Dazzle Dry vs. Olive & June Quick-Dry Nail Polish
Dazzle Dry and Olive & June require more steps. This would normally annoy me, but based on the middling performance from the other crew, I was willing to give it a shot.
The Olive & June Quick Dry professional manicure (in shade Lollipop, a candy-apple red) and self-manicure (in Elevator, a shimmery iridescent pink) I did during the first two rounds of testing held up incredibly well — over a week, when the brand states only five days. I appreciated the underpromise, overdeliver ethos of the wear time. The polish looked clean and neat for 10 days, similar to Dazzle Dry.
The trouble started when I decided to do a full manicure on my own. Olive & June Quick Dry requires two coats of polish, plus a top coat, with a dry time of one minute between each coat.
The first coat of the gorgeous, shimmery purple called Enchanted went on smoothly. The online instructions in the How to Use section of each polish listing (now corrected by the brand) originally said to wait a full five minutes between coats. The actual instructions are to wait one minute between coats. But in reality, I should have waited even longer, because the polish wasn’t fully dry and smudged significantly. Chalking it up to user error, I did a second manicure the next day and the polish still felt tacky when I was finished. If you can’t get a good, consistent, quick-drying manicure at home, what is even the point?
The color selection (filter down to Quick Dry if you click the link) includes a range of neutrals that look nice on a variety of skin tones, as well as saturated creams and some exciting shimmers.
With a solid selection of vibrant cream and shimmery shades, Dazzle Dry gives a long-lasting, salon-quality manicure that dries quickly. But it is expensive and only available in salons or online.
So, would Dazzle Dry live up to its name and wow me? Frankly, I found the multi-step process overwhelming at first. I want to just slap on a coat of polish and be done with it! But I timed a full manicure, and it took 22 minutes start to finish, including removal of my existing nail polish. This seemed extremely reasonable to me, because I spent most of my time actively painting, rather than waiting for the polish to dry.
The company makes it fairly foolproof, labeling each bottle in the process one through four, starting with a clear liquid nail prep you swipe on with a lint-free pad. Next comes two thin base coats, then two coats of polish, and finally a top coat. Since each of the steps dry quickly, with the formula turning matte once it has dried, the polish was already dry by the time I returned to that nail for the next step. I did have to wait a final five minutes after applying the top coat, but once that was done, I was able to walk away with a solid, no-smudge manicure that didn’t transfer onto other surfaces (like a wall or a piece of paper).
The pigments are smooth, saturated, and easy to apply, with the top coat adding a salon-quality shine. I got the longest-lasting (over 10 days!), best-looking manicure from Dazzle Dry, and we were impressed with its wide range of shimmer and cream shades.
You do have to pay for this greatness: A mini kit costs $39 plus tax and shipping and comes with one mini bottle of polish (additional mini bottles of polish are $12 each and a full size is $22). Full-sized system kits are obviously even more expensive.
