Price wise it’s very reasonable at only £3 per bottle (particularly when you compare that with Ciate’s Caviar manicure at a whooping £18 per bottle). You don’t get the polish included as you do with Ciate but MUA do a range of small polishes at £1 per bottle so the total price is only £4. I’d imagine that each bottle will do quite a few sets. The base colour I used is MUA Plum Noir.
Nail Constellation comes in 5 different colours and I picked up ‘Leo’ but they are all very pretty – it was a difficult decision! Application was easy and you can see the MUA YouTube ‘how to’ video here… The video states that you can finish the nail with a top coat, however I tried initally with Sally Hansen ‘Hard as Wraps’ but it really ruined the colour and made it look a bit dull. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has tried this with a different top coat and what success they had?
I’ve got some ‘fish-egg’ beads from ebay from Goldleaf craft supplies which were good quality and a similar price when you include postage. You get about twice the amount of beads as well. The one thing that I have preferred about MUA’s version is that the beads are much smaller – maybe even half the size, which makes the manicure look a lot ‘tidier’ in my opinion.
How does it wear? As I couldn't use top coat I found that the beads started coming loose pretty quickly. I only wore this for about half a day in the end and I’d lost quite a few. Again, if you can find a topcoat that will wear well with this product then you may have better luck!
Overall I’m happy with the result and I think it looks great, however I’d definitely recommend wearing it for a special occasion rather than expecting to get several days of wear out of it.
