Nail Diary 02 : Etude House Juicy Cocktail Gradation Nails (#5 Princess Marry)

11:46:00 PM

Hellooo...

Happy weekend everybody!

It's time for another nail polish swatch/review :). This time it's from my favorite Korean brand, Etude House! I have so many of their nail polishes, i never dared to count though... What i'm gonna review this time is their Juicy Cocktail Gradation Nails (it's a three nail polish set, in case you've been living under a rock and didn't know hehe).

Etude House Juicy Cocktail Gradation Nails

I have... three or four out of six from that picture (courtesy of Google, as well as the second picture below). The second one i've tried on was #5 Princess Marry (seriously, what's with their shade and product names, huh??? The product name's all a-okay lah, but Marry... Isn't it supposed to be Princess Mary? I keep on thinking that they're asking me to marry them or whatever. I know, i know, i'm so nutz obsessing over an extra R, it's just that they ALWAYS do weird things like that with their product names. Sometimes i wonder if that's a smart marketing way to make people argue and laugh about it that they became more talked-about?) which is golden-hued gradation.

I tried one other color (the purple set) before i even started this blog, so i would re-use and review it in the future.

If only the first color really look like the swatch on this picture!

Here's my less pretty pictures of the real item :p

And here's the final result :

Pretty eh? I quite love it. I think i called it Mermaid's Scales or something hehe. Yes, i'm a mermaid-aholic. Anyway! Let's start with the review, shall we?

Three petite sized square shaped polishes came in a cute looking box

As usual, all of the writings are in Hangeul. I was just informed by my niece (who can read a little Hangeul, thanks to her obsession with those yucky boybands *shudder*) that lots of their products are actually never been translated, they just directly write the English words using Hangeul haha

Consisted of three golden-hued (even though the far left one looked a bit peach in the picture, once it's used on nails they didn't look peachy at all) glittery colors with different textures of glitters

I used it the way the instruction was written (the OCD in me prevents me from mix and matching my nail polishes, it makes me feel that i am using them not the way they are supposed to be used, but i am getting better now! I force myself to mix and match'em every once in a while now). First, using the palest, with the finest glitter particle-the soft Champagne colored one on my nails fully (after a coat of Revlon's Top Speed, of course).

The result. Super sheer, it didn't look anything like the swatch on the promotion pic T.T

X-tra large pictures so you can see the glitters. The color was so pale that it looked almost nude. The glitter particles was so fine that if you see it from a further distance they looked more shimmery than glittery

Second step was the second, gold glittery polish. In the picture (and in the bottle) the fine (but not as fine as the first one) glitters seemed quite dense and the color quite strong, but once applied... It looked really really soft and subtle. So much so it almost wasn't apparent at all. I used it on the 3/4 of my nails.

At some point i even thought "i do not understand the use of this second color, you can hardly see the difference between the one with one color with the one with two!"

Only when you see it really closely you can see that they are more glittery than the first layer

Third layer, the fun part. The bigger sized gold glitters!

This third color/glitter top coat was what really special. It brings out the specialness of this nail... can i call this art? Instant nail art, that is. Painted them on the tips of each nails, i was being generous too

The large glitter won't be so dense if you just apply it like it was a regular polish. It'd be very patchy and bare. I had to tap tap tap plenty of times on every spot and add up so it would look dense and scale-like

Final result, after sealing them with Revlon Top Speed

The end result was really pretty and i really LOVE it! Every layer dried quickly (like most Etude House's nail polishes i've tried so far). Staying power was okay for the first and second layer, they are as good as other EH's polishes. But the third color... Even though it was the prettiest, staying-power wise it was the WORST! Probably because of the large chunks of glitters? Or maybe because i used quite a lot of them-so it was quite thick? They fell off one part after another. I simply patch the gaps with more glitters but they won't last long either. The first fall off happened as fast as one day.

What i love about this nail set was : they are easy to apply, the instruction (although in a languange i do not read a word of) was easy to follow and it's really really easy to do, even for a total hopeless like me. The consistency also quite nice and they dry rapidly. The end result also very pretty.

Plus they are not super expensive. I bought one set in one OS, but then i realized that the other OS (that i used to frequent, the no-longer operating one that i mentioned all the time) sold it in a fracture of the price! That happens a lot with EH products, so unless they are the rare kind of items, i usually take my time and compare the price because sometimes one product's price difference from one OS to another could be as great as IDR 30.000! I bought the first one at a whopping 110.000 while the rest i got for IDR 67.000! (and since they are from an old-ish-EH's stuffs became outdated in a flash because they keep on coming with new lines-series, they are now selling at under IDR 60.000 in some OS!)

There were some things i dislike from this particular shade (because i had a different experience with the other color) : i hate how sheer the second color was, it was almost pointless using it after the first one because it was so similar (or probably because the super fine glitter was suspended on a clear polish, so of course it blended with the background, which is already too sheer). I would much prefer them to make the first color to be a TAD more pigmented and the second layer to contain bigger glitters. I also hate how easily and fast the third color starts to chip!

In conclusion, this is an affordable, pretty and super easy set to use. But i won't recommend this particular shade (the purple one was fine, it stayed put after more than 5 days) for people who wants their nail polishes/instant arts to lasts. Will i repurchase this? Of course not, i never repurchase any nail polish please, i'll try other colors/sets instead!