Essie Navigate Her Collection Spring 2012 Swatches and Review

Instead of going the all-pastel route for this year's spring collection, Essie decided to give us a little splash of color along with a few traditional spring pastels.

Essie A Crewed Interest. A light peach creme. It's light but I wouldn't call it pastel. It's not strongly orange or pink. Just a nice, glossy, easy-to-wear peach.


Essie Navigate Her. A pale green creme. A slightly different mint green than the ones we usually see. This one looks more yellow-toned than most of the mints in my collection. It also looks decent against my skintone, which is very rare for this type of green. I really like it. It looks soft but fresh at the same time.


Essie Ole Caliente. This color doesn't really say spring to me, but that's perfectly fine. It's awesome. It's a bright red-based coral creme. It's not quite as neon-bright in real life as it looks here, but it is pretty saturated. It has a slight softness to it that keeps it from being brighter.


Essie Orange, It's Obvious! What a name. I like it, though. This is an orange creme. Although it is very saturated, it's not quite so neon-leaning as it appears here. Like Ole Caliente, it has a soft quality to the finish that keeps it from being super bright. It's a little darker than I'd think of a spring orange being, but I like it more this way. It's more of a tangerine orange than a pumpkin orange. More red than yellow.


Essie To Buy, Or Not To Buy? This one is tricky. It's a pastel lilac creme base, but in the bottle it appears to have tons of chunky purple/blue duochrome particles. Once it's on the nail, the particles mostly disappear and it looks like a plain creme until the light hits it just right. I tried to capture the way the light hits the sparkles; you may need to enlarge this to see that. It's very subtle.


Essie Tour De Finance. That sound like the most boring tour ever. Is it a race to see who can file their tax return the quickest? Anyway, this is a medium fuchsia with a pink and blue fine particle shimmer. It looks like it has a tiny bit of a purple flash because of the color-shifting shimmer, but it's not prominent.

The formula on these was perfect. I really enjoyed swatching these. The polish went exactly where I wanted it to, no pooling or running or anything like that. The only formula problem with these is that they're streaky on the first coat. The second coat evens them out, but I needed three coats to get them to look perfect. The brush was flawless and made application really easy. Drying time was great. All-around excellent in the formula department.

I like this collection. It's not the most creative and the names are a little cheesy, but all the colors look really nice on. It's a pretty straightforward collection; half bright, half pastel, with a little bit of shimmer. Nothing really complex or brand new, but still a really nice group of colors. My favorite is Orange, It's Obvious, but I love Ole Caliente almost as much.

This is supposed to be in stores starting in February, but I don't have the exact date.

(This was sent for review.)