Product Review: Ciaté Paint Pots

I have a bit of a thing about nail varnish - I love my nails being painted but I'm really bad at painting them and far too impatient to wait for polish to dry properly. Polish tends to last a day, at most, without chipping and it's quite common for me to have wrecked my hands within a couple of hours of painting them. 

Nevertheless, I persevere and recently I've been hearing really good things about Ciaté. 

When I was looking at the Ciaté website I came up with a very long short-list of colours I wanted to try. Fortunately, my decision on what to buy was made for me when I looked at the gift section. Individual bottles of polish sell for £9 but there are several gift sets containing three shades for £18. There are also sets of six selling for £27. There were three options for the 'six packs'  Classics, Nudes, or Trend containing the six 2010 spring/summer colours. 

I decided to go for the Trend pack, pictured above. The colours, from left to right are Ditch the Heels, Talent Scout, Access All Areas, Main Stage, Headliner and Fun Fair. 

I was so excited about trying them out that I couldn't pick one  colour to start with and so I used three.

I used Headliner and Main Stage on my fingers

and I used Access All Areas on my toes

I found that all three colours were easy to apply and seemed to dry quite quickly (which for me means that by the time I got bored and started fidgeting they were dry enough not to smudge). 

All the colours were applied straight onto the nail, there are two coats of Headliner and Access All Areas in the pictures above and one coat of Main Stage. 

The photographs don't really capture the different finishes very well. The closest I could get was this.

Headliner and Access All Areas both have a matte finish, while Main Stage has what I think of as a standard nail varnish finish (glossy but with no shimmer). 

The colours have been on for one day so far and haven't chipped yet. I'll report back on how long they last in the end.