Deborah Lippmann Brown Eyed Girl: my quest for the perfect red/brown polish

I'm always on the search for colors in the red/brown category. I absolutely love the color brown, but I have a hard time wearing a straight brown on my nails. Red, on the other hand, is my absolute favorite, so I'm always on the hunt for the perfect autumn red/brown. The first contender was Butter London Shag, which set the bar quite high!

Today I have Deborah Lippmann Brown Eyed Girl. Brown Eyed Girl is a bit darker and maybe a touch less brown than Shag, but they are definitely in the same color category. Brown Eyed Girl is blackened shimmer. The warm shimmer is bright and fine and it seems to glow out of the dark base color when the light hits my nails. It's definitely beautiful!

The formula on Brown Eyed Girl wasn't my favorite. It was a bit thick and difficult to deal with, and with two coats I ended up with a bumpy finish. I required a third coat to smooth out the finish for the photos below. The dry time was okay, but slower than most 3-free polishes.

Although Brown Eyed Girl is beautiful and I adore the name, I'm still not completely satisfied. I don't think my hunt for the perfect red/brown polish is over just yet. Which do you prefer, the darker Brown Eyed Girl, or my previous attempt to find the perfect red/brown, Butter London Shag?

Butter London Shag: the first in my quest for the perfect red/brown polish

I think I'm a bit odd when it comes to polish colors. Green is my favorite color, but I rarely wear green polish. Brown is my second favorite color, but I absolutely hate brown polish on me. I love red and pink polish, but hate the color pink and don't care for the color red. Perhaps I'm just completely insane. :-P

Anyway, back to the polish at hand. I'm always searching for a brown/red polish, because it's the closest I can get to a wearable brown. I've spent a long time searching for my perfect autumn red-brown polish, today I'm showing you one of the candidates. This is Butter London Shag.

Shag is a gorgeous coppery brown shimmer with a red hue. The shimmer is very fine giving it a metallic-like finish (but it's definitely not metallic, absolutely no visible brushstrokes). The formula was good, thin and opaque in two coats (but without careful application it may require three), quick drying, and no staining.

I did experience something strange with the formula though, when I went to seal the tips of my nail (polish the free-edge), and I couldn't get the polish to stick. I normally paint my first coat, let it dry, then polish the free edge on my second coat, followed by the rest of the nail surface to get a perfectly smooth finish. When I tried to do this with Shag it kept wiping off the edges of my nail leaving a bald spot on the free edge. For this reason I added a third coat for the photos below. It's so hard to describe what was happening, but it's happened every time I wore Shag.

For quite a while Shag was the front runner in my search for the perfect autumn red-brown (narrowly beating Julep Boris and Nicole due to formula) but I still have a bunch more to try out!

Have you ever searched for a polish color/finish you can see in your head? If you know of other polishes this color please comment and let me know! Maybe I can find my perfect autumn shade by next fall. :)