Essie Nail Polish Review

I purchased a bottle from Farmers Store. The price was very similar to that of Revlon and although slightly more than some, it was less than others so pretty middle of the range. Packaging simple. The brush is really good for application. The colour is soft and does not show wear at the end of the first day so I found it suitable for work. I am sold on Essie. I had applied a base and top coat but found the polish lasted approximately a week before showing slight wear at the end of the nail but not chipping. What has impressed me is that I have been using it for a while now and it has showed no signs of thickening. This is the second Essie polish (I generally purchase for colour rather than brand) but will definitely check the Essie colours out now in preference to any other nail polish.

I had to get a few Essie nail polishes to see for myself if they're worth the hype and to me personally no they aren't although I can understand why other people like them so much. Essie has the best, most varied color range i've ever seen along with OPI, (these two brands tend to be compared I wouldn't say that one is better than the other in my opinion they are on a par.) There's something about the colors and finish of Essie polishes that emit an aura of high quality, it's as if every color is carefully crafted as opposed to some cheaper nail polish brands where the colors can be lack lustre or plain cheap looking. The packaging is understatedly stylish, a convenient size for storage and they look neat, tidy and pretty when there's a bunch of them lined up.

The formula is a nice workable consistencey maybe just slightly on the denser side and can get a bit streaky upon application, however it seems to level itself out upon drying and finish up even, solid, and very tidy looking. The applicator brush is standard and average well and good, works well but there's nothing special about it. The drying time for Essie polishes is also average and standard, around about 5 minutes per coat give or take a few depending on climate. Wear- wise average again, 2-3 days I get out of an application with a base coat, 2 coats of Essie and a top coat.

While there are some big pros for Essie nail polish for me there are equally as many meh's so there is no way I would consider paying full retail for these. I would buy these again if I came across on sale, probably wouldn't pay any more than $10 though.

All through my high school and teenage years, the best nail polish was always OPI.. it was almost the cool thing to have. It was pricey which meant it had to be good quality right, and it does have an awesome range of colours, I can agree on the aspect. So for the past 5 years, I really hadn’t considered looking into other brands of nail polishes until I was gifted an Essie nail polish set for my birthday.

The set came with three colours, and the nail polishes were almost ‘mini’ size, with the bottles being about half the width of a regular Essie Nail Polish. These nail polishes are packaged in see-through glass so you can see the colour within the bottle, and they come with a white lid, which of course has the brush attached on the inside. The bottles still has the Essie print in the glass, as well as the Essie print on the glass with white text.

There are two main things that I love about these nail polishes. Firstly, I love the design on the bottles. There so simple, and understated yet really classy so I love placing this somewhere in my room where their beauty can shine. Secondly, there is such an amazing range of Essie Nail polishes available. Literally, you can get every colour, and pretty much every shade, tone & hue that you could think of. Thirdly, I love the brush that the Essie nail polishes come with. In fact, I’m not sure if the brushes vary from the mini bottles to the larger bottles (although I now own both), but as I have been using the mini bottles more frequently, I’m more aware of the brush shape which is perfect. It glides over nails perfectly, and is the right shape to get up nice and close to my cuticles, and evenly coat my nails. This, of course has something to do with the lovely consistency of Essie Nail polishes. They are a bit thinner than OPI, and two coats and essential, not optional to achieve that opaque look. However, its so easy to apply two thin coats, and the coats dry really fast so I’m pretty happy with that. One downside is I find these chip faster than I expected. They last about 2 days before looking crap, and that includes using a top coat so that is one downside.

I said there were two main things I liked about Essie, but that turned into 4 things. Whoops. All in all, I really do like Essie nail polishes and find them more affordable than OPI. I have already purchased some more colours for the Essie range and now own 7 of their colours, and I’m sure that number will be increasingly steadily as well.

I am a massive nail polish fan and love to collect different shades and collections. A couple of years ago I came across the brand Essie and have been loving it ever since.

Essie has an amazing range of beautiful colours - they tend to be predominately bright or pastel shades, I haven't seen many blood reds, or deep browns etc in the Essie range. I love the Essie collection of polishes because of the unique shades of polishes.

