Swatches: Nabi Magnetic Nail Polish

For about a year or so a few of my favourite clothing store have started carrying Nabi magnetic nail polish, and it's always selling for 2 for $5. I've been tempted many times to get them because I wanted to get some magnetic polish but wasn't sure I would use it enough to justify the cost. However, the extremely low cost made me wonder if they would even work so I always resisted the urge. Last week I finally just gave in and bought two bottles. There were a lot of colours to choose from, but I ended up settling on a blue and a green. The blue one had no colour label on it and the green one was labelled as navy blue, but I did some searching and I think I bought "Ocean Blue" and "Dark Green".

I decided to try the blue one first. The brushes in these polishes are rather terrible. They're too spread out, and so it's impossible to paint your nails without either completely missing the edges or getting nail polish everywhere. I ended up doing a lot of clean up afterwards. It also took me a few tries to figure out the best way to use the magnet as these didn't have those useful ridges on the cap that most magnetic nail polishes have. Once I got the hang of it though it was super easy and the results were very pretty.

This was a really gorgeous blue to start with, and the stripes added a really cool texture and tone to it. Someone told me they reminded them of the movie Avatar, and I definitely agree! Maybe one day I'll use this polish to do some Avatar nails. The one downside of this colour is that it stains. Bad. I had to wait a couple days before taking pictures because my fingers were tinted blue and I couldn't get it to go away.

In contrast, the green colour didn't stain my nails at all. It took me much less time to paint my nails as I had finally figured out a good technique, but I still had to do a lot of clean up afterwards due to the poor brush quality. This colour was a little bit more demure, kind of an olive green, which I liked a lot.

I used the v-shaped magnet on these ones, it doesn't show well in the picture but it looked cool in real life. It gave a fun alternative to the diagonal stripes too.

It's cheap, it works, but is it worth it? I'm not sure. So I made a list of pros and cons.

Pros:

• MUCH cheaper than the other magnetic nail polishes I have seen.
• The colours I bought looked really nice on the nail and easily went on in one coat.
• The magnets work and come in different designs so you can make different patterns.

Cons:

• The smell. Holy fishballs does this polish smell bad. Thankfully it goes away once the polish dries.
• The lack of a ridge to keep the magnet off the wet polish made using it a little more difficult than it needed to be.
• The brush is absolutely terrible.

All in all, you get what you pay for. If you're looking for a cheap magnetic polish so you can try it out, then these are great! If you're looking at using magnetic polish on a regular basis, I would recommend investing in a better brand. You'll save a lot of time on clean-up, and maybe they won't smell quite so terrible. I'm happy I finally tried these out though, and I'm definitely going to be using them again.