Insta-Dri mini-haul

I wrote some stuff about how I came to buy these polishes, and also there's a couple of interesting links, but first I think I'll show you what I bought:

This is Jet Set Jade and Plummet. Let me say now that all of these except Jet Set Jade covered in 1 coat - JSJade took two - and all of them except Jet Set Jade are current colors, according to Insta-Dri's page on the Sally Hansen website. Jet Set Jade was an LE color, but I was able to find it on Amazon - more on that below. Here are ALU's pics from that LE collection - I also have Chop Chop Copper and Quick Jeanius from that collection, all of which are pretty awesome. Anyway, Jet Set Jade is basically a lovely shimmery teal. Plummet (which is not LE) is a pretty blurple creme.

This is Expresso and Cherry Fast. Obviously Expresso is a much more muted pink, a grayed-out or almost browned-out pink - the name would tend to suggest it's the latter, wouldn't it? - while Cherry Fast is a fuchsia-to-berry color (definitely not what I'd call cherry, though).

And last but not least, because I'm obsessed with browns lately, here's Cocoa A Go Go, a lovely shimmery brown.


Before I lose the link again, there's this: The Science Behind Quick-Dry Nail Products. I stumbled across this and it's very appropriate to the Insta-Dri line. (It also has a quick primer about how nail polish works generally, which honestly I wasn't completely up on, I'm a little embarrassed to say. I did know a little bit about it, but this is more than I already knew.)

So Insta-Dri, as you might guess even if you don't know already, is Sally Hansen's quick-dry line. I've had a few polishes from this line for a long time, but I tend to forget about them. What brought this line to my attention again was all those "most underrated" videos that everybody has been making on YouTube, here's Jess as a semi-random example (actually I think I missed this one before, somehow):

It was a collab, where a group of people put up videos on this subject at the same time, and then (as usually happens) a bunch of other people made their own videos after that. And somewhere in watching of those, I remembered how awesome a lot of Insta-Dri polishes are. Somebody mentioned them in there but I'm not entirely sure who. So as a result of that, I got on Amazon earlier this week and bought a bunch of Insta-Dri polishes. I really didn't even look them up like I usually do when I buy more expensive polishes, I just bought a bunch. Jet Set Jade was more expensive, since it was LE, but even so I only spent a little over $25 including shipping, which is about normal retail price for these, I think. (There was at least one seller pushing something like 10 bottles for $30 - I'm going from memory here because I don't want to risk falling down another Amazon rabbit-hole - but I didn't want that because you don't get to pick your colors - I don't want yellows, for one, and I don't want the colors I already own,) Aside from Jet Set Jade, I just picked colors that I thought looked pretty, and I think I picked pretty well, on the whole. They're the sort of colors I always pick - a bright berry, a blurple, a dark brown - but hey, that's why I own a lot of those colors, because I like them.

(I don't think Jess talks about Insta-Dri, that was just the first one of those videos I saw when I went to YouTube. I think it was actually this one that talked about that, although there may have been others.)

I almost forgot to say that all or most of these are what Amazon calls "add-on" products, which means they don't ship for free by themselves but if you add them onto a $25 purchase (thus the name) then they do ship for free. I checked the fine print, and it turns out that if you have $25 of add-ons that counts, they don't actually have to be "added" to a larger purchase. So that's what most of these are. (I think you have to have Amazon Prime for that all to kick in, though.) Oh, and the other caveat to that is that it has to all be shipped by Amazon even if it's not sold by Amazon, but that seems to be the case for about 3/4 of the stuff on Amazon's website nowadays anyway. At least for the stuff I've been looking at lately.