mattel

Wet Paint Nail Glaze System – Inspire

Essie – Matte About You

This was my vision: Barbie-pink nails with the texture of plastic. I had it all planned out already and even swatched out different shades of pink to achieve that ultimate Barbie look.

Pictured here is about 3 to 4 coats of Inspire and 2 coats (this was a big mistake) of Matte About You. (Sorry for the little mess around the cuticles! I was quite annoyed...) Affection is a Barbie-ish Hot pink crème shade. It’s really rich, but borders on thick. Which really isn’t a good thing. Matte About You looks like a translucent milky formula in the bottle and applies slightly translucent, and dries matte to the touch. It may alter the colour of the base very slightly, but for Inspire it was barely noticeable.

Application was disgusting. The brushes aren’t even cut straight at the bristles. Though I managed it at a weird angle, 2 minutes later the surface would become uneven – BUBBLES. Fml. It’s probably the brush - it just incorporates air into the layer being applied onto the nail - but it was so annoying.

Pictured here is 3 (or was it 4?) layers of Inspire and application was an excruciating process. It’s like slowly sawing your arm off and then, letting you bleed to death. I’m sorry for the bad image but that was really how I felt.

So I decided to go on to the mattifying part. I was pretty excited about it, because I’ve heard many good things about Matte About You. I still remember a customer’s response to me when I offered her Matte About You to satiate her desires for a matte topcoat. ‘‘Essie? Eee, Essie is not matte leh, it’s more suede lor! I think Nubar V or China Glaze one better!’’

For one, Suede shades are matte shades. (OPI has a Suede line of shades.) I think the texture differs slightly (some softer and others, harder) due to chemical composition. Furthermore, Nubar V for Men is the most disappointing matte topcoat I’ve seen in pictures. It completely mattes the life and soul out of the base colour and makes our nails looks very flat, unsophisticated and extremely amateur. That’s how I would describe Nubar V for Men. I’ve not checked out China Glaze’s Matte Magic (I've heard it's pretty alright) but I would like to talk about Essie.

Matte About You is brilliant. I was quite annoyed when I tried it on a few nails because it made the base colour look sooo flat. It looked so dead. But I re-read the instructions on the box: Apply one thin coat. Well guilty as charged, I did apply a thick blob of Matte About You. So I tried again, and this time it was amazing. The colour changed slowly and had a very very very light frosted glass finish to it. I describe it as frosted glass because you know how at Christmas time, the warm glow of the fireplace through a frosted glass window witnessed from outside has that sort of luminesce effect. That’s how it seemed like to me – soft and subdued colour, not deadened.

The texture is so nice, too. Why would you want a flat out dead matte texture when you could have a softer look and texture? And to that random customer, why don’t you like the soft-matte texture of OPI Suede, or Matte About You!? It’s the one of the nicest kinds of matte you can get. I don’t understand you!

Anyways as the pictures show, I did manage to achieve the Barbie look. However a couple of minutes after pictures, white flecks appeared on the nail and I knew the bubbles would all surface given the extremely prolonged dry time. The whole manicure was extremely thick as well so I decided to scrap the whole look.

Perhaps next time I’ll try this one out again, after I thin Inspire out or use a different shade of pink! I am totally dying to use Matte About You again :-)

x, Ish