The nail polish brush seems to be smaller and a different shape to the OPI brushes and I find that it is easier to apply to fingernails than the OPI range of polishes. I am not sure the technical differences in the brushes, but I find Essie easier to use.

I own a lot of Essie polishes and always get compliments whenever I paint my nails. They are priced at a slightly higher price point than OPI, at about $23, but I think they are worth the $3-$4 difference.

Go and try Essie! It is not as well known in NZ as OPI and Revlon etc, but it is a quality brand and lasts on your nails as long as OPI, if not longer.

Before Beauty review, I didn't really have much knowledge about beauty products at all. Since being on here, I've become more aware of nail polish lacquers and the difference in qualities between brands. I find that there is a difference in wear and vibrancy. So I had a good read many reviews of Essie and also following their social media accounts I could see that this company is very active with it's fans and general community.

Essie comes in this square shaped bottle. It has clean lines and a classic simple style. It's bottle has the Essie branding within this glass. I like this little touch. The colour I chose is Parka Perfect. It's a light shade of grey. It has flecks of silver shimmer within it. This brush is quite thin and it looks pretty standard. The texture of this liquid is quite thin.

On the first application its quite opaque. This nail polish needs a few layers of lacquer to build up a solid colour. I recommend ten intervals in between coats. Once dried the colour wasn't moving. Now for wear I managed to get three days wear. I did notice fading on my tips of finger but not directly on my fingers.

The quality of this polish is definitely there. I probably wouldn't pay $18 a bottle. I was really lucky to get a big bucket sale at $8 a bottle. I really enjoy pastel colours at the moment. They had a lot of bright colours but I think I'm going away from using those types of colours. I recommend at least getting one of these nail colours to add to your collection. It's worth of it.

I'm really not a big Essie fan. There's a couple of shades which work really well, but most of the ones in my collection are just meh. They aren't bad.. they're just not very good. They don't last well and chip easily and some of the shades are patchy. On the plus side, their colour range is great!

Great colour selection. I do love this nail polish, but as I work with my hands regularly, I found the polish chipped away. Not giving me long lasting nail polish look :(

I'm not usually the sort to rush into posting a review, in fact I didn't even think 10 days would be long enough to trial a polish that claims to have a chip-resistant formula but after 3 days I think I have seen everything I need to see.

I usually go for bright coloured polish but I decided to step out of my comfort zone and see if I liked wearing a darker colour, and who doesn't love the chance to try out a new brand, as I personally haven't used Essie before. I wasn't too sure on the darker colour at first, but it has really grown on me!

My first thought, was I loved the brush! But the consistency was a little different to my other polishes. I found it went on quite thin but it wasn't very smooth going on, at least it was different to the polishes I usually use. It dried really quickly which is always good! After a few more coats I found it wasn't going very smoothly at all and it was coming out a bit patchy. It took four coats to get it to look like the rich chocolate colour I had pictured, before the fourth coat it was a dark burgundy colour and noticeably patchy. From a distance they look great, but up close I can see lighter patches even after four coats, but maybe that's just cause I know it's there. I didn't add a top coat over because I didn't want it to effect my experience with the polish, and it also has a nice shine without a topcoat so I didn't think it was necessary.

I had painted my nails about lunch time and by 7pm I already had minor chipping on both thumbs and a decent chip on my middle fingernail, which was very disappointing to see from a polish with a "chip-resistant" formula. But since then they don't seem to have chipped much more.

It's hard to give a product like nail polish a fair review after one use, there could have been many factors that caused chipping to happen so early on, maybe I was just too rough on them with my busy day! So I will definitely give this polish another try, just to be fair. My friend (also a BR member) loves the colour so I will be asking her to try it out and post her own review, hopefully she gets better results than I did!

So to sum it all up here's the Pros and Cons from my first use of this product;

PROS - Loved the shape of the brush - It dried quickly - Nice rich colour - Has a nice shine without a topcoat

CONS - Took 4 coats to get the full colour - Went on quite patchy - Chipping began quickly