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mini haul: essence colour & go nail polish, gel-look top coat & french manicure tip guides

Recently I was lucky to receive a gift card from my employer for Christmas! 🙂 I was needing some more nail polish, and discovered the “essence” range which is inexpensive and has lovely colours, so decided to give them a try!

Essence are a European cosmetics brand that I haven’t heard of before, so I did some reading on their site (http://www.essence.eu/) and was happy to see that they don’t test their products on animals. In Australia you can buy their products at Target and they don’t just do nail polish! 🙂

Here’s a pic of what I hauled!

From L to R, top to bottom:

• gel-look topcoat – “topcoat that adds glossy shine and leaves a gel like finish on nails” (AUD ~$3.50)
• colour & go quick drying nail polish in lime up! (#39, a nice pistachio green), meet me now! (#48, a bright purple), choose me! (#38, a glittery turquoise) and ultimate pink (#08, an awesome Barbie pink!) (AUD ~$3 each)
• french manicure tip guides (pack of 30 strips; AUD ~$3)

The nail polishes were easy to apply and just one coat provided good coverage (except for the glitter, choose me!, which was quite sheer). However, I applied 2 coats of each polish out of habit! It did dry quickly. The top coat looked no different to my cheap BYS top coat that I typically use, however a week or so later I applied it on a nude nail and the glossiness of the essence top coat then really stood out and was very nice!

The polish lasted approximately 2 days on my nails before starting to noticeably chip. It comes off very easily with nail polish remover.

Here’s a pic of the colours on my nails, first in artificial light and then outdoors (I was watching TV at the time hence the remote control is my prop LOL! ;)).

The manicure strips were no different from others that I’ve used; I’m not a big fan of them as typically I find it easier to use the paint-the-tip-then-tidy-with-a-brush-dipped-in-nailpolish-remover technique!

Catch a youtube video of what I think is the easier (and gives a better result!) technique here:

Here are the results I got using the tip guides, meet me now! polish on the tips and Rimmel’s French Manicure in soft violet (#457) on the rest of the nail:

I would buy the polishes again, but not the manicure strips! However that is simply due to my preference as to how I do “tips” of nails. 🙂

Beautiful rating…

• gel-look top coat: quality 4/5, value 4/5
• colour & go polish: quality 5/5, value 5/5 (5/5 for both due to the great price)
• manicure tip guides: quality 2/5, value 2/5

Hope you all have a great week! ❤