Saturday, September 17, 2011

Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Bewitched

Good morning, Dear Reader!

I was looking for something dignified this morning, and I picked Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Bewitched, which is one of the upcoming limited edition Tracy Reese polishes for fall 2011.

Bewitched is an interesting shade in a good way, kind of a cross between plum and the (I can't think of a more savory description for this) dried blood shades with a creme finish.  I used a base coat, two coats of color, and a top coat for this manicure.  I found that Bewitched almost gives full coverage in one thin coat, but I did need the second to make it completely even on all ten nails.  It dried to be pretty markedly darker than bottle color, as you can see in the picture.  This is Bewitched on a cloudy day.

Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Bewitched
Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Bewitched Nail Polish, Two Coats

That's quite a big difference between bottle shade and dry-on-the-nail shade, but I'm happy with how it looks on the nail.  The down side to a significant difference in bottle color versus dry color is that I have to remember that Bewitched is one of that dries darker, but if that's its biggest trouble, I can live with it.

Bewitched does have the usual Complete Salon Manicure brush, which I know is not the most popular design ever, but it's worth noting that it does a really nice job once you get a feel for it.  I don't recall what the first shade from this line that I used was, but I do recall thinking that it looked like I'd let a little kid paint my nails the first time I used this brush.  It has an unusually long stem, lots and lots of short bristles trimmed to a rounded shape, and it's wider than average, and the result is that it holds a lot of polish and is a little harder to manipulate than most.  Since I have great big nails by some standards, that might seem like a good thing, but it's easy to pick up way more polish with it than I want for one nail.  I found that wiping off both side of the brush inside of the bottle's neck rather than just one side as I normally do fixes the issue of quantity, and once the excess polish is wiped off, I found it's way easier to control where the remaining polish goes.  Having gotten a feel for using the CSM brush, it does a great job (there was no cleanup on this mani), but it took several crappy to marginally bad manicures to get to that point.  Since the colors in this line are so often very nice, it was worth the effort of learning to work with the brush.

That is Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Bewitched, the first of the Fall 2011 Tracy Reese polishes that Sally Hansen's PR sent for review, so until next time, Dear Reader, love and nail polish to you!



All Rights Reserved, Siobhan@The Nailphile. If you're reading this elsewhere, it's stolen from a real nail polish blog.

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