I carried out a focus group to find out which brands of nail varnish were most popular. I disguised the varnish bottle and let the members of the group try out the different brands and rate them in various areas; pigment, application, durability, brush.
The brands used were; Model’s Own, Barry M, Essie, Maxfactor, Rimmel and H&M. This gave a wide range of brands and prices in order to make the focus group fair. Once tested, I got the group to wash up one plate to see how the varnish reacted to determine the durability.
(Please click the images to enlarge them)
The varnishes were rated out of 1 – 10 (10 being the highest) and here are the average results:
| Pigment | Application | Brush | Durability | total | |
| Models Own £5 | 8 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 19 |
| Barry M £2.99 | 7 | 8 | 6 | 6 | 28 |
| Essie £7.99 | 7 | 9 | 8 | 8 | 32 |
| MaxFactor £3.99 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 24 |
| Rimmel £4.59 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 8 | 23 |
| H&M £2.99 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 22 |
Here are some comments made by the group:
(Model’s Own) “I really really like the colour but the application is a bit hard to get even coverage. After the durability test a lot of them chipped too.”
(Barry M) “I personally really like the colour and it’s buildable so you can have it as bright as you like. One thing I didn’t like was that the brush was really long which I found quite difficult to use.”
(Essie) “Absolutely love this one, the colour and application are amazing and survived pretty well after the washing up!”
(Maxfactor) “I don’t really rate this product as I found the brush was far too small”
What is interesting is that the most expensive nail varnish was the most popular among this group. This goes to show that maybe it is worth spending that little bit extra on nail varnishes.
Check out other nail varnish reviews on these blogs:
http://www.thepolishaholic.com/
http://www.nailpolishwars.com/
Lacquered Lane 