Over the last few days the weather here was dark and gloomy, so I’ve been wearing a wintery Essie combination of Cocktail Bling and A Cut Above.

Cocktail Bling is from Essie’s winter collection from last year.  I haven’t used it much but I wanted a pale polish, so I pulled it out.  It’s a pale bluish grey that’s very wintery.  It feels cold to look at!  It also has a sort of powdery, soft feel that I like.  The formula is good and it only took two coats.  I also used Essie’s Good to Go topcoat because I’ve had issues using Dior topcoat over Essies before, but I still ended up with a bit of shrinkage at the top of my cuticles with Good to Go, which was a little disappointing.  I would think that the Essie formula should at least be perfectly compatible within the line.

After a couple of days I topped this with one coat of Essie’s A Cut Above, from the Luxeffects line.  A Cut Above is three different sizes of light pink glitter.  With all one color glitter like this, it gives a speckled, dotty look that’s a little bit more grown up than most glitter topcoats.  I liked this combination a lot – the pink contrasted just enough with the bluish tones of Cocktail Bling and it gave a blushy flash in the sun.  The formula on A Cut Above was good, and the glitter was easy to spread out across the nail.  This could be a nice early spring combination, too.

I’ve had both of these polishes since last year and I feel so virtuous for digging them out and enjoying them!  They should still be relatively easy to find in the Essie salon packaging, although they’re probably harder to find on the retail side now.