Sally Hansen Magnetic Nail Color

Since I took Monday off for the holiday and have so many things I want to share, here I am with a rare weekend entry. This is one of my "public service" posts, in which I swatch things I justified buying by telling myself I'd be helping people if I showed how they looked on the nail. Also, they were on sale, so you can see I was pretty much powerless to leave any of the colors in the store. Here are the eight shades in the Sally Hansen Magnetic range, fresh from Meijer, still in their plastic overwraps (more on those later). Left to right: Graphite Gravity, Silver Elements, Ionic Indigo, Electric Emerald, Polar Purple, Red-y Response, Kinetic Copper, Golden Conduct.



Because my commitment to public service via swatching waned a bit once I got these home, I did Skittle swatches. (I was encouraged that that was fine by the fact that there were exactly two handfuls, excluding thumbs. Poor thumbs, so rarely get to be in the blog.) Here are the warmer shades; top to bottom, Polar Purple, Red-y Response, Golden Conduct, Kinetic Copper:



Golden Conduct looked the most interesting, what with the contrast between the flecked/dark and frosty/light areas. Kinetic Copper looked a bit like that, too, though it didn't show off as much since it was on my small pinky nail.



Here are the cooler-toned shades; top to bottom, Electric Emerald, Ionic Indigo, Silver Elements, Graphite Gravity:



Silver Elements is the most eye-catching of this group, since it has the light/dark frosty/flecked contrasts going on.



I used two coats of all of these. As you can see, the magnets are the same across the board. I held them as shown in Step 2 of the directions on the display, placing the lip on the cap just in from the base of my nail.



Unlike the image shown for Step 3, I did not get up and down wave shapes, just curves. Maybe my nails are the wrong width? Maybe I needed to set the magnet off center? I don't know. I also don't understand how they got the patterns shown on the display photo. Held the magnet diagonally? Photoshop? I need to do more experimenting, for sure.



Remember I said there'd be more about the plastic overwraps? That's now. The point is, the pretty wavy colors on the caps are on the overwrap, not the cap itself. I suppose it would be possible to carefully slice around the overwrap just under the cap using an X-acto knife and preserve the cap wrap. I didn't do that. I did what I'm guessing most people will—tear the wrap along the perforations which run the whole length of the bottle and end up with pretty stuff for the trash. With the wraps off, it's much more obvious how similar the Sally Hansen bottles are to other brands of magnetics, namely Nails Inc., Finger Paints, and Color Club.



One nice thing about all these brands is that the magnet is on a removable overcap (thus the need for the plastic wraps, as I'm sure cretins would steal the magnets), so you don't have to deal with a wet brush sticking up in the air while you hold the magnet over your nail. Here's a Color Club demonstrating this feature:



To sum up: the Sally Hansen magnetics work fine, but I suspect at least half of them are dupes of Color Club or other brands, so check your stashes before you shop.