Brand: Deborah Lippmann

I don’t know exactly when this shade was released, but a quick Google tells me that the earliest online reviews are from 2011, and that Deborah Lippmann spent ages trying to get a nail polish to match a rose gold Rolex watch. That is exactly the kind of dedication I like in my nail polish brands!

As a result, Glamorous Life—pity she didn’t go with a horologically-inspired name—is less of a pink rose gold and more of a classic jewelry rose gold. It’s not basically pink (see The Semiotics of “Rose Gold”), but a regular yellow gold that’s been slightly warmed up with the addition of some copper, making it less brassy and more bashful.

It’s weird when I Google for images of this polish, because a few of them look quite blush pink, and the others look more like mine, a soft gold, or maybe a touch copper. It could be that the color has changed over the years, but I don’t really remember this bottle looking especially pink when I got it, either. It also looks gold in the photos by a couple of bloggers who swatched back in 2011/12, so maybe I’ll just chalk it all up to lighting differences. I can’t see my bottle looking very pink under any lights, though. Batch inconsistencies could be a culprit, too.

I bought this back in 2011 or 2012, from Revolve, of all places! The polish has a thinner formula than metallics tend to, and it applies very easily. As a frosty metallic, it does leave brush strokes behind, though not as egregiously as some others might.

(Incidentally, I just Googled egregiously to ensure I was spelling it correctly, and it turns out that while the current definition is “outstandingly bad”, the archaic definition is entirely the opposite: “remarkably good”! Apparently, sarcastic use of the word may have changed its meaning sometime in the late 1500s. It’s Tidbit Thursday.)

Two coats give semi-opaque coverage.

I usualy have trouble finding golds that look good on my warm skintone. OPI Gala Gold (sadly, also discontinued) is my holy grail gold, but Glamorous Life ain’t half bad, either. Its soft, satin-y, airbrushed look is quite appealing, though it could probably dial the frost down a touch.

I believe this shade is discontinued, which I don’t quite understand if it took Deborah Lippmann so long to come up with it, in the first place! Plus, rose gold is still pretty ridiculously popular. Either way, I feel like there are other great rose gold polishes out there today, in various finishes and ranging from soft golds to coppers to blush pinks, so it’s not a remarkable loss.

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Deborah Lippmann Nail Color is 0.5 US fl oz / 15 mL and retails for US$20/CA$22. The formula is free of toluene, dibutyl phthalate (DBP), camphor, formaldehyde, formaldehyde resin, xylene, and parabens (7-free). The brand is cruelty-free and made in the USA.

Lippmann Enterprises, LLC is based in New York, NY, USA. It was founded in 1999 by celebrity manicurist Deborah Lippmann.