CIRCUS by Andrea's Choice polish: Reverso and Spectacle

Stock image of the polishes.

I received two of these polishes via my (and technically my daughter's) monthly Glambag subscriptions in the month of July.  I was highly looking forward to getting the polish, because I've been desperately searching for a white polish that I love.  At the time, we were not aware of the alternate color available.  My bag contained the yellow polish, Somersault, and my daughter got the white, Revereso.  These colors won't be available until the fall of this year.

The marketing information was horribly creepy, and I don't think it was meant to be so.  I'm not sure if they were going for a 90s Steve Madden-esque SD image, but it moves away from that into the uncanny valley.  It's not flattering, and I'm not really sure how it ties into the polish.  Why did I mention this?  Because that's what I see when I think of the polish now, unfortunately.

The five colors that have been introduced are very bright, and very pretty.  I love the colors of all of them, especially the pink and the purple.  I love, love, love neon colors.

True to life, the yellow was oh so pretty.  It's not quite as vibrant as my monitor (or three) would have led me to believe.  I wouldn't call it a neon at all.  It's more of a amped up banana yellow.  As I said, it is really, really pretty.  The white was, well, white.  If I had to say if it had a base (but it really doesn't), I'd say it was a blue based white.  Think liquid white-out.

The bottles weren't anything special, but the logo was cute.  The brushes are rather thin; they made me think of Love My Nails' brushes, which really surprised me.  I really expected better.  They're not unusable by any means, but this is being marketed as fancy nail polish, not $.99, bottom rack, drugstore, cheap-o kind.

But quality's the key word here, isn't it?  Oh yellow nail polish, how I wanted to love you.



Hey, look!  It's almost one of those fancy pictures like on other blogs, except I did a really crappy job at it.  Hooray!  (Yes, I did clean up my cuticles later.)

See that picture up there?  That's after three coats.  Three.  There are still brush marks in it that aren't really visible in the picture.  Really, really bad ones.  I never thought I was one to be bothered by brush marks in polish, but I've never had a polish that's so streaky before. 



One coat.



Two coats.

Now, this is definitely a cream polish, and cream polishes are notorious for their finickiness.  However, I've never had one this bad.  It could possibly be helped by putting a white undercoat under it.   Unfortunately, I have two white polishes.  One, I absolutely hate.  The other is the Reverso that I'm now "sharing" with my daughter.  I didn't steal it, it just stays with the other polishes and she can use it any time she wants, honest.  The Reverso isn't nearly as streaky as the yellow, and is a quite nice white polish.  It really makes me think of back in junior high when we would paint out nails with white-out.  It even has the same "not really shiny, but not dull" texture to it.  However, it suffers from the same problem as the yellow's major flaw:  they flake.  Badly.

No, I take that back.  They don't flake; they chunk.  As in, big pieces (sometimes the whole nail) come off.  This hasn't been a wear issue, because honestly, this starts happening as soon as the polish dries.  This has happened every time I have wore either polish.  It hasn't mattered what I've had under it, or over it.  I've tried purposely roughing up my nails just a tad to give it something to grip onto.  Then I buffed them out, and that made it even worse.  I've tried several different base coats, and several different top coats.  I've only had one other polish do this to me before, and that's this absolutely perfect neon coral color (I think it might be Way Cool) from the Sally Girl line at Sally Beauty.  Why do the ones I love always hate me back?  I've read from several other reviewers that they've had this issue with this formula, too.

I had debated on possibly getting the other colors, even with the streaking issue.  Streaking I can handle (to an extent), and it seems to vary color to color, anyway.  However, if all colors flake the way these two have, I definitely won't be purchasing them.