Essie Resort Collection Spring/Summer 2012 Swatches and Review

Essie's annual Resort collection is an odd one this year! It has a clear theme like resort collections of the past, but it has a somewhat random-looking color selection. That's not to say that it's bad... In fact, it's really quite good:


Essie No More Film. A dark indigo creme. It's very dark, but not so dark that it looks black. You can tell that it's blue in every type of lighting, though it is still very close to that blackened-blue territory. It has a slight faded/weathered look to it after it dries.



Essie Pink-A-Boo. This is a sheer, cool-toned milky pink base with color-shifting glass fleck shimmer. You can see it very strongly in the bottle, and unlike a lot of other colors like this (including Essie's own To Buy or Not To Buy), the duochrome does actually show up on the nail. It even seems to have more shimmer than Jessica Rolling Rose. The main color is a light turquoise and it shifts to darker pure blue and purple at one angle and pink, red and gold at another angle. Very pretty.


Essie She's Picture Perfect. This one is my favorite. It's a light blue-toned lavender creme base with some subtle purple-pink-red iridescent shimmer. The creme base is so dense that the shimmer doesn't look shimmery, it's more of a flash of color that glows rather than sparkles. The shimmer is very subtle but it comes out more in bright light. The flash photo washes out the color, but it brings out that lovely shimmer so you can get a better look at it.



Essie Sure Shot. Glowy, slightly duochrome dark magenta. It has a subtle blue-purple flash that sits on top of the polish when you view it at an angle, but head-on it looks like a plain deep pink shimmer. This reminds me a lot of an ancient Wet n Wild polish I used to wear in the early 90s... I think it was called Cherry Fudge or Chocolate Cherry or something like that. This color brought back so many memories of that old polish!

The formula on these was good. Not too runny, not too thick. I had no trouble with application. I did three coats of each and all but No More Film needed the third coat. Dry time is fast.

Unusual grouping of colors, yes, but they're all good ones. I like the duochrome shimmer in Pink-A-Boo and She's Picture Perfect and I like the deep, rich-looking color of No More Film and Sure Shot. My favorite is definitely She's Picture Perfect, though.

The Essie 2012 Resort collection is available now.

(This was sent for review.)