This is Essie Sew Psyched, and my first experience with Essie. I bought this one at a big cosmetics sale for $8 – normally I wouldn’t buy Essie polishes because they are owned by L’Oreal who test on animals, but: a) the parent/child company and animal testing area is a bit of a grey one – PETA encourages us to spend money at the non-testing child company to prove a point to the parent company that testing is unecessary. See, I think that’s a touch naive, but…  then there’s: b) it was a really pretty colour. (shame.)

Sew Psyched has a really pretty silver microshimmer to it – which I can’t see AT ALL on my nail, but I think it does add a bit of depth to the colour.

These swatches are two coats, no top coat. This polish had a thinner formula than I was expecting, with the odd rampaging blob of polish – watch out for those. It self leveled well, and was nice and opaque in two coats. Good wear time, minimal tip wear the next day.  I’d describe the colour as a lovely blue based khaki green, and it was fairly flattering on me.

Sorry about the cuticles! Big day of swatching 🙂

Whole hand photo… it’s not a weak colour, but it is quite subtle.

Then for fun I used top coats of  Darling Diva Polish – Dreamy, Australis  – Speck-tacular, and Cover Band – Sticks and Stones over the Sew Psyched (little finger Speck-tacular, ring finger Sticks and Stones, middle and index fingers Dreamy). I really preferred Dreamy as the finish. The holographic top coats’ silver tone turned it into a very grey sage green, and Sew Psyched really amped up the holographic sparkle of Dreamy. ( I like it so much so that I’m wearing it as a pedicure…) Sticks and Stone looked nice, and would be great for a camoflage effect, and Speck-tacular just didn’t really impress me over this colour.

Shade photo

Shade – the flakies look so nice in the shade

Whole hand photo with the top coats.

Look how nice that holographic looks in the sunlight! And how invisible the flakies are… 🙂

After this first experience I’m pretty happy with Essie – it did dry fast, and removal was easy – it didn’t stain either. Unless its at a mega sale I won’t be racing out to buy more (apart from Smooth Sailing, maybe. I WANT that polish.)

I don’t think the big cheese parent companies give two figs about where they get their money from, as long as they get it. The concept of buying from the non testing child company would only work if we didn’t buy anything at all from the main company, and if they stopped selling in China (or China changed that animal testing pre-requisite).  I don’t know if that’s going to happen. But I do love this polish, yessir.