Vintage Valentines - Sally Hansen New Lengths - Espresso Frost

Warm red/brown shimmer  

Myself and fellow UK nail blogger, Lina-Elvira from Pretty Perfect Beauty have cooked up a plan for February to show off some of our older polishes, hence Vintage Valentines.

We agreed anything older than 5 years was vintage in nail polish terms, but I don't think I'm planning to share anything newer than 10 years.

So over this gloomiest of months we'll be sharing the HTF, the VHTF and the damn near impossible to find....

I'm kicking off with one of my favourite vintage brands, Sally Hansen New Lengths.  Back in the 90's (I think) they used this name for a range of colour polishes with self coloured tops.

Let me say that again, the polish lids were made of the same colour plastic as the polish inside the bottle.  How wonderful and crazy is that?  They had to make different coloured lids for all the polish colours!  And on a drugstore polish no less.

At some point they must've realised the error of their ways as a few of this bottle shape New Lengths have plain black lids.

I have a small collection of just 7 of these polishes, 6 with self-coloured lids, one without.  I'm pretty sure I picked these up on my first holiday to the US back in 1996 - one has a CVS price label on for $2.85!

The bottles are 13.3ml/0.45 fl oz with a tall lid and the brush is long, flexible and narrow.

So on with the pics & swatches..

Espresso Frost is a warm reddish brown with lots of gold shimmer that really comes alive in the sunlight.

Application with this was great, the narrow brush didn't cause me any problems and the formula was good, if thin in texture.

Swatches shown are 2 coats with no top coat.

I didn't have to add any thinner to these polishes, whatever magical combination of chemicals is in these 20 year old babies keeps them liquid and ready to go!   You can see the ingredients label above, suffice to say they're not 5-free, the only nasty I couldn't spot was Toulene.

And if you want to see more of the collection Kaz from Pretty-Random has a great reference guide though she doesn't quite have all of them (yet).

And don't forget to check out Lina-Elvira's first Vintage Valentine