This article originally appeared on xoVain.
Last month marked the start of a new xoVain series that highlights black-owned beauty brands. This month, I’m excited to continue the series by sharing with you my thoughts on indie nail polish brand, Ginger+Liz.
Ginger+Liz is a vegan-friendly, nontoxic, 5-free nail polish brand created by Ginger Johnson and Liz Pickett as a solution to their growing frustration with the lack of polish options available that didn’t contain the harsh chemicals that both women had bad reactions to.
I’m personally not that particular about what is in my nail polish (maybe I should be) but I am always glad to find brands that are vegan/cruelty-free because I know that this is very important to a lot of people, especially in the xoVain community.
Another cool thing about the brand is that they have a lot of color options (I counted 48) that suit a variety of tastes, from neutral-lovers to bold babes. Ginger+Liz were kind enough to send me six of their polishes (four different finishes and two topcoat options) to try and share with you.
I was sent both a matte top coat, Dry Ice Effect Top Coat, and a regular top coat, Fast Drying Top Coat, and I thought both performed really well. My past experiences with matte top coats have not been great (usually I get chips the same day) but I’m pleased to report I got a solid four days of wear out of this one! As far as the regular top coat goes, I made it about six days before the edges of my nails started showing a little bit of wear, and about seven days total before I got a noticeable chip.
I generally tend to gravitate towards super-bright colors or darker hues when it comes to nail polish so I was especially happy to try out the shades Unbothered (bright cool-toned purple) and Blowin’ Money Fast (metallic emerald green).
Unbothered has a really creamy formula, so it applied very smoothly. I usually do really thin layers of polish on top of each other, but with this particular formula, I found that using a little bit more than I usually would made the application even smoother and provided full opacity without having to layer.
Blowin’ Money Fast was easier to layer as the formula was a bit thinner. And the color is absolutely gorgeous! I am definitely going to be wearing this one a lot. Don’t forget the base coat, though — I did once and it stained my nails a little bit!
I initially thought Queen Bee was a glittery top coat, but it’s actually a really lovely muted gold/champagne shade with a sand-textured finish thanks to the addition of both fine and slightly larger glitter flecks. I used this shade as an accent nail alongside Unbothered, and I loved the combination of the two colors.
The last polish I tried was Icing on the Cake which is a holographic silver glitter.
This has a combination of super-small glitter flecks and slightly larger glitter circles. It took me about two goes to get a fairly even spread of glitter, but that’s pretty standard for me as far as mixed glitters go.
As far as pricing goes, Ginger+Liz is more expensive than drugstore polishes, but not in the realm of higher-end brands like Deborah Lippmann. I think for the quality and variety of the polishes, $12 is not bad at all.
