Product Testing ~ Quick-Dry Polishes

Last night was the first game of the 2011 NFL season. I was counting down the days, minutes, and seconds to this game since... one minute after the Super Bowl ended. I don't know if you've picked up on this already, but I love football. Being a short, fat, injury-prone girl, I have never played this glorious game, but I can shoot the shit about it with the best of them. Thankfully, many of the awesome people I work with also love football, so we went out last night, watched the game, and got a little rowdy. :]

Before I went out, I decided to play with some nail polish. Because I make no sense. Anyways, I tried out three different "quick-drying" polishes to see which one worked the best. I absolutely hate waiting for polish to dry, and 99.99% of the time I end up smudging it. Which is really frustrating, since I often spend an hour or more getting them to look awesome in the first place.

☀ Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Fast Dry Nail Color

Don't buy this. Seriously. The polish itself was crap. I'm not sure how to describe polishes like this. I actually have a few of them. They come out of the bottle fine, but as soon as they touch your nail, the get... clumpy? But not really clumpy - lumpy? I don't know. But they're not smooth, not shiny, and don't cover evenly no matter what you do. The way to make these work (if you have similar issues) is to put a clear and/or glitter layer on top. That somehow makes them perfect again.

Anyway, back to the original issue of quickness. The bottle says it dries in 60 seconds. Five minutes later, it was still goopy and smudgey. This might have been because I attempted to fix the lumpies with an extra layer..? It says it's supposed to coat in one layer, but that's a lie as well.

Although this didn't dry nearly as fast as I was hoping, it did have a couple good aspects. I don't know if you've noticed this, but polish creators have started using a different brush design - which I love! It's flat and wide, rather than round and thin, which makes it a lot easier to cover your whole nail in two strokes. This brand also had some really cool colors. Which I like. Revolon, the other brand I tried, only had fairly basic colors (at least at the CVS I went to).

I think I might have to give this one another shot, but I'm not getting my hopes up. I wouldn't rush out to buy more any time soon though.

☀ Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Anti-Chip Top Coat

This product sounded SO COOL. It's a clear top coat that claims to make any polish dry in a minute. The box says to apply your normal polish, wait 2 minutes, apply this top coat, and wait another minute. Although it definitely didn't dry in a minute (it was more like 3-5), I still liked it. I don't know about you guys, but I already have a million colors that I don't want to have to replace just so they'll dry faster.

☀ Revlon Top Speed Fast Dry Nail Enamel

I had heard rave reviews about this Revlon polish from a couple other bloggers. And it actually lived up to the hype! By the time I had finished painting each of my nails, the first nails were already dry!! It was a miracle. I only saw a few colors in the store, which is kind of annoying, but I have a feeling that if I hit up Ulta there'd be a lot more to choose from (the website says there's 32 colors).

When I was testing for dryness, I did both the finger print test (does it leave lines when you poke it?) and the nail-edge test (poking the edge of another nail straight into the polish). This was the only polish that passed both tests easily and quickly. The bottle claims that it dries in 60 seconds. It passed the finger print test in 60, and the nail-edge test in 2 minutes or so. Not bad, right?! I'm really excited about this stuff, if you can't tell. The only thing is that if you put a different polish on top, it will take longer to dry again. But all polish is like that, so I wasn't surprised.

There are about a million different types of "quick-dry" polishes out there. I'm going to try to test out a few more, but if you have any brand suggestions, or any type of testing suggestions, let me know! I'm going to work with the Konad stamper stuff soon, so I'll let you know how my second attempt at stamping goes!