Layla Hologram Effect

A few weeks back I picked up four polishes from Layla's spring holographic nail polish collection release.  These are my first linear holographic polishes and I was excited to give them a shot.  Yes, over a year of blogging and being in the nail polish community and these were my first holographics.  Let's just say that I needed to see in person what all the fuss is about.  No picture ever does these polishes justice!

All of these polishes use a coat of Seche Vite dry fast top coat on top of a base coat to create a smooth surface for polish adhesion.  I did not wrap my tips nor did I apply top coat to these swatches.

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01 Mercury Twilight

Layla 01 Mercury Twilight is a lovely silver holographic nail polish.  Beneath Mercury Twilight I used one coat of  Sally Hansen Continuous Treatment base & top coat (one polish).  While I think it's rather plain (I enjoy my color!), I do think its simplicity adds to its charm.  This polish was pretty easy to apply with minimal streaks, pictured here is three coats. 

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03 Retro Pink

Layla 03 Retro Pink is a lovely pink holographic polish.  Underneath Seche Vite I used OPI Nail Envy Original for my base.  I used three coats of Retro Pink to arrive at this density.  The color wasn't as delicate as some of the others appeared to be, instead it was a nice bright pink.  The one item I did not love about this formula was how fast it began to chip.  Within twenty four hours of wear the polish had chipped from all my nails and was in poor condition.  Other than wear, I was very pleased with this polish.

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04 Ultra Violet

Layla 04 Ultra Violet is by far my favorite polish from this collection.  Underneath Seche Vite I used Sally Hansen Continuous Treatment base & top coat (one polish).  Ultra Violet, while noticeably purple, was more of a lavender or light purple than a stand-out color.  Formula-wise I could have gotten away with two coats of polish but decided to spring for a third just because.  I was really impressed with how nicely this color wore compared to Retro Pink and (spoiler alert!) Mermaid Spell.  I wore this polish for three days  before I had any sort of tip wear and that's pretty amazing considering my tips weren't wrapped and this is without top coat.

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06 Mermaid Spell

Layla 06 Mermaid Spell is my least favorite from this series.  It was an absolute pain to apply.  This was also the first holographic polish I tried so there may have been some human error in the application.  I don't believe that I used anything beneath Seche Vite (which may have been my application problem?).  I used five coats of Mermaid Spell to get to this point...and if you click on the picture to make it bigger you'll see there are still some streaks in the polish, especially on my ring finger.  The streaks in the polish were one thing, the terrible chipping that occurred with this polish was another.  Within a few hours this polish had basically all chipped off.  Talk about a bummer!  

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Overall I'm really happy I bought these polishes.  They were worth every penny that I paid for them (except maybe Mermaid Spell).  I did hear that Layla is coming out with eight more holographic polishes to add to this collection - awesome!  I'm looking forward to picking up a couple of those as well.