Vernis Classique by Cherimoya Metallic Purple: Nightmare Polish

I was traveling out of state over the weekend and one of my favorite things to do when I travel is to visit drugstores and see what kinds of different beauty brands they have compared to the ones at home. I went into a Walgreens and spotted a big, well-stocked display of these Cherimoya polishes. I grabbed a few shades including this insane looking purple foil called Metallic Purple.

Have you ever had a cherimoya? It's a scaly, strange looking fruit with huge black seeds and white flesh, but it tastes amazing.

(image source)

The cherimoya fruit also smells very, very good unlike the Cherimoya nail polish, which smells kinda scary.


Vernis Classique by Cherimoya in Metallic Purple. This is one amazing looking polish, no doubt. It's just so incredibly weird. It's a deep purple metallic, though it looks much more blue toned in my photo than it is in real life. You know how purple gets when you try to photograph it. Anyway, it's like a deeper, better version of Essie Viva La Vespa; the glow of this polish is like nothing I've seen. It really does look like it's lit from within, like there's a little lightbulb behind each nail. It's really strange.

What's stranger about it is that it only looks like that after topcoat. I'm wearing topcoat in those pictures, but before I applied it, the polish had a foil-like finish. Like, sparkly, grainy-looking, shimmery foil-ish finish. Apply topcoat and BAM! Smooth metallic. WEIRD.

Now let me tell you about application. This polish has one of the worst brushes ever. It's wide and fluffy, very thick and with stiff bristles that are cut completely unevenly. It has clumps sticking out here and there, some bristles curled back, some really short and the whole thing is just a mess. The brush is garbage, and it's a shame because the color of this polish is so amazing. It makes a clean application nearly impossible. I did the best I could but still ended up with polish on my skin.

No big deal, I can always clean that up afterwards, right? Wrong, apparently. I got out a little paintbrush and some acetone to clean the polish off my skin, but the second the wet brush touched the excess polish, insanity happened. The pigment in the polish bled out into the acetone in the brush, creating a pool of dark purple acetone that stained my fingers and cuticles worse than the small amount of excess polish on them from the shoddy application. I've never seen any polish behave that way. It just bled everywhere instantly, a purple liquid explosion.

I try to do the best I can to clean it up, but the more polish the brush touches, the worse it gets, so I give up. I decide to just apply my topcoat and hope the stains and excess polish come off the next time I wash my hands. So I get my trusty Seche Vite topcoat and start applying it to my nails. I get halfway through my right hand before I notice that the polish is bleeding pigment into the Seche Vite and turning it purple. The polish was barely even wet, certainly not wet enough to contaminate my topcoat. But there it was... a growing cloud of purple pigment developing in my topcoat bottle. When realized this was happening, I started wiping my topcoat brush on a paper towel in between each nail and was shocked at how much purple was on the brush.

If you think that's strange, listen to this. A day later I tried to change it up a little by adding some glitter topcoat over it, and guess what? The purple bled onto my glitter topcoat brush. Day old dry polish with a coat of Seche Vite and it still bled. I didn't like how it looked so I added a coat of Essie Shine of the Times and it dyed the flakes purple! What the hell??

Seems like every time the polish gets wet, it releases purple dye that spreads everywhere. It probably goes without saying, but removal is an absolute horror show. Purple EVERYWHERE. It reminds me of something I used to do as a kid. Sometimes I'd take the back cap off of my brand new magic markers and take out the little tube that holds the liquid. Know what I'm talking about? All the old Crayola markers used to have this fuzzy, felt-like tube with a plastic coating inside the marker, that's what wets the marker. Well, I used to take those out when they were still brand new and really wet and blow through them to make splatter art. It always made a giant mess on my hands, but it was pretty fun... I can't be the only kid who took their markers apart, right? This polish is just like that mess.

Other than the crazy dye staining issues and the horrible brush, the polish is pretty good. It was completely opaque in one coat and dried really quickly. The texture was on the thick side and it was a little stringy/gooey, but if it had a normal brush in it, it would had been fine. It did have a really weird, strong smell to it, like Silly String. Plastic-y, chemicall-y, all around strange and just like Silly String. I didn't have any chipping issues when I wore it and it looked great until I removed it.

It has a laughably bad brush. It smells like Silly String. It changes from a foil to a glowy, smooth, molten-metal looking metallic when you apply topcoat to it. It bleeds dye into your topcoat and all over everything during removal. Despite all that, I still can't help being in love with it. It's such an incredible color, you have to see it for yourself to believe how amazing it is. My pictures don't do it any justice. It's one of the most frustrating polishes I've ever used but, damn. It looks incredible. And it was only $1.99 at Walgreens.