Zoya Carly (+ a dupe alert!)

Oh Zoya, how I love thee.  You help me enjoy colors that are outside of my comfort zone, and Carly is definitely one of those colors.  I consider it a beautiful dark pink, but many others consider it more of a purple.  I have pretty fair skin and feel that anything too bright looks ridiculous on me, but this pretty Zoya toes the line of bright but not TOO bright. 

 

I usually paint my nails in the evenings, then take photos the next day and you can see from the above pic that I started to get tip wear fairly quickly with this polish.  Didn't both me though, since then I had a chance to do this:

I love a good french tip, especially to cover tip wear and gain another day of my mani, and Orly's High On Hope came to the rescue this time.  There is a gorgeous pink shimmer in HoH that closely matched the pink shades of Carly and I looooved the result of these two colors together.

More pics after the jump, along with a close-enough dupe:

I kept thinking that I'd seen this color in my stash before, so I grabbed a nail wheel and dug out the polishes that I thought might be close...from top left to bottom right:  Sinful Colors Fig (nope), China Glaze Draped In Velvet (nope), Zoya Carly (control) and Pure Ice Touch Me Softly (we have a dupe winner!):

The only real difference between Carly and Touch Me Softly is that TMS is a matte polish when used on its own without a top coat.  In the photo above, I used Sally Hansen Insta-Dri top coat on half of the TMS swatch and then used a matte topper (Sally Girl brand, I think?) on half of the Carly swatch.

The matte versions of both show a bit more of a difference between the two, whereas I couldn't tell the difference between them on the shiny versions.  I suppose you could say that Carly is just a weeeee bit darker than TMS when looking at this close-up but in real life, you'd be hard-pressed to tell any difference.

Despite their dupe-ness (dope-ness??...lol), I'm keeping both!!   :)