As I’ve mentioned over my website and YouTube many, many times, I despise painting my own nails. Yes, truly shocking coming from a girl that is Calgel trained and used to be a nail technician!
The trouble is, I just don’t enjoy the whole process of doing my own nails. The filing, the buffing, the painting…the good old 20 minutes where I’m more useless than a chocolate fireguard while I’m waiting for my nails to dry. Oh and not forgetting, that inevitable ugly chip I tend to get a day into wearing my new nail polish that just makes me despair and have to torture myself with the whole process all over again!
Anyway. To cut a long story short, I ended my longterm affair with gel polish at some point last year. After being devoted to having my nails gelled up monthly since around 2011, I decided my nails seriously needed the rest. Along with my bank account too.
That’s when I rediscovered my absolute loathe for painting my own nails all over again. I persisted and tried many brands, OPI, Dior, Lancome, Models Own, Rimmel…they all chipped within a day and I was getting seriously tired of it. On impulse, my mum bought a nail enamel from Next and hallelujah, it didn’t chip for days. And days on top of that too. “We’ve finally cracked it” I thought. Nail polish that isn’t to the nail world what the rich tea is to the biscuit world – wimpy!
Anyway, I carried on using the lovely Next nail polish right up until a rather lovely Ciate Paint Pot arrived in my February Glossybox. Of course, I’d seen Ciate nail polishes before, but I wasn’t keen on paying £9 for one after the likes of OPI and Dior had let me down in the past and my trusty (and cheaper) Next polish hadn’t yet let me down.
Iced Frappe, the colour of the Ciate polish I received, is a rather gorgeous nude with an almost purple and coffee undertone. It’s said to work well with all skin tones thanks to it’s own clever undertone, and being very pale-skinned and finding it hard to find a perfect nude, I can definitely support their claims. The perfect nude for me I’d go as far as to say.
So, first of all the formula is great. It’s easy to apply on the larger almost paddle-type brush. Nudes are notoriously hard to paint on without streaking or brush lines, but the incredible thing I found about this polish is that it seemed to self-level just like a gel polish would. No more brush strokes even if you slightly mess up. They’ll just gently disappear.
I found two coats to be ample, and I found that the drying time wasn’t bad at all either.
Wear time was great – five days in and my nails were still chip free! Amazing really to say I’m constantly working with my hands, exposed to strong bacteria-killing brush cleaners and of course, like to take a luxurious soak in the bath on a nightly basis.
I’d highly recommend this nail polish for ladies that one, don’t like painting their own nails, and two, tend to be so hands on that they chip their polish all too easily.
Ciate Paint Pots range from £5 – £9 and can be found on the Ciate website here.