The plain, unvarnished truth! (Boots No.7 Colourlock Nail Enamel)

Member Name: nikkisly

Product:	Boots No.7 Colourlock Nail Enamel
Date:	25/11/01 (201 review reads)
Rating:

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Mr nikkisly and I have been invited to a wedding and, as usual, there has been much argument about what I intend to wear.

The last wedding I went to was something of a personal fashion disaster. It involved three nights stay at a very exclusive hotel and naturally I took several outfits with me in an effort to look stunning. I went up to the hotel bedroom to change before the ceremony, only to find that my lemon chiffon dress had mysteriously acquired a thick, black grease stain across the front. My second outfit, a pale green suit, lasted through the ceremony until the photographs when someone spilled a pint of Guinness down the back of it. Outfit number three, a navy silk trouser suit lasted ten minutes into the reception when a harassed waitress had her elbow jogged and dumped a whole serving dish of Coronation Chicken in my lap. The remaining photographs taken show me cavorting round in a pair of striped pyjamas given to the groom as a joke wedding present. However, if you think that was a nightmare, consider the wedding before that when I managed to turn up wearing an identical outfit to the bride!

Hence I am understandably somewhat paranoid about weddings, especially this one which is a bit of a high society do. I have carefully checked what the bride is intending to wear (scarlet!) and I have bought a silver trouser suit. I have the matching handbag, the shoes are on order so all I needed was some nail varnish to complete the look. (Not to mention hopefully concealing the fact that I will have been hard at work on a dairy farm only two hours before the start of the wedding!)

The Boots no 7 Colour Lock range had exactly the colours I was looking for. I dithered for ages between "Glacier" which is an opaque silvery colour, "Thunder" which is a deep gunmetal grey and a third silver glittery one whose name I can't actually read on the bottle as the transparent label is practically invisible against the polish.
At £4.85 for a 15 ml. bottle, they weren't the cheapest available but the colours were absolutely perfect, plus, as an added bonus, buying all three bottles entitled me to a free sterling silver and 'diamond' pendant necklace with matching earrings.

According to the blurb on the back of the bottle, this nail polish purports to be "fast drying". (I assume it says that on the back of the glitter one too.) After eight minutes my first coat of "Glacier" was still tacky and it was a full twenty minutes before I felt it was safe to apply a second coat. The second coat failed dismally to achieve an even coverage on my nails, as did the third coat and, after an incredible one hour and twenty minutes, the fourth. At that point, I gave up and started again.

The anonymous glittery one was unremarkable. Like most glitter nail polishes, it is basically a clear varnish with minute particles of glitter suspended in it. However, unlike the glitter polishes I have used before, the particles were either too small or too thinly dispersed because even after two coats the sparkle was barely evident. Again, after 4 coats I gave up and reached for the remover pads.

"Thunder" was the best of a bad bunch. Being a dark colour, the coverage was better (although still somewhat streaky) and two coats left my nails looking satisfactory rather than glamourous. Yet it chipped and peeled within eight hours - very obviously being so dark a shade - and when I removed it, I found that it had stained my nails a fetching shade of grime. I had to resort to scrubbing my hands with neat bleach to remove the residual colour since nail polish remover pads just couldn't cope.

Again, according to the legend, this nail enamel is supposed to be hard wearing. Now, for me, Rimmel nail polish has been known to last a week through gardening, working on dairy farms, and using my computer keyboard. That is hard wearing. Colour Lock ha
s so far lasted at longest one day and didn't just fade away at the tips of the nails but fell off in great chunks. And all I did was eat a meal in a restaurant, a bit of light housework and normal hand washing.

The bottle assures me that this product is fragrance free, hypoallergenic and conditioning. I can't vouch for it's conditioning prowess since it never seemed to stay on my nails for long enough to have any noticeable effect. I'm not sure that a product like nail polish, which smells strongly of...well...nail polish, can legitimately be described as fragrance free but one thing I did notice was that the smell lingers on and on and on, long after the polish has dried. (While we were eating our restaurant meal, someone at our table actually commented that they could smell it.)

The integral brush with which the enamel is applied is too thick and unwieldy, painting not just my nails but the sides of my fingers and my cuticles too. The overall effect is messy, particularly as the polish takes so long to dry and is thus very prone to smudging.

At the time of writing this opinion, there is one other opinion about this polish on site which, I should point out in the interests of fairness, gives it a 5* rating. My rating has to be a disappointing 1*, but even so I am more than prepared to trust the writer of the other opinion. I have a friend, who is highly delighted with Colour Lock although she has tried two of the three shades described above and pronounced them awful. It therefore seems that some shades in the range are better than others and hence satisfaction or otherwise is more due to the luck of the draw than to the product itself.

I will be shopping around for another nail colour to compliment my outfit and using these three for stopping ladders in tights. And to add insult to injury, my free 'diamond' jewellery broke the first time I wore it.

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