Essence - Ice Crystals on my Window Review

After taking off the red I was in the mood for something light coloured and elegant and picked Ice Crystals on my Window from Essence's Crystalliced collection. It has been available since late December and can still be found here and there, sometimes discounted. I have three polishes from this collection - the delicate, slightly shimmery colours really hit a soft spot, but so far I have been somewhat disappointed in the quality.

Ice crystals is a very light cream shade with a peachy-rosé shimmer and white glass flecks. I the bottle that is. On the nail, the shimmer is rather subtle and the glass flecks only visible if you look closely. The closeup pictures look horrible and my cuticles are a mess, in reality it looked much neater and certainly adequate for everyday wear, though not at all perfect, as you cah see on the last picture. I think this shade suits me much better than a straight forward white, which makes my skin look horrible, and I rather enjoyed having the colour on my nails. I'll be on the lookout for similar polishes with a better formula in future.
The bottle shot unfortunately doesn't show the shimmer, but the overall shade is pretty close.

2 coats of Ice Crystals on my Window
1 Coat of Essence Better than Gel Nail topcoat

I'm wearing the Waking up in Vegas Dance topcoat on the ring finger here.

Price & availability: 1,75€ for 8ml. Limited, but still available in drugstores, etc. I have seen them in the sales basket for as little as 0,80€.

Formula & application: The formula was okay, slightly on the runny side. The brush seemed somewhat wider than the one on the colour&go polishes. The application was a mess unfortunately. The first coat was very streaky and while the streaks vanished, bald patches remained. The second coat was less streaky but still left bald patches. A third coat would have been needed for opacity, personally I don't mind the white of the nail showing with such colours so I left it at two. Even though I tried to apply thin coats, they ended up in a really uneven layer, forming thicker ridges here and there. The topcoat evened it out a little, but I still had a visible thick ridge where the polish began. Ugh. Not pretty. Drying time was acceptable.
To be fair, most other reviewers didn't seem to have huge problems with this one, so it may be just be my lack of skill where light colours are concerned.

Wear & tear: After one day a few tiny corners had flaked off and at the end of the second day I could pull the polish off half the nail. I didn't do anything strenuous at all those days. Rather disappointing.