Let me preface this review by saying that I am a total nail polish fanatic. Giving myself home manicures (and really, doing any sort of home beauty ritual) is one of my favorite ways to pamper myself. I’ll take a bottle of salon-quality polish over an actual trip to the salon any day. Nail polish is a little like shoes or handbags – really cute accessories that can set off an outfit. Once you get into buying them though, you find yourself wanting something new for EVERY outfit. OPI brand polish – basically the holy grail of nail polishes – runs about $8 a bottle. Not quite as bank-breaking as bags or shoes, but still adds up pretty quickly. So you can imagine why I try to experiment with less costly brands in hopes of yielding good results. I figure at worst I’m out a few dollars, and at best I wind up with a cute new color in my nail polish collection.
I’d consider myself a fan of Avon Cosmetics. I’ve bought everything from cuticle cream to perfume from them, and have had uniformly good results up until this purchase. They’re kind of a jack-of-all-trades cosmetics company in my opinion – they sell a very wide range of products, but none of them are my favorites. However, this is the first time I’ve bought something from Avon that I really disliked.
This nail polish was a total disappointment. I’ve got a few bottles of their Nailwear Pro polish laying around (the “Venus” shade is particularly gorgeous), so when I saw the Mirror Shine advertised in the booklet I didn’t hesitate to order. I’ve been having a fascination with blue nail polish as of late, so the “Glisten” color caught my eye immediately as it’s a bright topaz blue. There is no OPI nail polish shade like it, the first close duplicate I found was a China Glaze polish color called “Martini Pedicure”. I paid $3.99 for the bottle, figuring I’d test drive it before picking up any of the other Mirror Shine nail polish shades. These polishes look very pretty in the catalog swatches – as the Mirror Shine name alludes, they have a very shiny metallic finish.
After manicuring my nails and applying base coat, I began applying the Glisten polish. The first thing I noticed was that the polish was too liquid-y in the bottle. As any veteran manicurist knows, sometimes when you pull the brush out of the bottle there is too much polish on it. You have to wipe the side of the brush on the inner rim of the bottle to remove the excess – if the brush is too wet, it’ll wind up as a huge mess on the nail. This formula was too wet to be able to wipe off excess polish well; after the first swipe or two, the nail polish had completely gummed up around the edge of the bottle. This can easily be cleaned up with a Q-tip dipped in nail polish remover, so no big deal.
On the nail, this nail polish seems to take on a completely different consistency. The Mirror Shine Nail Enamel isn’t listed as being a quick dry formula – and I tend to avoid these as a rule because of consistency issues. This was much too dry on the nail, starting to dry unflatteringly almost immediately after touching the brush to the nail surface. Attempting to go over a slight gap in the layer of polish where the brush had run out of product caused pulling – which is when the nail polish “lifts” from the nail while still wet, revealing the bare nail underneath. This is a very frustrating component to polishing your nails since you’ll have to try to repair that spot with the next coat, sometimes having to start that particular nail all over if you can’t cover the mistake.
With most metallic nail polishes I’ve tried, I’ve found that they dry beautifully. Even if the application looks messy or streaky, metallic nail polish will sort of “even out” as it dries to give a perfect finish. Not so with Avon Mirror Shine. My manicure came out streaky, with small bubbles and several dull spots throughout the finish. I did a complete manicure before applying polish including buffing my nails and applying base coat (which helps fill any ridges you might have). I am sure that my nail surface itself is smooth, and was after my base coat was dry.
It looks almost like this nail polish contains small granules in some areas, and even where there are no bubbles the finish looks very cheap. I attempted a second coat to correct it and the mistakes caused by the pulling while applying the first coat of polish, but the look didn’t improve. Even after finishing with top coat (another Avon product no less – their Nail Experts UV Gloss Guard), this polish doesn’t quite live up to the Mirror Shine moniker.
Avon Mirror Shine Nail Enamel wasn’t a total loss, however. The color really is beautiful on – very true to the bottle/swatch shade, which isn’t always the case. I feel like it might benefit from a few drops of a good nail polish thinner, that maybe that would be enough to eliminate some of the inconsistencies in the formula? Another thing I will say is that it dried very quickly, and dried uniformly – no weird tacky spots. I so no pulling on the second coat or while applying top coat. This might be an interesting shade to try with a mattifying top coat as well – such as Essie’s Matte About You. I’d still recommend Avon cosmetics 9 times out of 10, this just happened to be the one product of theirs that wound up not being so good.
Overall, I’d have to say Glisten earns a 2/5. I still think it has potential, but it wasn’t the great polish I hoped it would be. Beware buying this in hopes of a flawless Mirror Shine – it’s probably not going to happen. You might be better off going with the China Glaze duplicate Martini Pedicure.
