Borghese Stellare Notte Review - Delightful Dragonfly

I picked this up at the chemist yesterday, after rummaging through their bargain bins of assorted mostly separated bottles of brands I've never heard of. I'd never heard of Borghese , but I'm not going to turn down a duochrome for three dollars!

Image from Steph's Closet

In trying to find out more about this brand, I've found a bunch of negative reviews of this, and I gotta say, I'm pretty surprised. I only paid three dollars for it, but I wouldn't have felt ripped off even if I'd gotten it at full price. In the bottle it's a lovely shimmery dragonfly wing shift from green to purple, in a charcoal base, and I was really impressed with how well this translated on to the nail.
It is, however, a little on the thin side. I did a swatch here with one coat on the little finger, two on the ring finger, three on the middle, and four on the index, just to show you how it builds up.

As you can see, one coat is totally see through, and two is still a little patchy, so I would reccomend laying down three of this. In the other swatches I put it over a black base to see if I could cut down on the layers required, but unfortunately the duochrome doesn't really show up without three layers.
However, with a black base and three layers, it is just gorgeous.

Outside, indirect sunshine

Inside, direct artificial light

Inside, filtered natural light

 You can see just from these three pictures the amazing array of colours that show up from this one  polish. It goes from almost pure charcoal, to green, to purple with just a flick of your hand.

Greenest green

Purpleiest purple

My only gripe with this polish is that it's quite slow to dry - very similar to the Sally Hansen Prisms range, which makes me think that the slow dry time is most likely down to the type of pigment used for this duochrome effect. It's a bummer, but so long as you have some nice fast dry top coat around it's not enough of a hassle that it outweighs all the pretty colours!

I'm not really sure where you could get this - it seems to be from quite an old collection, and the prices I saw on Ebay were outrageous. But my chemist had a bunch of them, so if you're in the Inner West of Sydney your best bet is probably to keep your eyes peeled, and three dollars on you!