Ebony is the second polish from Dior’s Mitzah Bricard Collection (I reviewed the other polish, Camel, here.)  It’s a dark, cool brown inspired by the color of a leopard’s spots.

The Mitzah Bricard Collection is named for Dior’s muse, who loved leopard print.  The collection is a limited edition, luxurious offering that has been available in Europe for a while, and it’s now available at Sephora in the U.S.

Camel and Ebony are the two polishes from the collection, and were inspired by the colors of leopard print.  They even come in black boxes that are printed with the name of the collection, not the normal dark blue Dior box.   The formula on Ebony was wonderful – creamy and pigmented, and still thin.  I only needed two coats for my swatches.

I’m not normally a fan of really dark polishes, and in normal wear Ebony looks very dark, almost black in most lights.  But I liked it much more than I thought I would.  This polish seems somehow not vampy to me–I think it’s because the color is much cooler than most colors this dark.  It doesn’t have any red undertone; it’s a greyed-coffee darkness, much different than a burgundy that just veers so dark as to look black, or a dark purple.  I’ve seen a lot of descriptions calling this a dark chocolate brown, but I think it’s too cool for that-it doesn’t read chocolate to me at all.  It’s more woody or animal fur to my eye.

In the shade you can see how deep this looks, but not exactly black.

I also tried a coat of Nfu Oh 49 on top.  In the bottle, Nfu Oh 49 has a gorgeous red-purple tint and lots of green iridescence, but this didn’t come out on the nail.  The result was okay but not noticeably different than two other similar Nfu Oh flakies I have.  They just look like orange flakes on the nail.  It was okay, and kind of pretty for fall, but I was disappointed in the Nfu Oh.

I like Ebony for a dark brown that isn’t reddish, especially with the nice Dior formula.  I do have to also report that my Ebony bottle has the first wonky Dior brush I’ve received.  It looks to me like it didn’t get the final step that cuts the tapers down the side of the brush – it’s just all straight across the bottom, like an OPI brush.  This made it much harder to use, although it wasn’t as disastrous as I thought it would be when I first pulled it out.  I didn’t do any clean-up, and you can see in my pictures that I was able to keep the polish from going all over my cuticles, but it ended up straighter across the top than normal; the curve at my cuticles is not as nice as it would be with the normal Dior brush.  For a polish this expensive, it’s kind of irritating to get a messed up brush.

The Mitzah polishes are available only through some Sephora stores and the Sephora website in the U.S., at least so far.