Essie Winter 2011 Cocktail Bling Collection Review, Swatches and Photos

You know even though we’re entering Summer in Australia, some days it sure feels like we never left Winter. It’s only been in the last week that things are starting to pick up! :/ Anyways! Nail polish! Introducing Essie’s Winter 2011 collection 🙂

I have to say I was pretty impressed with the quality of this particular collection, all the polishes applied very well, very pigmented and gave a lovely finish. I think if you were generous with your application you could almost get away with 1 coat. But as you know, these swatches are 2 coats and no top coat.

Bangle Jangle

A lavender amethyst crème, as I mentioned before it applied beautifully. I personally think Essie’s Nice in Nice is a lighter version of this shade, even though the swatches online looks rather different.

Bobbing for Baubles

A dark sapphire crème, I found OPI’s Light My Sapphire to be a more shimmery and thinner version of this.

Brooch the Subject

A deep nude crème, and clearly not an overly unique shade so I managed to find a couple of similar shades, such as Essie’s Sand Topaz which is a greyer and lighter version, or Essie’s Topless & Barefoot which is lighter and has more pinky tones. Unfortunately neither “dupes” (which just so happen to be from Essie’s Spring 2011 collection) have the same level of opacity as Brooch the Subject does.

Cocktail Bling

A gray bluish crème (my colour descriptions are terribly precise and accurate, I know!), I thought Zoya’s Clove was a greyer version of this, but still in a similar vein.

School of Hard Rocks

A darkened teal crème, for some reason in person I found Essie’s Sew Psyched to be a much greener version of this. They aren’t really that close if you’re a bit of an nail polish addict, but if you need something that’s a dark khaki green shade, I don’t think you really need both.

Size Matters

A ruby red crème, a pretty standard berry red shade, so not hard to dupe nor find pretty similar shades such as China Glaze’s Winter Berry (a more watered down version though) or OPI’s Wocka Wocka which instead contains some shimmer.

I’m doing my best to find similar shades to polishes from now on, I haven’t really found any exact dupes yet, but if you’re the average polish user, I reckon one or two reds is more than enough for your collection given how long it takes to use up polish.