Sally Hansen Palm Beach Jellies

Nail Wheel Wednesday is going to stay on hiatus today so I can share some polishes that are so new to my stash that the display hasn't made it into a display post yet—the Palm Beach Jellies from Sally Hansen, six limited edition sheer colors in the Triple Shine line. Before I get to swatches, here's the display, which I found at Meijer earlier this month. Colors left to right: Water Melon, Sea Through, Ice Tint, Vitamin D-light, Jell-ous, and Grape Jelly.



Bottles in the order I would have arranged the display:



Because these seemed to break nicely into two groups of three, and because I did not have the time or the patience to swatch them individually, I did Skittles, starting with the three warm shades. Vitamin D-Light is a red-leaning orange, Water Melon is a warm medium pink, and Jell-ous is a deep rose pink.



Top to bottom: all three warm shades layered on top of each other, Vitamin D-light (3 coats), Water Melon (2 coats), and Jell-ous (3 coats).



You can see that these are very sheer. Water Melon is the most pigmented; that needed two coats to reach the same level of opacity as three coats of the other warm hues. The formula on these is much thinner than the OPI Sheer Tints, more the consistency of a regular topcoat. Perhaps if I'd gone to five or six coats, I would have gotten closer to bottle colors and these would have looked less alike, but I lack the attention span for that many coats of the same thing. I wouldn't wear these on their own anyway, what with the sheerness showing off Mr. Peelies' shenanigans.

I moved on to the cool colors: Grape Jelly, a purple, Ice Tint, a deep sky blue, and Sea Through, a green.



The cool shades on the nail, top to bottom below: gradient with all three, Grape Jelly (3 coats), Ice Tint (3 coats), and Sea Through (2 coats).



As Doge would say, such sheer. The thin formula does make it easy to make smooth gradients without a sponge, but the sheerness makes the overall effect barely visible anyway, at least on bare nails.

Of course I had to try these layered. Here are the warm colors over Sinful Shine Wisp (which, yeah, I didn't let dry quite long enough before adding the jellies). Top to bottom: gradient with all three, 3 coats of Vitamin D-light, 2 coats of Water Melon, and 3 coats of Jell-ous. Looking at this, I find myself wishing the Vitamin D-light was more orange and Jell-ous more red or orchid or something to distinguish it more from Water Melon.



And now the cool colors. Top to bottom: gradient with all three, then 3 coats each of Grape Jelly, Ice Tint, and Sea Through. Worn this way, these colors look soft and pretty and very spring-like to me.



Since the three warm colors were nearly the same, I only used one of them when it came time to try these over silver (the same as in yesterday's post, OPI Your Royal Shine-ness. Top to bottom (three coats of each): Jell-ous, Grape Jelly, Ice Tint, Sea Through. Grape Jelly barely shows up against this silver; that made me a little sad. Sea Through was my favorite over the silver.





Overall, I was disappointed with how these looked on the nail versus how they looked in the bottles. I knew they'd be sheer, but not as sheer as they turned out to be. Look at the color circles on the display; those are lighter than the bottle colors but not that much, so apparently they based those on using many coats of color. I guess the "jellies" in the collection name led me think they'd be more like the L'Oreal Miss Candy Gellies, though that was dumb, since quite clearly they're more transparent. (Hah, clearly ... transparent ... I amuse myself.) I still want to play with them more, though. Maybe I'll leave the tops off the bottles for a while to thicken them up and hope that gives me a better color payoff. In their favor, they were not streaky, even the ones that I used only two coats of.

Of course I did some comparisons between the OPI Sheer Tints and these Sally Hansen Palm Beach Jellies, but since I also dragged out my Maybelline Water colors and some of the L'Oreal Miss Candy shades and even the two sheerest Essie hues in my stash, those comps are going to have to go in their own post. Look for that tomorrow or Friday.