Five Finger Friday Mint Greens

Hello Lab Partners! Allison here with Five Finger Friday!


As I was working on my polish stash spreadsheet last week, I realized I have a lot of mint green polishes. I didn’t realize I owned that many! So it was time to get swatching. Below are two photos of the five I selected to swatch: Sinful Colors Mint Apple, Barielle Sweet Adiction , RGB Minty, No Miss Melbourne Mint, and OPI Mermaid’s Tears.

With Flash. From Left to Right: Sinful Colors Mint Apple, Barielle Sweet Adiction , RGB Minty, No Miss Melbourne Mint, and OPI Mermaid’s Tears

Artificial Light, No Flash.

I had used three of these colors before; however, this was my first time trying RGB Minty and Barielle Sweet Addiction. For each color, I used two coats of polish. Please excuse the extra balm on the skin around my nails. My cuticles were feeling really dry, so after swatching, I left them to marinate in moisture. Here are the results:

Indoor, with flash. Thumb: Mermaid's Tears, Index finger: No Miss Melbourne Mint, Middle Finger: RGB Minty, Ring Finger: Barielle Sweet Addiction, Pinkie: Sinful Colors Mint Apple

Another view, to get a better shot of the thumb with Mermaid's Tears.

Conclusions:

OPI Mermaid's Tears: A little streaky on the first coat, but great in two. When I've had this one on before, it wore nicely--no chips for probably 6 days. This color is closest to Sinful Colors Mint Apple (on the pinkie), but a little more muted. My friend called it "Vespa Green," (the original Vespa green--almost seafoam), and that's a perfect description. It actually has the very slightest gray undertone, which you can see better in the photo of the bottle than you can on the nails. If you can't see the subtle gray, don't worry--I have a freakish sensitivity to undertones. It's like a superpower--I need to get a cape and call myself "Super Undertone Girl." I wouldn't be able to see the gray, either, if I didn't have other mint greens right there to compare with. This is why I love side-by-side swatching!

No Miss Melbourne Mint: No Miss is a lesser-known brand. I find it at Whole Foods Market, but you can also purchase it on-line. No Miss is a Florida-based company, which names its polishes after Florida cities. Because I live in Florida, this naming system intrigues me. As you can see from the photo, it's not really minty at all. It has quite a bit of silver/gray to it.  It's a frost, and although it's supposed to be a "one-coat" polish, it took two coats for opacity. I have to give it props, though; I hadn't worn this color in over two years, and it still applied beautifully.

RGB Minty:  Oh, RGB, how do I love thee? As with the other RGBs I've tried, this one was opaque in one smooth, streak-free coat. I applied a second coat for good measure, but it wasn't needed. This mint is by far the brightest of the lot and also the truest mint. Remember those super-hero undertone powers of mine? Well, here they are again--this polish has the tiniest bit of blue undertone. Nothing I would have seen had it not been next to other mint green polishes, so please don't think that this polish leans toward aqua. It is most definitely a true mint green.

Barielle Sweet Addiction: An interesting phenomenon occurred with this one: it applied darker than it looks in the bottle. If you look at the bottles, Sweet Addiction is not much darker than the polish next to it, Sinful Colors Mint Apple. On the nail, however, the polish isn't mint at all. I'd call it jade. It's a lovely color, just not what I expected. It was opaque in one coat but needed an additional coat for streak-free coverage.

Sinful Colors Mint Apple: For polish that I purchased on sale for 99 cents, Sinful Colors is great. This one took two coats for opacity. It's an interesting mint, with tiny white flecks, which don't make the polish at all grainy during wear; however, the polish. is a tad grainy during removal and, consequently,  a bit difficult to remove. Don't worry--it's not so difficult that you need to use the foil method to remove it, but it was more difficult to remove than the other colors I've shown you.

In a few days,  I'm going to show you a manicure using one of these mint greens: Sinful Colors Mint Apple. And it will come with a basic tutorial, suitable for even the most novice of our lab partners. Until then, sending you lab love!
--Allison