Saturday, July 11, 2009

Essie Punchy Pink

Protect your eyes, Essie's Punchy Pink is definitely the brightest highlighter neon pink polish I have seen!

Essie Punchy Pink nail polish
Color-wise this is everything I expected - I was not in search of shy and demure pink. Although I managed to capture the neonness of this color somehow, you really have ro see this IRL to understand how blindingly bright it truly is. And please see the original of the previous picture (*click*!) - for some reason the Blogger image resizing algorithm did very bad things for the quality of this particular image.

But quality-wise I'm extremely disappointed. I've read mixed reviews about the quality of Essie 2009 neon colors and unfortunately I can't join to those who praise it. The consistency was thin, which is totally ok - but also awfully sheer. This is four layers. The first layer was probably streakiest I've ever seen - and layers 2 and 3 gave me worst cuticle drag issues ever. It might work better with base coat, but I don't own any so I can't really tell.

I used my best trick to tackle these problems. After coat three one coat of fast dry topcoat (Seche) stopped the cuticle drag issues, after that just one additional coat was needed for full cover. And another coat of Seche for shiny surface - Punchy Pink dries almost matte as many real neon colors do.

Comparing to my Color Club neons CC wins hands down in quality. This experience left me wanting to try for example Misa's Lather, Rinse, Repeat - it seems to be a neon pink with similar brightness and I don't have any bad things to say about any Misa quality.

3 comments:

  1. This shade is very pretty on you. I don't like to use that many layers of polish. How about using ridge filler or white polish? Cuticle drag is a real pain. Sometimes it does go away with the second coat. You really had a rough time with this. I don't have many Essie's so I don't know about application issues.

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  2. Big effort but definitely worth it in the end! I am really impressed with the colour. Looks real pretty on you! :)

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  3. Lucy: I definitely think that ridge filler -type base coat would make the application easier, the first layer was total mess! I'm not so sure about the white, though, this was so sheer that bright white will show through... ...perhaps for long nails if there is need to cover the tip line.

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