Essie Leading Lady

This post is dedicated to my beautiful sister Kate, whose birthday is today. Happy Birthday Sis!

Essie released Leading Lady as part of the eponymous Leading Lady collection for winter 2012, and describes it as a "supreme deep red with glitter." I'm sorry but that is so lame. I'm sure I'm not the only polish enthusiast who gets it with large mainstream polish manufacturers all but ignoring a potentially ripe marketing technique, ie a well thought out, well constructed polish descriptor. I mean, come on Essie!

Leading Lady is a lovely dimensional deep raspberry red glitter jelly polish suspending abundant small/medium silver hex glitters. It has fabulous bottle presence. Something about the ratio of glitters to base or the rich nature of the saturated dark red base tint with its ruby/fuchsia flush and the way light refracts through it from the glitters' reflective silver surfaces, something somewhere in the construct of this polish translates into an exquisitely lush color aspect, like the way true silk velvet does. I mean, yes it's a red sparkly polish but visually there's more to it than that. I can't quite put my finger on it, but whatever it is gives this particular red sparkly polish an almost muscular opulence.

Application of Leading Lady was interesting. It's a fast drying jelly glitter with a gelatinous quality that for me didn't self-level particularly well and gave a tumbled sense to the glitter spread. Coverage is very good, with opacity and bottle color reached at two coats. Leading Lady dries naturally very quickly to a somewhat dull, not completely even or smooth surface, which is greatly improved by topcoat and surprised me by requiring more than one coat of it. Despite the fomulary quirks, it isn't particularly problematic to apply. Just... well, interesting in an atypical way.

Photos show two coats of Leading Lady over treatment and basecoat with a topcoat of Seche Vite followed later by and additional topcoat of Poshe.

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

Essie Leading Lady

So Eleanor, are you wondering why I would want another red sparkly polish in my collection considering the small troop of them (like Picture Polish Dorothy, Orly Star Spangled, Picture Polish O'hara, China Glaze Ruby Pumps, Butter London Chancer and China Glaze Ring in the Red) that I've already assembled? Actually, I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't even begin to wonder about something like this because you have the same kind of appetite for color that I do and your native intelligence in this area has got it covered already. I mean, can one really have too many sparkly reds? See, there you go.

In point of fact, I find that Leading Lady has an exceptionally fierce aspect to its personality. That's in addition to the qualities we usually find in sparkly red polishes, that they are festive and special occasion oriented and full of lively overt femininity and such. There's a point on the chromatic schematic (like that? I just made it up) where cool-toned/blue-based reds on the one side cross over and become magenta/fuchsia/berry reds, and I would argue that Leading Lady lives and breathes and has her own zip code right smack on that point. It's a landmark sparkly red and as such needs no other explanation for its presence in our troop.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

love,
Aunt Liz