Finger Paints Special Effects Flake Glitter Topcoat Collection Swatches and Review

There's an epidemic spreading throughout the nail polish world. Flaky fever. It's highly contagious. And if you have flaky fever, the only cure is more cowbell flakes.

Flake glitter polishes (known colloquially as "flakies") are sprouting up everywhere lately, and that's a good thing. Flake glitter polishes are not all that common; most brands only have one or two, if they even have any at all. For a while, the only flaky polishes we could get were Nfu Oh, and those are pretty pricey. Despite being relatively rare/uncommon, they're incredibly popular and loved by polish fans everywhere. Now it seems that a lot of brands are realizing that we really love our flakies and we want more of them, so they're slowly adding more flake polishes to their lines. This most recent release, the Finger Paints Special Effects collection, is the créme de la créme of flakies.

I've swatched each of these over black because it's easier to see the different types of flakes that way. Each swatch is two coats of polish.

Finger Paints Asylum. Asylum is a clear base with red and blue flakes that shift to orange, yellow, green and purple. The flakes are all different shapes and sizes.



Finger Paints Flashy. Flashy is one of those red-orange-yellow-green types of flake polishes. It's not all that different from Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure/Essie Shine of the Times/Nubar 2010/et cetera, but it does seem to have brighter colors in the flakes. I haven't compared this side-by-side with any of those other polishes, but the red in this one just seems redder somehow.



Finger Paints Flecked. Flecked is the bright green-blue type of flake, but it has an extra strong color shift.


Finger Paints Motley. Motley is a little bit different. It's a mixture of green-blue flakes and blue-purple flakes. Some of the flakes even look purple on their own without changing colors. It's hard to see the purple color from these pictures, but it's obvious in real life. The blue flakes in this one are a lot bigger than most blue flake polishes I own so you get more blue tone than green in this polish, which I appreciate.



Finger Paints Twisted. The very best one. It's a mix of all the flakes. It has every color of the rainbow visible at all times and the shapes and sizes of the flakes are all really different. If I had to choose only one polish from this collection, this would be it. It rocks.

The formula on these was good. Like most flake polishes, they have a thick-textured base. These aren't as bad as most I've used, but they're still thicker than I'd like. Other than the texture of the base, the application was perfect. Great coverage. Reasonable dry time, but still longer than regular polish.

Honestly, this is the best collection of flakes I've seen to date. They're by far the most interesting ones I've used, but they also have the advantage of not being too sparse or having flakes that are too small.

Usually the type of flake glitters we see are the single-type ones, like Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure, where we only get one kind of flake in a clear or tinted base. They're either the red-orange-yellow-green ones (Hidden Treasure, Shine of the Times), the blue-green ones (Nails Inc. The Wyndham, Nfu Oh 56), and rarely, but still out there, the blue-purple ones (Nails Inc. The Old Vic). It's not as common to see the types of flakes mixed, but those are the ones I like the most. That's why I like these Finger Paints ones so much. Most of them are mixes of two or more flake types.

Another reason I like the Finger Paints Special Effects is that the flakes are large and there's a lot of them in the polish. I don't like flaky polishes that barely have any flakes and you have to do too many coats to get good coverage. These look good at one coat, but even more amazing at two. I haven't done three coats of any of these yet, but I can only imagine how cool that would look.

The only thing I don't like about this collection is that it's limited edition and only available in-store at Sally Beauty. Flake glitters this good need to be permanent and accessible to everyone! They got the price right, but they should have at least made them available online.

The Finger Paints Special Effects collection is available only at Sally Beauty stores through the month of January. They are limited edition and retail for $5.49 each.