After many, many years of producing the most brilliant nail polish shades but in a sub-par, easy-chip formula, Chanel have completely revamped their nail offering and it’s good. It’s really good. The new longwear polishes are just that – longwear, with the nude shade lasting a full week on my tin-opening, dried-weetabix-scraping, car-tinkering hands.
I’m going to come back to the longwear polishes in another post (this website might be a bit Chanel-heavy for a week or so, I’ve done a bit of a blitz through their new collection) but I couldn’t hesitate when it came to today’s subject: Le Vernis Nail Gloss. It’s very rare that I try a product and then run straight to my laptop to write about it – especially a nail varnish – but that is precisely what’s happened today. The Nail Gloss from Chanel is so good that if you have even a modicum of interest in your hands, you need to paint this on them.
In the bottle the gloss looks faintly disappointing – a transparent varnish with a reddish tint. The sort of thing you’d expect would stain your nails a wishy-washy pink, as though you’d coloured them in with a felt-tip pen. Or the kind of expensive extra step that might add a reddish sheen over your base colour, a luxury top-coat for those with money to burn. No, friends, no: wishy-washy this is not. Surprisingly, it’s full of pigment and one coat leaves your nails the sort of bright, punchy, fiery red that is almost a rule when it comes to summer beauty.
But there is a hint of sheerness there, a bit of transparency – it’s like painting your nails with a very rich and glossy form of strawberry jelly. It has the visual bounciness of a gel, with a hi-shine finish that looks chic and pulled-together, but the punchy colour of a traditionally opaque polish. I can’t get enough of it.
I’m hoping that the lasting-power is good – it doesn’t mention “longwear” on the box, so I’m not going to have the highest expectations in terms of longevity, but then I’d happily repaint with this every other day. Application was a breeze. And I keep staring at my fingers and thinking about holidays, which is never a bad thing.
