Essie Fall 2014 Dress To Kilt Swatches & Review

Essie Fall 2014 – Dress To Kilt

Fall tends to be a time when brands start to bring out the shimmer but for Essie, Fall 2014 is all about luxe, saturated cremes. Dress To Kilt is a palette of six shades that blends rich autumnal hues with dusty neutrals that can be mixed and matched for nail art or simply worn in all their creme glory.

Formula & Application

Essie nail polish is 3-Free (Formaldehyde, Toluene, DBP). The square bottles are embossed with the Essie logo and the smooth plastic caps include an embossed ‘e’ on top. Bottles at mass retailers have stickers rather than embossing on the bottle. The brushes are thin, round and shorter than most. The bristles are very flexible, allowing you to easily fan out the brush to cover your nail width.

It’s a rare moment when I can say that every single polish in a collection gives two coat coverage but this is one of them. The smooth, easy-to-manipulate formula is very well pigmented, drying with a high gloss shine. The only downside is that Style Cartel stains so I needed my beloved Orly Cutique to get rid of the smurf nails.

Essie Dress To Kilt is a berry-based ruby red creme, along the lines of Essie Head Mistress.

Essie Dress To Kilt

Essie Fall In Line is a dusty jade green with a slight military fatigues feel. If you were to mix Zoya Evvie and Bevin, you’d have Fall In Line. I think of this as a cool-toned twist on the oh so popular Essie Sew Psyched.

Essie Fall In Line

Essie Partner In Crime is a rich, warm chocolate brown creme. It dries darker than the bottle implies but compared to Essie Little Brown Dress, it’s lighter and more definitively brown, not black.

Essie Partner In Crime

Essie The Perfect Cover Up is a greyed, blue-based teal creme. It’s VERY similar to Essie Mind Your Mittens (less pigmented & more blackened), and nowhere near as green as Essie Stylenomics (since you were wondering Curly Comedy).

Essie The Perfect Cover Up

Essie Style Cartel is a unique blue in that it straddles the line between cobalt and navy. It’s a very transitional blue in that respect. I have nothing quite like it in spite of my ridiculously large blue polish collection.

Essie Style Cartel

Essie Take It Outside is a neutral grey nude with a hint of cooling pink. If Essie Miss Fancy Pants was too yellow/tan for you, this would be a good option.

Essie Take It Outside

Essie Dress To Kilt

Bottom Line: As a fan, in general, of the Essie formula I’m a happy camper thanks to the excellent pigmentation. Aside from that, I like the overall color palette with Style Cartel (in spite of the staining) and Fall In Line being my standouts. I’m already picturing some sort of nail art incorporating those shades and Take It Outside so that gets a thumbs up as well.

The Essie Fall 2014 Dress To Kilt collection is available now at salons and mass retailers nationwide and online at Nordstrom.com, Kohls.com and Beauty.com. Essie nail polish retails for $8.50/ea. For more info, visit Essie.com.

Thoughts on the Essie fall collection? Which colors are calling your name?