Recently I was lucky to receive a gift card from my employer for Christmas! 
I was needing some more nail polish, and discovered the “essence” range which is inexpensive and has lovely colours, so decided to give them a try!
Essence are a European cosmetics brand that I haven’t heard of before, so I did some reading on their site (http://www.essence.eu/) and was happy to see that they don’t test their products on animals. In Australia you can buy their products at Target and they don’t just do nail polish!
Here’s a pic of what I hauled!
From L to R, top to bottom:
- gel-look topcoat – “topcoat that adds glossy shine and leaves a gel like finish on nails” (AUD ~$3.50)
- colour & go quick drying nail polish in lime up! (#39, a nice pistachio green), meet me now! (#48, a bright purple), choose me! (#38, a glittery turquoise) and ultimate pink (#08, an awesome Barbie pink!) (AUD ~$3 each)
- french manicure tip guides (pack of 30 strips; AUD ~$3)
The nail polishes were easy to apply and just one coat provided good coverage (except for the glitter, choose me!, which was quite sheer). However, I applied 2 coats of each polish out of habit! It did dry quickly. The top coat looked no different to my cheap BYS top coat that I typically use, however a week or so later I applied it on a nude nail and the glossiness of the essence top coat then really stood out and was very nice!
The polish lasted approximately 2 days on my nails before starting to noticeably chip. It comes off very easily with nail polish remover.
Here’s a pic of the colours on my nails, first in artificial light and then outdoors (I was watching TV at the time hence the remote control is my prop LOL! 
).
The manicure strips were no different from others that I’ve used; I’m not a big fan of them as typically I find it easier to use the paint-the-tip-then-tidy-with-a-brush-dipped-in-nailpolish-remover technique!
Catch a youtube video of what I think is the easier (and gives a better result!) technique here:
Here are the results I got using the tip guides, meet me now! polish on the tips and Rimmel’s French Manicure in soft violet (#457) on the rest of the nail:
I would buy the polishes again, but not the manicure strips! However that is simply due to my preference as to how I do “tips” of nails.
Beautiful rating…
- gel-look top coat: quality 4/5, value 4/5
- colour & go polish: quality 5/5, value 5/5 (5/5 for both due to the great price)
- manicure tip guides: quality 2/5, value 2/5
Hope you all have a great week! <3
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