The results of my "Lay It On Me" layered nail polish experiment

So if you read my last post about the new products I spotted at Rite-Aid on Friday, you know that I was particularly intrigued by this new line of layered nail polishes called "Lay It On Me". These polishes retail for $3.99 a bottle and I just had to pick one up to see how it works:

I purchased "Lay It On Me Ra", which is a bright neon pink shade on top (photo makes it look orange), a black cream in the middle and a medium blue cream on the bottom:

Now the display clearly states: "Do not shake! Just dip and apply for a surprise color and a very special effect!"

So I took special precautions when I drove home with this polish. I made sure it was sitting upright on the passenger seat next to me, and I wedged it in between my purse and the back of the seat to make sure it wouldn't fall over and accidentally mix the shades.

When I first opened the bottle, I thought I better experiment on a piece of paper first, just to make sure there wasn't some sort of technique I needed to practice in order to swirl the colors just right. Here's the result of my practice session on paper:

Hum...not too promising, is it? No matter what I did, I just couldn't seem to get the blue to show up at all, and I definitely couldn't get the colors to swirl. In fact, I even tried painting in a circular motion, but all that did was blend the colors.

Finally I just decided to plunge right in and put this polish on my nails. Are you ready to see the results?

Drum roll please.............here you go:

Yuck, yuck, yuck! As you can see, some nails look a bit more "marbled" than the others, but for the most part this polish ended up blending into a weird shade of dark brownish-red with little streaks of black here and there. Also, on my pinky you can see that the neon pink that was there from the first coat is showing through on the second coat.

Oh, and did I mention that this polish is matte? Yep. The picture above is after one coat of clear top coat. I just couldn't stand the look of this matte so I had to add a top coat. Also, the polish itself is thick and quite hard to work with--it didn't spread easily on the nails and when all was said and done, I was left with a very goopy, bumpy, matte, brick-red color that took forever to dry.

Oh and let me show you what the bottle looked like while I was in the middle of this manicure:

As you can see, the black gets pulled to the top and quickly mixes with the pink. There's just no way to prevent this from happening, no matter how quickly you work. I tried very hard to pull the blue from the bottom but it was impossible (you were right, Halifax!). By the time the brush reaches the middle layer (black) the blue gets dominated by the black and you just cannot not see it by the time you pull the brush out of the bottle.

Sorry, ladies, but I just can't recommend this one. It's funny that they call this line "Lay It On Me" because I just kept thinking to myself when I was using this, "They really should have called this polish 'Lay It On Thick.'" If you're not familiar with the term "lay it on thick", here's the definition from thefreedictionary.com:

lay it on thick Informal

1. To exaggerate; overstate.

See! That's a way more appropriate name for this product, right? :)

PS: And congrats to Papaya Bunny who predicted that this color would end up muddy brown. You totally called it!