Essie Sexy Divide - Swatch and Review

This is just a quick review of Essie Sexy Divide which I got in Hong Kong for an equivalent of about $5 Australian dollars. Essie retails for almost $20 in Myer... ridiculous. Anyway, onto the photos and review!

Sexy Divide is a vampy, dark, glowy purple shimmer. On the Essie website they describe it as "a bold deep purple with hints of shimmer". The shimmer consists of small red and blue particles, as you can sort of see in the bottle shot below. In the bottle the purple looks satiny and on the nails it translates into a glowy, lit from within kind of colour. Application was lovely and smooth and I did three coats plus Seche Vite.

I think this was after maybe four or five days of wear and it still looked good!

 Pros:
- Nice formula.
- Classy yet sexy colour.
- Wear time was really good.
- The shimmer is really nice and it's got that lit from within look.

Cons:
- Nothing really... I guess it's not unique but I don't have any dupes in my collection!

Overall:
- 8/10. I think it's a must have for a purple lover. I don't personally love purple polish but I still really liked it.

Thanks for visiting!

- J

Max Factor Fantasy Fire Swatch and Review

I know the hype over Max Factor Fantasy Fire has mostly died down by now, but I still wanted to review it in case there are some people who haven't seen this gem of a polish! It's supposedly a dupe of the most coveted Clarins 230 (aka Unicorn Pee) which I sadly do not own.

This polish is a gorgeous purple with shimmer that shifts to all colours of the rainbow. It really is mesmerising!  Fantasy Fire is the perfect name for it. I made a GIF to show you just how shape-shifting (well, colour-shifting) this polish is.

It seriously looks like three completely different polishes at these three different angles!

The polish itself was very sheer, and I did 5 thin coats to achieve maximum opacity. To save polish and to avoid doing so many coats, you can layer it over a similar purple. I used Seche Vite for a glossy finish.

This is what it looks like front on and what it looks like most of the time. It's a medium royal purple with pinky-redy-purpley shimmer. It has so much depth to it.

Here the shimmer is an olive green and almost a bronze colour.

The shimmer is shifting to gold and peachy coloured.

It is orangey-pink here.

At extreme acute angles, the shimmer becomes an intense green and teal, and you can see a bit of yellow as well.

A few more pictures where you can see several different colours at once! (Sorry for the tipwear, these were taken when the manicure was a few days old.)

This reminds me of a lizard... somehow... lol.

The bottle is tiny though!

You can see how small it is next to a regular-sized Revlon bottle.

And here it is next to my Nikon lenscap haha.

 Pros:
- THE SHIMMER IS COLOUR SHIFTING FROM BLUE TO GREEN TO YELLOW TO RED!!!!!!!!!! So incredibly awesome!
- The base purple is a beautiful colour. I would love it even if the shimmer isn't colour-shifting.
- Might satisfy some people's lemmings for Clarins 230.

Cons:
- Pretty hard to find. Only sold in the UK... I got mine on eBay a few months ago, and it seems like the price has dropped since then. So if you haven't bought this, now is a good time ;)
- Bottle is tinyyyy, only 4.5 mL...
- Very sheer, probably better over a purple base colour if you want to conserve polish.

Dupes?
- See Scrangie for a great comparison of Fantasy Fire with several similar polishes.

Overall: 
9.5/10

Thanks for stopping by!

- J