Essie Matte About You. Or How I Thought I Was Living In a Lie

If you were to look at the matte tag in this blog, you may notice about a third of all my posts have been matted. I love the matte finish and the soft light it reflects. So far I've been using Rimmel Pro Matte Finish and I was in love. After reading a few blogs, I discovered that the this matte top coat was actually giving my manis a satin finish and not the full on matte effect. I decided to do some research and look for the best matte top coat to ensure I was actually in love with the matte finish and not the satin one. 

This is how I came across essie's Matte About You. I'd read in various places that essie MAY and OPI's Matte Top Coat gave the best results so off I went to this trustworthy eBay seller and only found MAY for sale. I got the bottle of polish today and I had to try it out straight away. 

I knew exactly what mani I wanted to try it with to have a truly matte finish. I started with two coats of Topshop in Celestial, a beautiful periwinkle blue creme that is no longer on sale. There are plenty of dupes out there but the quality of Topshop polishes is impressive so I stuck with this one. Please excuse the crappy clean up I knew, I would have to clean up the rest of the polishes later. They get cleaner, I promise. 

Once Celestial was almost dry, I dabbed one coat of essence in The Huntsman from the Snow White Collection. I even got a long bar glitter that I didn't know the polish included.  Dabbing FTW! This took a while to dry so I applied a coat of Seche Vite to speed up the process. 

This is where I decided to put one coat of Rimmel PMF on first to see it would compare to MAY. Pretty  and soft, right? 

I let the mani dry completely before applying one coat of MAY. 

I didn't really see any difference but the I thought it may have had to do with the layering of matte polishes. So I started again to make sure there was clear difference.

More after the break.

I painted two coats of Orly in Blue Collar on my index and ring fingers and two coats of B Collection by Bloom in Cologne on my middle finger and pinky.

I applied the two top coats on two fingers each and look hard for the difference. Can you guys see it? 

I can after two coats of matte top coat, but ever so subtly and in macro shots. Below is MAY, which show a good matte effect. 

And PMT. I would say this reflects the light in a different way but the amount of light is the same. Get me? 

 

I may have gotten a dud Matte About You or a really good Pro Matte Finish. I guess I won't know. For the three weeks that I waited for MAY to  arrive (yes, it take that long but it's not like I didn't have other polishes to play around with. Ha!), I thought I had been living in the lie that PMF was matte instead of just a satin finish but after this little experiment, I have been left in limbo. Is it or isn't it? 

Do you own any matte top coats? If you do, can you tell the difference between satin and true matte? I may need to look further into this...

Till next time, 

Laura