Icing Nail Polish Set Swatches and Review

Icing is an accessories store in Canada, they sell earrings and jewelry mostly, some handbags, just cheap accessories. I think this store is in the States too, it's similar to Claire's. Anyway, I picked up this nail set from them last year, it was marked as limited edition, but I have since seen it recently too, so it clearly isn't. What attracted me to this was the bright fluorescent orange shade. The set looked like fun, bright summer colours, but let me tell ya, the application on these is atrocious and I feel like just pitching them all in the trash. It's too bad because it cost me $16 CAD, so like $3 each, that was before I knew better and it was a total impulse buy.

The bottles are all mini, 12ml or .4 oz, and the worst part is, they have no ballz in them!! So you have to shake it like crazy to get the polish to mix together right and not separate, which it is clearly doing in the picture below. I know that mini sets usually do not have them, but the bottles in this set are pretty large, so it's silly not to put ballz in. Whoever named these wasn't very clever either: from left to ring in the pic below: Blackberry, Orange, Lime, Lemon, and Blue Razeberry, not impressed at all with that.

And that's Misa Right Here Now, No More Later on my thumb, which is gorgeous, nothing like these horrible things! The formulation on these was really thin and watery, uneven.. and eww. All the polishes have silver shimmers and dry to this weird sort of matte finish, no shine (the pictures below were taken underneath a lamp so there is flash or shine to them).

Onto the not so stellar swatches, all of these were taken with no basecoat or topcoat to show their craptastic nature. I think wearing these two would help the appearance of these definitely...

Icing Blackberry

This is a bright pink, more purple in real life with silver shimmers (the whole set has these). This is 3-4 coats, they all took that many. It takes a lot of coats to get this level of opaqueness. This colour is kinda cute though.

Icing Orange

Orange, is just that... orange, a fluorescent, bright, neon, almost blinding orange. This one actually didn't disappoint me all that much.

Icing Lime

Lime is a light green. This one is probably the ugliest colour of the bunch, and makes me look ill and pale.

Icing Lemon

Lemon is a bright yellow. It applies very streaky and is a horrible mess. I know yellows can be hard to apply, but this is just ridiculous.

Icing Blue Razeberry

Lots of visible bald spots on this one. Blue Razeberry is a oceany blue colour. This colour was promising but the formulation is just horrible, it's too bad.

So in closing, I think the colours in the bottles are really pretty and I was expecting these to be better than they turned out. I have seen other nail bloggers swatches of these (here are Edge of Sanity's pics) and they look pretty alright, maybe they have more patience. I think adding a basecoat and topcoat would really help these look better. The shimmer in these is not irritating at all, but the application is bad, bad bad. Stay away from this set. I know Icing polishes can be okay, and I have a couple of individual ones that are just fine, but this set is awful in my opinion.