Yes, another swatch, because this is utterly gorgeous and I feel like the review might be a tad more rambly than usual. Why? The odd, strange, and baffling brush.
Bourjois relatively recently released the ‘up to 10 days’ range. Who the hell thought up that name? It’s ridiculous. Technically the websites call it ‘Vernis à Ongles 10 JOURS’ and ‘10 DAYS Nail Enamel,’ but if it ain’t on the bottle it don’t count! The front label says the following:
jusqu’à/up to
10 jours/days
au/with pro-calcium
anti-choc
no chips
Ongles 2x
plus forts
2x stronger nails
I honestly don’t see a name there. That’s a description, y’know: what usually goes on the back? Amusingly, the back just has a description of the brush, the barcode, colour number, and so forth. And the cap has the brush info again. I’m very much amused at the ‘anti-choc no chips’ thing. Bad girl, no cookie!
And apparently the whole ‘ up to 10 days’ thing means ten day if you use the super special brush for touch-ups, they do promise ‘3+ days minimum’ with touching up.
So, yeah, special brush. It’s flat and angled. Now imagine how to use an angled polish brush. My first instinct was to paint half the nail, then flip it over for the other side. If you have a roundish nail bed that will give you a gorgeous neat result. But it’s not practical, because you then have to flip-dip-wipe halfway through each nail. I then proceeded to just use it like any brush, but this meant that it felt like a was using two different brushes for each nail and led to one pretty and neat side and one wobbly side.
Also, the pinkie nails are a bugger to paint. Seriously. The brush is wide enough that with a straight or rounded tip one swipe would have been perfect. With this brush it takes some fiddling to get a moderately neat edge. This is not a practical brush. And I’m not even bitching about that longer bristle near the tip (I trimmed that after applying the first coat of polish).
That being said, you will get used to the brush. The second coat was much easier already. I preferred to keep the longer side of the brush near the pinkie-facing side, the shorter one one the thumb-facing side of each nail.
As to touch-ups, I covered a little clean-up mishap and the brush does make it quite easy to fix small flaws.
The polish, #18, has no name I could find on any of their websites and is a amazing shade of blue. My first thought was a faded dark blue ink, but it also has a denim kind of edge. There’s quite a bit of silver shimmer in there, but it’s not obnoxious at all. I only needed two coats. Yay.
The formula is insanely good. The fist coat is very streaky, but the second coat fixes that. I found it easier to apply medium-thick coats rather than ultra thin ones. #18 levelled beautifully, the brush really is the only issue I had with this polish.
If you’re willing to make the effort to get used to the brush I can highly recommend #18 for both colour and formula. Random thing I like about Bourjois polishes: the *snap* when you screw them shut. You always know that they’re good and closed.
Here’s #18 in two coats with top coat:
I can’t imagine that kind of brush catching on. Bourjois has had some gimmicky brushes in the past. There was the much too wide 1 seconde ones, or the curvy french tip one that has longer bristles on the sides than in the centre. I don’t think any of these are bad per se, but there are many people with narrow nail beds for whom the 1 seconde polishes were an utter fail; there are folks with straightish smile lines who may not want to fake curved ones; and there are those with a square nail bed (or whatever that is really called, let me know, will you?) who will have trouble with this angled brush.
Have you tried one of the 10 days polishes? How did you fare with it? If you haven’t, what issues would you expect?
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