For many years I thought of Essie as an overhyped brand. Or perhaps an inconsistent one. Some of the formulas were excellent, while orhers were crap, some wore perfectly for weeks, some chipped within 24h, some have nicely fanned out brushes, I even own one with a wide flat brush, but some brushes are ridiculously narrow.
Encouraged my my good experience with Essie After Sex, with its wide flat brush and excellent formula, I went ahead and picked the craziest summer shade ever, Strut Your Stuff, and a week later I won in a competition the entire Essie Summer 2014 Collection Brick, containing 4 minis, including Strut Your Stuff!
The competition was organized by an online store bestmakeup.pl who sell cosmetics by such popular brands as Sleek, Zoeva, Sugarpill, Lime Crime among others. Together with the polish brick I got from them a Sleek palette and a mini Sleek lip gloss plus a couple of samples! Such generosity is still rare among Polish online businesses!
The brick contained 4 polishes: Haute in the Heat, Strut Your Stuff, Roarrrrange and Fierce, No Fear. All of them unfortunately had these ridiculously narrow brushes which scared me at firstm but it turned out later that, combined with the wonderful formula of every single polish within the set, the brush performed surprisingly well. Every single polish was fully opaque in 2 coats, applied streak and ridge-free, shone beautifully (though this could be attributed to my Seche Vite top coat) and went without showing the signs of chipping or wearing out for days. I'm head over heels in love with Essie now and I wish my local drugstores sold also collections, not only the basic line.
Strut Your Stuff is hard to describe and even harder to photograph. My pictures don't seem to do it much justice as, even though this is an undeniably bright blue shade, it's less turquoise. It seems to be an epitome of blueness, yet I've never seen anything that blue.
Although I've got a number of oranges, Roarrrrange turned out to be fairly unique as well. The polish was opaque in two coats, but offered a kind of see-through finish. The colour is obviously orange, but it's a kind of muted, dirty, brick-toned orange. It's sooo pretty and I see myself wearing it a lot this autumn!
Haure in the Heat looks very different from what I've managed to photograph. It's a very summery raspberry/watermelon shade, quitr bright, but nowhere near a neon. I like this shade, but it's not unique at all, I have at least 2 other polishes that are very close to this.
And finally, Fierce no Fear is the one I have mixed feelings about. It looks strangely separated in the bottle, but applies like a dream. The shade is a pretty neutral taupe that screams late autumn to me, but in the dark all its yellow tones come out and it doesn't look pretty at all.
It's a king of dull shade, but I managed to stirr some life in it by adding an Essence glitter top coat (below)
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