I was aware of Sally Hansen nail colors and treatments. I’d seen their products in Payless Drugs and Long’s Drugs growing up, even though I didn’t buy them. I do remember buying the Nail Magic and Nail Prisms colors fairly heavily when I first saw them in 2005, but I didn’t pay much attention to their other nail treatments. I wasn’t a huge nail polish user, and I didn’t quite understand what all these different products were supposed to do, let alone why I’d want to pay $5 for a base coat (ah, such innocence…and for anyone asking, no, in my opinion, Sally Hansen base- and top-coats are not all that great. Especially not the Double Duty stuff that so often comes free. But I digress.) At any rate, I again started buying Sally Hansen when their Salon Formula polishes came out - most notably Ring My Shell and Hidden Treasure. I discounted the various other polishes from this line as not really all that interesting to me, not worth the money. And then, one day…a 50% off sale, and a color that I really wanted to try. So I picked up my first Xtreme Wear polish, more than half expecting it not to be all that great.

I was a bit wrong. They’re fairly good polishes, at a great price.

Since then I've bought about a dozen of these polishes, often when they're on sale. I've averaged about $3 a bottle for the colors I've chosen. These all dry rather quickly - they're ready for a second coat within 15 minutes, and moderate activity within about an hour - they generally have good spreadability, and while some of the shades are semisheer and meant to be used as layering polishes (VIP Pink, Virtual Violet, Lime Lights, and Blizzard Blue, to name the ones I own) most of the shades give me complete opacity and even coverage in two coats. Despite these polishes often being kept in the back of the makeup aisle - where drugstores have traditionally put their least popular, cheaper brands - these are pretty good polishes. In my opinion, these make good "travelling" polishes because they apply smoothly, dry quickly, and last a long time and stand up to rigorous activity even without a base or top coat.

This collection contains dozens of polishes, and rather than try to list them all, I'll just list the ones I own:

• Black Out — black creme
• Blizzard Blue — semisheer blue shimmer
• Blue It — semi-metallic navy shimmer
• Blue Me Away — robins-egg blue creme
• Bubblegum Pink — cherry-blossom pink creme
• Celeb City — metallic silver shimmer
• Cherry Red — cool medium red creme
• Deep Purple — metallic concord-grape shimmer
• Emerald City — medium-deep emerald green creme
• Flirt — medium cool brown shimmer
• Going Green — metallic medium emerald green shimmer
• Gunmetal — semi-metallic cool grey shimmer
• Hot Magenta — vivid fuchsia-pink creme
• Lime Lights — semisheer pale green duochrome shimmer
• Marine Scene —
• Mellow Yellow — soft yellow creme
• Mint Sorbet — pale green creme
• Pacific Blue — UCLA-blue creme
• Pink Boa — metallic hot pink shimmer
• The Real Teal — bright teal-green shimmer
• VIP Pink — semisheer watermelon-pink shimmer
• Virtual Violet — semisheer blue-violet duochrome pearl
• Wet Cement — medium-light grey creme
• White On — white creme

Keep an eye on drugstore.com, or your local Walgreen's, Rite-Aid, CVS, or other similar chain so that you know when these polishes are on sale. Sure they don't cost as much per bottle as China Glaze (retail) or OPI or Zoya; but you're getting 20% less product than with those particular brands (.4 fl oz for Xtreme Wear versus .5 fl oz for ChG, OPI, Zoya, or most other brands) - and sales are always good, for any product. These are also the perfect consistency for nail stamping polishes, so there's another great bonus!! (Currently these polishes are on sale at my local Walgreen's for 2/$4.)

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