real life, because the sun has left us today.

I like the color a lot.  You can definitely tell it is a cooler tone than the other two in the collection.  I added some Nars Arabesque over top of it, and I really like these two colors together; they are almost the same color, with Arabesque being a tiny bit darker, so the shimmer effect is subtle:

Zoya Pandora with Nars Arabesque

slightly blurred for sparkle effect

Now, let's talk about application.  I got significant shrinkage with this one:

especially on my left index finger.

I used Essie First Base basecoat and Good To Go fast-dry top coat on all three of the polishes in this collection, and got shrinkage with all three.  The shrinkage was less pronounced on Minka, and most pronounced on Pandora.  Sometimes I don't get shrinkage with Zoyas when using Good To Go, but in this case I did.  I'm thinking I will have to start using the Fast Dry Drops with Zoyas from now on.

I did have a little trouble with application on all three of these as well, and it was something I haven't experienced before.  First of all, I found it really difficult to load my brush in a way that would give me good coverage.  When I loaded my brush in my normal way, I ended up not having enough to completely cover the nail.  If I tried to load it a little more, I ended up with too much, making a gloppy mess.  I was able to even everything out with two coats, but I can't really say that application was "flawless" - I found it to be rather frustrating.

The other thing that occurred which I haven't run into before is that with each of these polishes, I got strange little hard clumps on a few nails, almost like a grain of sand.  I tried to capture one here:

Sometimes I'm painting my nails and a fluff from a cotton ball or something similar will get into the wet polish, and I'm able to stroke it away with the brush.  These clumps were different.  I wasn't able to stroke them away, and the only way I could get them off (short of removing the polish and starting over) was to scrape them off with my cuticle pusher and then try to fill in with more polish.  Like I said, I've not experienced this before, but this occurred with all three of the polishes from this collection.  I mention it because I spent some time last night looking at other reviews to see what other bloggers had to say about the set, but all the reviews I found seem to focus on the warm/cool/neutral skin tone issue rather than application.

Still, I'm glad I have them, and for me they are versatile colors.  I like them on their own and also for stamping and layering.  I like nudes and sometimes I want them to be opaque.  In the past, I've put white polish under a more sheer nude to get an opaque effect, so with these that step can be skipped.