New Maybelline Color Show Nail Lacquer Collection Swatches and Review

Maybelline has a whole new line of nail polish out in drugstores now. It's called Color Show and it consists of 40 colors. The display has the colors divided into categories (like crackle aka 'shredded', shimmer, foil, creme, et cetera) and there's a very good variety to choose from. Maybelline shows all the colors on their website and they have an app you can download to virtually try on all the colors. I only picked up the ones that looked the most interesting at the time: Denim Dash, Styled Out, Twilight Rays and Wine & Dined.


Maybelline Color Show in 10 Denim Dash. A light-medium dusty aqua-leaning blue with flaky foil shimmer. This blue is one of those muted blues that I love, like Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Pacific Blue. Bright color but not clean and crisp. The shimmer in this is cool, too. Flat, flaky foil particles with silver-blue-green iridescence.


Maybelline Color Show in 20 Styled Out. Similar to Denim Dash, just darker, more of an actual denim color, and with pure silver shimmer. I can't decide which of the denim blues I like more. I might have to go with this one because it's a little darker and it has more shimmer. They're both really cool, though.


Maybelline Color Show in 240 Twilight Rays. A black creme base with large, chunky, flaky gold foil shimmer. Some of the gold flakes flash green, which in some lights causes the entire polish to have a greenish tint. Kinda like how China Glaze Wagon Trail is black with gold shimmer yet the polish seems olive sometimes. I love this one, and I especially love how big the gold particles are.


Maybelline Color Show in 420 Wine & Dined. My label says wine and dined, the Maybelline website says "wined and dined", I'm not sure which is correct but I'm going with the label. Anyway, this is a vampy duochrome glass fleck. It's a blackened red-brown base with wine, purple and bronze glass fleck. At an angle, you can see a golden duochrome color shift. Like a browner, less sparkly version of Nicole Sounds Grape To Me. I see a few larger pieces of shimmer mixed in with the glass fleck, and I even see some sparks of bright purple now and then. It's a gorgeous color, but I think it looks better in the swatch than it looks on my nails in real life; seems more shimmery on camera.

The formula on these was mixed. I found the two dark colors to be runny and difficult to control. The blues, however, were perfect. Dense and smooth, not runny at all. The brushes aren't the best shape and size for getting a good curve around the cuticle, but it's nowhere near as bad as the Express Finish brush. I did three coats of each polish and only the darker colors needed all three. Dry time was average.

Quite a few interesting colors in this collection. A lot of common ones that you probably already have (red creme, silver foil, black crackle, stuff like that), but still a few really good ones. I think I'm going to go back for some of the purples next. I wonder if they'll ever expand this range to have special effects topcoats... It would be like a reboot of Colorama! Still holding out hope for something like that. Colorama was awesome. I miss it.

I bought mine from Walgreens, $4.99 each. They're on sale buy one, get one 50% off right now.