Pro Salon Manicure

I’m so in love with Ulta3. I can tolerate their gluggy consistencies in their ordinary $2 range because hey.. it’s a $2 polish, you can’t expect it to compete with nail polishes for $20, but so long as the end result looks good and you can get a massive collection without spending hundreds of dollars, that’s all I really care about. I’m reasonable like that, I have reasonable expectations, especially since Ulta3 moved production to the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and quality was never the same as it once was.

But they’ve released a new range recently called “Pro Salon Manicure”, and let me tell you, for $5… it’s so worth it. Ulta3 sent me three bottles for me to review along with the pastels and the first thing I looked at was where these colours were produced. Taiwan! Interesting–hopefully better than the PRC formulas then.

I felt compelled to write reviews on these colours too simply because Ulta3 was kind enough to send them along with the pastel polishes and I felt like I should review both because they were nice to me, too, haha. They also sent me a semi-neon set, but not sure I’ll be reviewing them because they’re not “new” and most of them aren’t really neon colours either.. But I’m sure you’ll be sick of my nail polish reviews by now anyways! So here’s my take on the Pro Salon Manicure sets from Ulta3.

Truthfully, the quality is amazing. Coral Crush goes opaque with a single coat (I did two just to be thorough), and the flat-tipped brush means that each nail required like two sweeps–even the thumb. The pinkie only needed one. Sky Blue and Purple Fusion was a bit of a different story–it took three full coats for them to become opaque. The formula is smooth and the absolute perfect consistency–just on the verge of becoming slightly watery, but this is great because the glugginess is a thing of the past. And as soon as I applied Coral Crush, I started typing this review up and accidentally knocked my nails a few times. While this had resulted in denting the nail polish a lot while I was swatching the Pretty Pastels collection, I found to my great surprise and pleasure, that these colours dried VERY quickly. By the time I finished writing this, they were utterly dry.

My only question for Ulta3 is why their normal range isn’t this good?? Forget the base coat and top coat additions etc–why can’t we have such great consistency and drying time with the ordinary range? WHHHYYY?