Mentality ~ Empress

Mentality ~ Empress

Baby pink matte

I’ve actually got three Mentality polishes to show you today, and I was going to put them all in one post, but I thought it got a little too much picture-wise, so I’ve split them up into three posts, all of which I’m going to post today.

Empress is the first one up. It’s described as hot pink, but personally I think it’s too pale to be called hot pink. In my world it’s baby pink. The formula is really good, but it can be a bit of a challenge to apply the polish anyway because it dries up wicked fast, so you don’t have many brush strokes to deal with before it’s too late. I’d say four or five brushstrokes, and then time’s up and you have to move on to the next nail. Talk about luxury problems, haha! Anyway, the pigmentation is good, and I used two coats for these pictures.

Here’s what two coats look like:

It’s a nice, calm pink that can’t offend anybody.

It does clash a bit with my skin tone in my opinion, so there’s no way I can wear this on its own. Not that I ever do that anyway.

So what I did was to dot with a true hot pink at the base of my nails. I used a Sally Hansen Insta-Dri polish called Magenta Moves, and I made my dots various sizes, like a reverse dotted gradient. I topped it with a layer of H & M Quick Dry topcoat, and here’s what my mani ended up looking like:

I used these polishes: 

Verdict:

I have come to really like Mentality’s polishes. This one isn’t my favourite, but that’s because it’s a little too pale to slip quite into my comfort zone. I will keep it though, because it’s a great base colour for nail art.

I have to make a note about the H & M Quick Dry topcoat. I have never ever experienced a topcoat that dragged so much in my nail art design. I used the lightest brush strokes ever, and it still pulled on the dots like crazy. I will keep it and use it as a regular topcoat but I won’t ever use it with nail art again.