Brand: Yves Rocher

Along with my recent hauls of Yves Rocher’s new Botanical Colour Nail Polish, which I adore, I also picked up a few colors from their previous line of Vernis Brilliance Nail Lacquer (which doesn’t seem to be on the Canadian site anymore!). It normally retailed for CA$9, which is 50% more than the new line costs (CA$6), though I got it on sale for just over CA$2.

One of the shades I got is Nude Rose / Rose nude (13), a pale, peachy beige pastel with a touch of pink. It has “invisible shimmer” which translates into a very soft glow on the nail: it’s so subtle that it’s not even pearly. You’d definitely read this as a cream finish.

Initially, I tried applying this in thin coats, like I usually do. Attempting to apply the polish this way resulted in bald spots, and I ended up using—I kid you not—five coats to get it to a good level of evenness. So I removed it all and started over.

You need to use thicker coats with this polish. It actually has a thicker consistency, so I was surprised that thin coats worked so poorly. You have to load up the brush a bit, then let the polish pool out over the nail. The formula self-levels quite well, so just let it do its thing. I only needed two coats with this process.

Now, it is possible that my bottle ended up with a dud brush. I checked the other Vernis Brilliance I got in the same order, and its brush is long and a bit wide and flat. The brush in my bottle of Nude Rose kind of pinches together at the end, so it’s more difficult to spread the polish out nicely. I feel that if the brush was not defective, I would not have had the application problems I had when trying to use thinner coats.

Overall, I like this color a lot—and I can be pretty tough on soft shades, since they’re not my favorite to wear—and I’d recommend it if it didn’t appear to be phased out at Yves Rocher.

Yves Rocher Vernis Brilliance Colour Nail Polish is 0.16 fl oz / 5 mL and retails for CA$9. It is free of toluene, formaldehyde, and dibutyl phthalate (DBP), and it is made in France.

Yves Rocher was founded in 1959. The company is based in La Gacilly, France.