Nails Inc Candy Shop Collection swatches and review

Hi All,

A Bank Holiday again hoorah!  What with two bank holiday weekends and a weeks annual leave, the month of May has been very kind to me.  I wish every month could be like this.  And here I am, sitting in the garden blogging, living the dream haha.  I almost didn't bring my laptop outside because I thought dodgy geezers might walk past, see I've got a laptop, and come back in the night to take it.  Then I realised, who am I kidding, they're probably all standing outside the pubs by now, smoking, with no tops on.  And that's just the girls haha

So anyway, I digress as usual.  If you've been following me on Twitter for more than a couple of weeks, you'll know I was in Torquay on holiday not long ago.  I'm wondering whether I should do a post on it, but I never read other peoples holiday posts, so I probably shouldn't.  So, while I was on holiday, I took a day trip to Plymouth.  I didn't like Plymouth much, but it does have a TK Maxx and surprisingly I "accidentally" wandered in and "just happened" to make my way over to the polishes.

What I saw made me happy:

I'd almost bought this at full price on the Nails Inc website, but had decided not to, and I'm glad I waited!  As you can see from the price sticker (over one of the polishes as usual), this collection has been priced, as the Nails Inc collections in there usually are, at £14.99.  As Nails Inc's can go for £11 each, £14.99 for 4 is a good deal!  So I snapped it up.  I was super excited too.  Other half said to me "If I'd known you'd get this excited over some polishes, I'd have bought you some of those instead of taking you on holiday", ha!

So this weekend is the first real chance I've had to swatch them properly, so here I am sharing them with you.  The first one I tried was the one I was most excited about in the shop, Wimbledon, in the shade:

And here it is in the sun, (with a hair that I didn't notice in real life, how does that even happen?):

Now I don't often say this about Nails Inc cremes, but I was a bit disappointed with the formula.  It was pretty watery, and it bubbled a bit too.  It felt.... over thinned.  Maybe as it gets a bit older it may improve.  I wonder if they've tried to make it extra fast drying, and this is the formula they came up with.  It did dry really fast, but when you need more coats, it's hardly worth it.  I had to do 3 coats to get a non-patchy finish, and I was surprised by that, not in a good way.  But still, it is a pretty green-yellow-green colour, and unique in my stash, so I have a feeling that I'll still be reaching for it again, despite its shortcomings.

Then when I was taking Wimbledon off, I managed to break off the corner of the nail on my middle finger, which had been peeling, and had to file my nails down a bit.  That's ok though, they were getting a bit deformed looking anyway, they always curl over on the edges when they get too long.

The next I tried was Oxford, a pretty baby blue.  Here it is in the shade:

This had a similar formulation to Wimbledon, but perhaps a tad more forgiving, as I only needed two coats.  I do like it, but I already own some very similar Nails Inc light blues, so even though I quite like it I'm not blown away.   Here it is in the sun.  As you can see, it dries darker on the nail than it shows in the bottle:

The next one I tried was the final pastel in the set.  Cambridge, which is a delicate lilac.  Oh, just writing this I clicked, Oxford and Cambridge, doh!
Here it is in the shade:

Maybe a little bit too much shade there haha.  Here it is in the sun:

It was the same, slightly disappointing over thinned formula.  Three coats required to eliminate patchiness. 

Now don't get me wrong, it's not an awful formula, it's just that I know that Nails Inc can do cremes better than ANYONE when they choose to, so I always expect great things from them.  Most of my one coater cremes are Nails Inc.  If this had been my first ever Nails Inc purchase, I'd have been wondering what all the fuss was about.  Oh well.

The final polish in the set, doesn't really fit with the theme at all, it's not a pastel, and now I've noticed the name thing, it doesn't seem to match with that either.  I give you Richmond:

Again, it would seem I've slightly misjudged actually how shady it was in that corner, so here's the sunshine version:

Although I'm not the biggest fan of shimmers, this peach with blush colour shimmer would probably be a pretty nice combo if the peach polish wasn't so sheer.  This is 4 coats, and still you see the evil VNL.

In order to make up for that, I'll review a different peach instead, which COULD have fitted nicely into this collection.  It's called You're a Peach, and it came free with Instyle Magazine.  I love freebies, me:

That's more like it!  Two coats for peachy loveliness. 

And just to prove this was a better one for the set, I used the other pastels from the collection for a dotticure over it:

It's a little bit bumpy, could probably do with another coat of Seche, but you get the idea, right?  Somehow it reminds me of pyjama bottoms.

And there we have it, one collection swatched and reviewed, so what do you think?  What's your favourite brand in terms of formula, are there any others that do great cremes?

Until next time...

MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~