NOTD?: Crown For Whatever, by China Glaze...

Spoiler alert; this polish is frustrating, and is why my reviews for the Happily Never After collection are late this year; all the way through the reviews, I keep pausing to try this one again.


I didn't want it to come to this, but I'm going to be completing my Halloween polish reviews with a whimper this year, as today's spotlight polish doesn't agree with me. I watched a few YouTube vloggers swatching this polish and it looked great on them, so I couldn't wait for the UK release of the collection to get my own bottle, but now I've concluded that you need to be a gifted manicurist to get it to work - so I'm out.

Lets find out what the nature of the problem with Crown For Whatever is...


Crown For Whatever is a medium blue shade, with a matte formula filled with pink shimmer. Unfortunately the shimmer sinks down as the polish dries, so is more subtle on the nail compared to it's appearance in the bottle. With topcoat it's a near-dupe for OPI Turn On The Northern Lights.

I wanted to adore this polish as it is a stunner in the bottle, but the polish formula is not great to work with, which spoils everything for me; it's a one coater, but it begins to dry as soon as you take the brush out of the bottle, so it's a race against time to apply it neatly as it becomes impossible to smooth it within just a few seconds - I had remove it from my nails and start again countless times, as it always dries before I get it smoothed out. I then left it for a few days and tried again after getting really worked up, only to encounter more of the same. The terrible swatch photo shows you how messy the finish is [sorry I didn't do any clean up, but this was after loads of repeated mani's, so I was really frustrated].



A stunning-looking polish that I did really try to make work as I love the look of it, but ultimately I decided that it's not really worth the hassle for me; I paint my nails to unwind at the end of the day, but I hear the final few seconds of the Countdown clock playing in my head whenever I pick this up to try and put it on. I advise buying Turn On The Northern Lights and a matte topcoat instead...