Essie Ballet Slippers

This was 3 coats, no topcoat.

Essie Ballet Slippers is one of them age-old polishes that are so ancient, I don't even know how to find which collections they were from - if they were even from any of these recent invention called 'collections'. This is a sheer nude pink that are meant, I suppose, to resemble the shade of actual ballet slippers. I would call it sheer because it does take a few layers to build up. Even here at 3 coats, you may still be able to discern a bit of VNL if you're not careful but personally I'm too lazy to paint more than 3. It's acceptable for me!

I get the feeling that this has become the sort of quintessential sheer nude pink shade. Although it's not quite as interesting as OPI Who Needs A Prince?, I actually like this shade very much. If not for the troublesome Essie formula, I would like to wear this much more often! I have a soft spot for all these light-nude shades of pink, it's somehow so girly and feminine that I can't resist.

Speaking of Essie formulas though, I just can't seem to master it! I find that almost all my Essie polishes are rather streaky and slightly goopy. It's not too bad when I paint them in an air-conditioned room like in these swatches, but of course that'd be equivalent to shutting myself into a sealed chamber with no ventilation, inhaling nail polish fumes at very close proximity. When I attempted yesterday to paint them with the door of my bedroom open and my fan switched on, the polish dried so fast (bad thing) that it turned positively goopy before I even managed to finish the coat, which was disastrous. To add to this, it dried just enough to turn goopy, but it didn't dry completely so when I hit my finger against something, it still ruined it after all. I removed all ten fingers in frustration.

Anyone else having such problems with Essie?