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When I spotted Catrice Ombre Top Coat, I knew I had to have it. I love ombre nails, and this top coat promises that you can easily turn all your pale creme polishes into ombre manicures with just the one bottle – none of the frankening and desperate scrambling through your Helmer to find the perfect polishes to get a consistent gradient. SOLD.
The polish itself is a thin, runny maroon colour, the consistency of a brand new base coat, which is both good and bad. Good, because it’s thin enough for you to build up a lot of layers without a super thick layer of polish, and dries reasonably quickly. Bad, because it makes it streaky as hell. The colour tends to run to the sides of the nail, and you can’t get away with one coat if you’re a perfectionist.
The 1, 2, 3 coats thing is also bald-faced lie – I ended up using 7-9 coats on my darkest nails in the manis below.
The other catch is that the colour has a definite reddish/purple tint, which means it really doesn’t work for all the colours it claims. Anything in the red/purple region is fine, but the further you go, the dodgier it looks.
With OPI Do You Lilac It – it gave the best results out of the ones I tried. If you look closely you can see the streakiness, though it’s not obvious in person. I used 2, 5 and 9 coats to get this look.
With Mckfresh First Light – not too bad, but it turns it red. The bare polish looks really out of place here. I used 2, 5 and 8 coats for this.
With Essie Absolutely Shore – here’s where it gets really dodgy. The contrasting green really shows up the streakiness, and the purple tone just doesn’t work. This was 2, 4 and 7 coats.
I think this idea is genius, but it falls short of my expectations though I’m not sure exactly how to improve it. A purely grey polish? A second ombre top coat for blues and greens? A less runny consistency? A stronger tint? I hope someone takes this idea and improves it!
Ugh, I tried this too and it’s a complete failure if you ask me. The idea would be cool, but I think a more jelly-esque formula and a less reddish tint would do this one good.
I think it’s really tailored towards nuggles who would find this good enough for the boring pinks and reds – such wasted potential!
Ok, I gotta ask. What are nuggles?
Oh dear, how disappointing. I was really hopeful that this might have been a good way to short cut to an ombre
Same! I hope maybe an indie takes this idea and runs with it…
Sephora has a similar product, but it is blue. It isn’t streaky though. I was hoping this would be a great product, but now I’m a bit disappointed.
I’m curious about the Sephora one now! Though I’m sure it’ll cost an arm and a leg for me.
Sally Hansen has a similar product – I think it’s called Big Smoky Top Coat and it comes in the flattish rectangular bottles that are relatively new. It’s very much like this product, but it’s sheer charcoal grey and is therefore much more versatile.
I’ll look into that, thanks for the tip!
Aww I got really excited when I saw this. I’m sad to see it didn’t work out as well as what I was hoping for. Big Smokey Top Coat by SH is essentially a “dupe” of Christian Dior’s Rock Coat if you ever bought that.
This is a cool idea, too bad it’s not really working. Sooner or later someone will probably come out with a better version!
Really good idea, though not so great in execution! I have to say though, the purple mani looks really great. 9 coats seems like a lot though! Haha, I think I’d probably just rather use a darker nail polish 😛
Tasha // shiwashiful.
this seems like such a cool idea, too bad it didn’t deliver 🙁
Sally Hansen has a similar product – I think it’s called Big Smoky Top Coat and it comes in the flattish rectangular bottles that are relatively new. It’s very much like this product, but it’s sheer charcoal grey and is therefore much more versatile.
Hi Auther!
You made my day. You put your great effort in it.
Regards:
Doctors Scrubs