Metallic polishes are ten a penny and dime a dozen these days (phrases which would both make for decent metallic nail polish names actually!), so it takes something pretty special for me to sit up and take notice of one. And with a name like Screaming Bright – and a colour that lives up to it – MAC have achieved just that!
MAC’s Screaming Bright is part of their recent permanent collection of polishes – a pale yellow gold that is SO bright, it almost starts to look silver… if that even makes sense! This is some seriously SHINY shizzle.
Simple golds, silvers and coppers are the staple of all nail polish brands, but Screaming Bright is far from your average straightforward metallic and consequently, it happily surpasses all expectations. It’s a chilly pale buttermilk gold, but with an almost celadon green cast to it from some angles – and from others it’s just so damn shiny, that’s it turns into a practically blinding silver. As ever, you can click on any of my photos to enlarge them to freakish levels in order to take a peek for yourselves.
Screaming Bright’s formula was similarly interesting… it felt almost like it was already dry on the brush, meaning you have to make sure you’ve got plenty of polish on there or else it seems to set even whilst you’re working with it – resulting in weird little specks of dried up polish appearing, playing havoc with achieving that much-desired slick and smooth finish. So aim for the lacquer to be near enough dripping off your brush and go against all your better instincts to swipe off excess on the sides of the bottle!
Unlike many metallic lacquers, Screaming Bright dries with a resolutely brushstroke-free finish; no polish can quite compete with Minx’s uber-shiny liquid metal finish, but for ease of application (and a MUCH cheaper cost per mani), Screaming Bright does the trick well enough for me. [And yes, I have tried Minx – they looked great but started peeling badly within a few days, and one whole nail came clean off when I was tying up the back of my friend’s wedding dress! Not cool.]
The number of different metallic casts peeking through Screaming Bright keeps it interesting… and when it hits the sun – KACHING! If robots could wear nail polish (and somehow had their own autonomous sense of style), I’m sure they’d all be sporting Screaming Bright. It’s total sci-fi chic with its start button set to brilliance. This is one polish so metallic, you can practically hear it clinking!
Looks good with: Barbarella fantasies, sci-fi chic, not wanting to stump up for a Minx mani
Drying time: 1 min
Coats required: 2
Chips: 3 days
MAC Screaming Bright nail polish, $110, see all MAC locations in Hong Kong here
Note: this product was provided for my consideration.
Through The Looking Glass 