Make Up Academy Nail Varnish > Reviews (14)

I'm horrendous when it comes to applying nail varnish but I do love how it looks on my nails so I often have to spend quite a while reapplying and altering the polish on my nails. In a recent search for a few specific colours I stumbled across the Make Up Academy range and decided they would be worth a try.

Make Up Academy (MUA) is specific to Superdrug, but luckily you will find Superdrug all over the country! Often you can even find more than one store in a town! If unfortunately you are not located near one, the MUA range is all available on the Superdrug website. Now what makes MUA stand out above the rest is the price tags of its items. It's even more cheap than Superdrug's 2true and Boots' Natural Collection. Now those two are often considered cheap and a bit rubbish, but MUA's products look so gorgeous and not at all cheap. The same can be said for their nail varnishes.

The nail varnishes come in a little square shaped bottle, it's black plastic lid the same size as the pot itself, stretching in total to the height of an average pinkie finger. It does look quite small however you still receive 6.2ml of product, which is a good amount of product.

Naturally the first thing you'll have to do is choose a colour. There are so many wonderful colours to choose from: browns, reds, pinks, blues, greys etc. I decided to go for three shades - a risk since I hadn't tried it before but I was feeling very positive! The colours don't have names but they do have shades. I opted for shade 7 (a gorgeous fantasy red colour), shade 2 (jet black) and shade 13 (a beautiful emerald green shade).

More than content with the colours, all that was left to do was to try them out. The first I tried was shade 7. Naturally because of the shortness of the bottle, the brush size itself isn't too large. However I do have quite small fingernails and I feel that this is more ideal. It allows for much more accurate application - I definitely don't make so much of a mess with it!

You'll need two layers of varnish to get full coverage but this is not an issue. The first one applies perfectly, and this is without a pre-applied base coat, and dries fairly quickly. So by the time you've done one coat you can start on the second. It goes on smoothly and doesn't become too thick (a problem I find is a regular occurrence with other options) so that it peels off.

The nail varnish lasted three full days on my fingers and only very slowly began to chip on the fourth. I took it off with a cheap nail varnish remover on that fourth day but I feel it would have lasted another day. Now I honestly didn't expect it to last more than a day so I was rather impressed!

The best part? The price! Each bottle of MUA nail varnish costs just £1. Yes, that's right, £1! The Boots' Natural Collection varnish is £1.99 and is appalling in comparison! I've never been more content with a nail varnish. I will definitely be buying more nail varnishes from MUA in the future. I could not be more happy with them!

Amy 2011