Maybelline Blue Brilliance

Maybelline Blue Brilliance (three coats over Zoya Phoebe.) This looks like a pretty cool polish, doesn't it? It's all duochromey and stuff. That's why I was drawn to the bottle on the display. It's a pale sky blue with green, purple, pink and orangey duochrome, just like the awesome duochromes I remember. Sadly, this is crap. Seriously. It made me remember why I stopped buying Maybelline polishes after the Wet Shine Diamonds / Colorama cool stuff was discontinued.

The first problem with this polish is the brush. It has to be the worst brush in drugstore polish. It's long, squared off, thin and floppy. It's totally uneven and limp and that makes it pretty much impossible to achieve a good application. The bristles splay out every which way and they're not all the same length. It also has these weird hard edges on some bristles that scrape the polish as it applies it, exacerbating the streakiness of the formula. The signs of a good polish brush? Smooth, firm (but not stiff) springy bristles with no frayed ends that leave no streaks or scratches in the polish when applying. A dense brush that holds enough polish to cover the nail smoothly, and that gently curves into a c-shape when pressure is applied. This Maybelline brush? The exact opposite of all of that.

The second problem is the formula. It's a runny, globby, streaky nightmare. It streaks worse than almost anything I can think of, runs into your cuticles no matter what you do, and makes weird globs when it settles on my nails. The fact that this is a frost finish doesn't help, though I'd hope their cremes don't streak like this. And the whole '50 seconds' express finish quick dry thing? LIES. Takes forever to dry.

The third problem is the color. What looks like an amazing duochrome in the bottle is actually a watery sheer streaky frosty blue on the nail. I tried five coats of it alone and ended up with a gross striped looking sheer frosty mess. Here I layered it over a bright blue to add more of a blue punch to it, but it barely helped. Why is this so sheer?!?! We finally get an old Sally Hansen Nail Prism-style 3-free drugstore duochrome and it's too sheer to wear alone? And even layered, only the pink side of the duochrome really shows up. I was hoping to get the strong green/orange side that shows in the bottle.

I've heard similar things about some of the Scherer Chameleons. I have a few of those and I've never used them. Maybe it's about time I break them out and try them on.... They can't be worse than this.

Man... they build my hopes up with duochrome dreams just so they can get my $5 and then smash my rainbow-reflecting expectations with a sledgehammer. I think I'm going to go hug my Nail Prisms collection for a while.