#NailsOfTheDay: Essie Gel Couture

I haven’t done my nails in forever and the long weekend was a great excuse to give my nails a little TLC. I was sent some of the Essie Gel Couture polishes to review and wanted to really test the claims of longwear gel without a lamp. I find a lot of brands are pumping out these types of products, but Essie being one of my holy grail brands, I had high expectations.

Take me to Thread

Lace Me Up

Top Coat

I was sent two colours, Take me to Thread (a mauve-y grey purple) and Lace Me Up (a baby pink). I was also sent the top coat so I could really test out the staying power of this polish!

I decided to do a simple nail art look with a minimalist dot design. As ‘minimal’ as it is, I have the shakiest hand known to mankind, so it made it a bit hard to get it even! I applied a base coat from Revlon and then applied two coats of Take Me To Thread. The first coat was decently opaque, but two coats was definitely needed to get the full colour payoff. I then used a dotting tool with Lace Me Up to get the dots.

The brush, as you can see, is a bit flatter than a normal brush which I like. There is a bit of a taper which makes it easy to apply right to the cuticle. A really cute touch I noticed was that the brush handle actually has a similar shape to the bottle, with the curved twist. The polish itself was pretty easy to apply, with a bit of a thicker consistency than a normal non-gel polish. Once it set, I noticed even before the top coat, the polish had an extreme level of shine!

Now for the test! I put this polish on October 7, so it’s already been four days. So far, the polish has been lasting beautifully. I do want to say that regular nail polish usually stays for a pretty good amount of time on me. The polish feels a bit heavier than a normal one would, but not as heavy as the one time I had a gel manicure done. One thing I have noticed though is that as much as the top coat lasts, I find that it shrinks on me. 🙁 Shrinks in the sense that after it really truly dries, it pulls up from the edges a bit which is a bit annoying. So if other polishes shrink on you like Seche Vite, you might experience the same thing with the Essie Gel Couture top coat.

All in all, I’m impressed with this nail polish. The Essie Gel Couture really does live up to the claims about being a gel manicure without a lamp. The high shine and long-wearing make it a line that’s worth having in your collection!

You can pick up the Essie Gel Couture collection over at Nail Polish Canada!

Thanks for reading! Have a great day!

*Sent for Review