KIKO Multi Effect Nail Lacquer

I recently discovered KIKO Makeup Milano, and have dived into their skin care range by doing a 30 day trial of their Skin Trainer, and so far so good - I can't wait to share the results with you on September 20! Since it would be rude to only try one product I also bought some nail polish that seemed interesting. They had some nice looking green and blue shades, but I really wanted to try something different so in the end I settled on - KIKO Multi-Effect Nail Lacquer in 06 Red & Mandarin.

This is supposed to be one of those multi polishes where you can either use the 2 colors on their own, or combine them by first applying the full shade (Red in this case) and then add a coat of the semi-sheer shade (Mandarin) to get the 3rd color - 3 looks in 1 as per this illustration from the KIKO web site:

In theory this sounds great and the shades looked really promising. My intention was to create an ombred look with 2 Red nails, 2 combos and a Mandarin nail in the middle. The end result - as you can see from the dodgy looking photo below, is that my nails don't look anything like what I had envisioned. To start with the shades don't look like the illustration, but fair enough when you buy things on line, this will happen every now and then - it's disappointing, but it's a risk you have to accept. So let's move on to talk about the formula.

The description of it says that "it's been created to guarantee an even release of color for quick drying time and a long lasting result". Well I'm sure it dries very quickly but unfortunately this formula is VERY thin, particularly the semi-sheer shade. In the pic below I'm wearing 2 coats of Red on my pinky, 3 coats of the combo on my ring finger and 5 (!!!!) of  Mandarin on the middle finger - and it's still far from the look I was going for. I PROMISE you that I wouldn't normally show a photo of nails in this state, but to be perfectly honest I was so disillusioned by this nail polish, and after 5 coats I felt that I needed to show them as they were.for illustration. I know that the Mandarin is a semi-sheer effect but I have never had to use 5 coats of any nail polish previously - ever.

On the plus side, both of the shades were easy to apply thanks to a nice wide and flat brush and it did go on evenly without leaving any streaks. The orange shade does eventually start to resemble the description and the red shade is actually a striking scarlet color, and it's probably the only one I will use out of these 3 multi-effect options.

The description claims that this is long lasting, and these colors as individual shades may very well be, but I'm not able to comment on that for 2 reasons; I had to apply so many coats that it would take a miracle for this not to end up smudged and damaged straight away, and I disliked the end result so much that I took it off immediately.

As you can tell, this product didn't work for me and while it really pains me to write a negative review about any product - I can not in all honesty say that my experience of this multi-effect lacquer was a good one. Please note that it might be a completely different experience with the Quick Dry and Laser nail polishes (1 color only) and I certainly don't want to discourage you from trying that, but don't get this particular multi-effect lacquer and expect that it's going to turn out as it's shown in the picture on the KIKO web site.