Sunday 30 March 2014

Oh hey there, magnetic polish, where you been hiding?

Magnetic polish was a hot new thing for nails along with other sorts of textures (concrete, leather, etc.) that started trending a couple years ago. I'm pretty sure the first time I ever heard of it was in 2011, with hard-to-find-companies (at least in Canada) like Layla Cosmetics and Nails Inc. releasing a line of magnetic polishes. Soon enough wallet-friendly brands like Sally Hansen and Revlon among others caught on and the next thing you know almost ever brand of polish had at least one magnetic polish and you could find them at your local drug store. That shit spread like wildfire.

What is magnetic polish? Essentially it's polish that has magnetic particles in it so that when you hold a magnet directly over your nail immediately after applying the polish it replicates the design of whatever the magnet's shape is. No, not just any magnet will work. Specialty magnets usually came with the polish (embedded in the cap) in various designs like stars, lines, waves, and so on. Essie jumped on the magnetic polish party train in late 2012, releasing a line of 6 magnetic polishes under the 'repstyle' collection, all with the same snakeskin-ish pattern that would be revealed by the magnet.  Some reviews of the collection weren't so great, and some talked about using ad hoc tricks to get the magnetic pattern to better show itself.

I've had these two Essie repstyle magnetic polishes for probably two years now and had only ever used them once. I hated how they turned out cause whenever I placed the magnet over the wet polish I ended up smushing it cause I'm a tard, and then well, it was just ugly. So when I was re-organizing my polish rack I thought I should give these little bastards a try again. This is the result:




I ended up adding dark tips mainly because that's where the magnet effect began to get f'ed up. Probably because my nails are a bit curved and so the tips missed out on some magnet action. Other than that I actually think these were pretty well executed. I didn't even redo one nail - I know, you're thinking gahhhh whaaaaat?!



Here's a shot under camera flash - the three-dimensionalness really comes out!




One thing that's interesting to note is that clearly on the nail the polishes look way deeper and saturated in colour than they do in the bottle, where they look far more shimmery. I'm no scientist but I think that's because the shimmer particles are the ones that are magnetic, so they get sucked up kind of like humans to UFOs. Wait... whaaaat?!

Polishes used:
- Essie repstyle 'Snake it up' (dark blue magnetic polish)
- Essie repstyle 'Sssssexy' (I might have missed or added an extra 's' - this is the red magnetic polish)
- OPI 'I sing in color' (dark burgundy)
- Seche 'Wonderfully witty' (dark blue)



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