Hey guys, hope you had a wonderful holiday! To kick off the new year, I have a nail polish swatch for you. This is essie's Leading Lady from their winter collection of the same name. I had a love-hate relationship with essie. Sheer pinky-nudes are a weakness of mine and essie is a veritable Shangri La of those kinds of colors. One of my favorite polishes of all time (Nude Beach) is from essie's line. Unfortunately, the formula is either a hit or a miss for me even though the colors are to die for. They have some incredible sheer nude-pinks and some awesome creme colors, but sometimes *coughabsolutelyshoreimlookingatyoucough* the formula falls flat.
These days, I don't see much of that problem. Ever since they've branched out from their core line of sheer nudes and release a ton of collections, I feel that they have still been pretty hit or miss with the formula. Even though they don't release 12 color collections as all their collections are usually 6 polishes, they're like MAC cosmetics in releasing like 90849823 collections a year. It's super hard to keep up with and it can get annoying at times. I think I bought almost every polish that they released in 2011 and I've pretty much put myself on an essie ban when I had to change my storage method for the third time because of the ridicuous amount of essies I was getting.
Anyway, Leading Lady is gorgeous to look at. It's a magenta jelly base packed to the brim with small silver hexagon glitters. The glitter will not appear silver unless it is above the top layer of base, but because it is small enough, I doubt any glitter pieces will actual breech the surface. The resulting effect is a multilayered jelly sandwich like and very very pretty. Application did take a learning curve as this polish dries very quickly. If you dally on the brush strokes, the polish will semi dry on you and lay out in clumps. You have about three to four strokes of the polish before it will begin to dry on you. It's a little too fast, in my opinion.
The worst of this polish is removal. It's a straight up glittery mess. You may need to use the cotton ball and foil method for removal if you wish to avoid glitter getting everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE. Oh my god, I think I spent a good five minutes trying to dig glitter out from underneath my nails and even then there was still stubborn residue pieces.
Swatches:
Overall, this polish is beautiful if you're willing to deal with the removal issues. I love jelly finishes and that combined with my affinity for glitter during the holidays make this a great polish for the season. Even though Christmas and New Years is over, this is still a nice polish to have if your're feeling glamorous. But again, because this is a glitter, it is a nightmare to remove, but not much more so than any other chunky glitter polish.
If you have any polishes you'd like to see swatched from my stash, let me know and I'll put it in my queue.
Thanks for reading!
-seal
No comments:
Post a Comment