Etude House Mint Choco Chip nail polish review

It seems my love of desserts is starting to spill over into my love of nail polish… nearly every polish I wear these days reminds me of something deliciously edible! So after the blue strawberry slushie of pa AA162, the choc mint milkshake of Deborah Lippmann’s Rockin’ Robin and the cupcake-inspired Nail’s Inc Sprinkles Collection, it’s time for a set of polishes inspired by ice-creams – Etude House’s Sweet Recipe Collection.

Etude House is a Korean cosmetics brand famous for cutesy girlie designs and playful fun packaging – and their adorable ice-cream cone nail polish bottles have got to be some of their best work yet! The first one I have to show you is probably my favourite of the bunch, Mint Choco Chip… and yes, how did you guess, it involves yet another variant on all things turquoise!

Mint Choco Chip features a pale minty aqua base studded with a well thought-out mixture of glitters: large, medium and small black hex glitters, pink square glitter and pale green hex glitter, with varying levels of iridescence. Often, cheaper glitter nail polish opts for the “whatever we found in the factory that day” approach, but all these colours, shapes and sizes totally compliment the ice-cream pastel base, creating a lovely and unique nail polish shade.

This was my first time trying Etude House nail polishes, and I have to say I was very impressed; honestly, this is the kind of glitter mix you’d expect to find in some impossible-to-get-hold-of, created-with-blood-sweat-and-unicorn-tears indie, but all for a HUGELY affordable price point (Etude House polishes generally retail between $20-25) and at a more than decent quality. The waffle cone brush handle was short but had good grip and was easy to control, whilst the brush itself was similarly short but did the job well enough (although I did notice a couple of my other brushes had a few wonky bristles that will need trimming).

Meanwhile, Mint Choco Chip’s formula was thin but good; the aqua base colour is quite sheer but builds up nicely with a couple of coats, to create that “glitter jelly sandwich” effect so beloved of us nail polish fans. I found it relatively easy to get a good spread of glitter onto the brush, although you may need a bit more targeted “splodging” (highly technical term) to get the glitter exactly where you want it on the nail.

I absolutely loved Mint Choco Chip’s combination of so many sizes of black glitter showing up at different depth of colour depending on how many coats of polish were layered on top – a really pretty, soft and dreamy effect. The glitter I was least sold on was the green hexes, but thankfully that seems to have been sprinkled into the formula pretty sparsely, to provide just the merest lily-green twinkle every now and then.

Do I even need to say I fell in love with Etude House’s Mint Choco Chip? Given that mint choc chip is actually one of my least favourite ice-cream flavours, I’m quite happy gobbling up gorgeous nail polish versions of it instead – now if only I could stick to dessert-themed make-up as opposed to the real things, I’m sure my waistline would be much happier!

Looks good with: Chocolate wafer rolls, whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top
Drying time: 3-5 minutes
Coats required: 2-3
Chips: 3-5 days

Etude House Mint Choco Chip, Spring 2013 Sweet Recipe Collection, gifted to me by my beautiful friend Elle; see all Etude House stores in Hong Kong here