Thought all my Gum Leaf Mafia Australian/NZ nail polish girls would be interested in this: Sally Hansen Nail Art Pens! ^_^
Over here in Aus the range of Sally Hansen has up until now been rather scarce. Even though they’re stocked by a billion major chains the range usually only consist of a few nail treatments and maybe 2 of the light pink polishes. Imagine my surprise when I walked into Priceline to a whole new display of them *_*
There was a whole shelf of the Insta-dri’s in some pretty weird colours. They didn’t have the fluros which lovely Brooke sent me from the US but if these ones are anything like them I would definitely grab some if I had the money.
More interestingly they had some really pretty looking HD colours…
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There was also a deal where if you bought anything from the lip/nail collection you could get one of the treatment pens for free… So I bought a light pink nail art pen for $13 and got a Corrector pen (which cost $16) for free… While it looked like a good deal at the time here’s my review…
So nail art pen first. The best way I can describe this is it’s like a paint pen. It comes with a clear tip to begin with…
To get the colour out you have to press up and down on some paper a few times.
Colour of the tip:
I put a falsie on and did a base coat of and Opi white so I could see how opaque it was. Because the tip is super pointy and thin I thought I would be able to get a nice detailed stroke.
Not so much.
It’s more like trying to paint using the wrong end of a paint brush. When colouring with a normal felt pen you press the pen to the surface and it leaves a trail of pigment, when colouring with this it basically puts out a watery blob that you can sort of move around with the tip.
It did nice even dots very easily and the colour was very opaque straight out of the pen.
Unfortunately because it puts out such a huge amount of polish the drying time is a bit much. If you smudge it you end up with this:
Verdict: I don’t think it’s great for doing detailed work but for basics like dots and little designs it would be good. The drying time might be a turn off if you’re working on your natural nails. I think it’s not so great for the price though. Ok now on to the corrector pen. The idea of it is just say you’d done a fantastic nail art design and then go to finish with a French tip and make a huuuuge mistake *o* rather than starting again you can just wipe away the mistake by drawing on it with the corrector pen. It comes with 3 different tips depending on the size of the mistake. *Edit* A couple of you lovely readers have pointed out that the corrector pen is actually used for removing polish from the skin and cuticles if you make a mistake rather than polish mistakes on the nail. Firstly the pen was actually recommended to me by the clerk at Priceline with the nail art pen saying that it was great to use and clean up mistakes in nail art, so firstly fail on the clerk for not knowing what she was talking about and fail on me for not reading the package properly. I did actually test it out on the skin too but apparently when I was posting half asleep this morning I forgot to include that part of review, double fail on me! Anyway on the skin/cuticles I found it to be a little bit pointless as it took quite a bit of effort to remove any polish rather than just mushing it into my skin and turning it purple. For a highly pigmented polish you would have to stop and clean the tip several times if you needed to clean more than one finger which I found frustrating and time consuming. I think for the price (assuming I hadn’t gotten it on sale) I would rather just use an orange stick with a little cotton and polish remover >_< */Edit*
Oh noes I made a huge mistake with dark purple nail polish what ever am I to do?!
Following the instructions I wiped over the mistake. The pen didn’t specify if the polish should be wet or dry when I used it. When removing wet polish it just kind of moved it around. To be honest you might as well use an orange stick covered in a tissue because it really just smudged everything. You can see the results below:
I let the remaining polish dry and then tried the pen again. All it seemed to do was scrape off polish layers and mush them around together. Results:
Verdict: I wouldn’t buy it. I tested it in several different situations and with different polishes etc and all it didn’t do anything different. I don’t think it would be useful for removing small mistakes without destroying the rest of the design. It’s a pity though because it’s such a good idea 🙁 Next post is going to be a circle lens review 😀 Have any of you had good results with a Sally Hansen Nail Art Pen? |
