I mentioned this last month when Illamasqua were running an offer where you got a free nail polish with any two purchased products at the counter. The freebie shades that were available were quite limited and it was between this and a gorgeous pastel lilac, but eventually I decided to go for the one out-there shade, which was Elope!
This is a bright green shade which I would describe as grass green, which translates very well from the bottle to the actual nail.
Unfortunately, I seem to have had nothing but trouble with this nail polish. First of all, let's talk about consistency. It already seemed strangely runny in the bottle, which was more than disastrous on the nails. The brush is your bog-standard thin brush and whereas I tend to favour the wide ones it's not usually a problem. With this formula, however, it meant that the polish slipped and slid all around my nail and I had to get the coats extremely thin.
Coat number one was incredibly streaky - in fact, the messiest finish I've ever had on my nails. Coat number two somewhat remedied the streakiness, but I could still see the white nail tip shine through the colour. After coat three nothing much had changed, so I decided to call it a day.
The polish dries to a semi-matte jelly formula and I'm not entirely sure if that finish works so well with this particular shade. I normally discard anything that takes more than two coats, but I really wanted to like this nail polish, which is why I applied three. At least the layers seemed to dry very quickly, so after three and a half hours (!!) of sitting around I assumed it would be safe to go to bed.
Wrong.
This is what I woke up with:
Boo! You can still see the white nail tips and the polish is covered in scratches and smudges. Not pretty.
As I said before, I really, really wanted to like this product. I've been nothing but impressed with all my Illamasqua purchases so far and after a bit of googling I couldn't find anyone else with a similar problem. In fact, the polish seems to look completely different on other people, so I'm thinking that maybe I got a dodgy bottle? In fact, the Illamasqua website claims this is a glossy finish, which I did not achieve at all! I can't complain that much, seeing as it was a freebie after all, but I don't think I'll ever be using this again, as there's no way I can spare upwards of four hours to wait for my nail polish to dry.
These normally retail at £13.50 each for which you get a 15ml bottle - one of those big enough to probably never be used up.
Have you tried any Illamasqua nail polishes and how did you like them?
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