Today I have a very special polish for you.. one that was on my wish list for quite some time. It was a present from Mr. NB, who I can honestly say is the most supportive and encouraging person I have ever met.

Now to meet.. Deborah Lippmann’s Mermaid’s Dream!

Mermaid’s Dream

Swatches, review and a trainful of pictures after the jump..

Deborah Lippmann’s polishes can be considered part of the “high-end” crowd. They can be purchased from her website, found on online marketplaces (typically for much more than you would pay through other venues) and found at stores such as “Beauty Brands”. They average $18 and are worth every penny. They each are packaged in their own little box:

And are in what are widely considered to be one of the most awesome bottle designs:

The brushes fan out beautifully which, in addition to the high quality formulas, result in effortless application.

I have dreamily looked at countless swatches of this color, and was never really sure what the formula was like. I can tell it’s textured but is it sheer? Opaque? Jelly? What exactly am I looking at? I could never figure it out. So today I will try to answer all of the questions I once had.

Deborah Lippmann “Mermaid’s Dream” is a nail polish jam-packed with glitter. This is basically the majority of what this entire formula is.

(The size of these glitters are relative to each other, what I will call “larger” are the dark blue specks/glitter that can easily be seen to the naked eye.)

There are the sparser, larger blue hexagon glitter that you can easily see sprinkled throughout in these pictures. However I find it interesting to note that without pretty extreme magnification, these do appear circular in both photograph and in person.

Then there are equal amounts of smaller gold and teal glitter, again these appear circular BUT when magnified these are actually in fact square shaped!

Lastly there is a very generous helping of extra small pearlescent glitter, almost dust like it is so plentiful, small and fine.

This makes up the majority of this polish as all of this is simply suspended in a transparent base that flashes with golden iridescence in the light.

Here are some pictures taken in various light and angle to demonstrate this:

Crazy right? I knew this polish had glitter but I didn’t know that it IS a glitter! Nor does it look like one in person! I think we should create a new category for madness such as this.

So, who knew all of that would result in something that truly resembles mermaid scales? Deborah Lippmann, that’s who. (but trust me, I both understand and empathize with that price tag of hers)

This lacquer covers well and all that is needed is two coats before it turns opaque.

For comparison, in this swatch I wanted to show you the difference between one coat and two:

Index, Middle & Pinky all have 2 Coats. Ring has 1 Coat. No topcoat.

SWATCHES!

The texture you see is shown in person as well. It does not feel as rough as it looks, however it does dry to what I would call a dry, fine grit sandpaper finish. So do keep a topcoat on hand if this bothers you. I test drove this polish both with and without a topcoat and both ways it had no chips and barely any tip wear after a full week. This is one tough cookie (which also results in a harder removal, although not quite as hard as typical glitter).

A few things to make note of:

I tried a matte topcoat thinking I may stumble unto some extremely cool effect. That was, of course, horrifically wrong thinking. This color is so complex with so much depth and shine, all my matte topcoats left it looking like I had simply dipped my nails into milky wax plus never even fully matte-ified it. (I will say the matte topcoat did make it feel like reptilian skin which was pretty neat)

Her website is currently sold out of this one (and as I noted above, Ebayers seem to be charging far more than I believe they should) however I did find this on Amazon for her retail price ($18) here: Deborah Lippmann’s Mermaid’s Dream

If anyone has ever heard, seen or known of any dupes or similar comparison polishes, please let me know! I haven’t found a single thing I can compare this to and would love to be able to offer alternatives.

Sigh. It’s truly mermaid-esque.