Kiko

I'd never tried any Kiko polishes - they're relatively new in the US - but they have good reviews, and they had a buy 3, get 3 thing for Black Friday. They're only $3.90 for the ones I bought, so 6 of them were only about $12. Note that they do have several other lines; I know there was at least one that was cheaper and one that was more expensive - but these were the ones I had seen the good reviews of, so I went with that.

Honestly, I opened up the box and went, what the hell, did I buy the same polish four times? because I kept unwrapping all these purple polishes. (OK, I didn't really think that - I knew they weren't actually the same - but I did think all these purples looked awfully similar. The two in the middle especially.)

Here's all of them:

At $15 you also got free shipping -  that's why I added the cuticle pen that you see sitting at the top.

You can see my tick-marks on the wheel - I ended up doing three coats of most of these on the wheel - with one exception. I'm happy about finding the one one-coater, but honestly, I don't get that upset with having to do three coats on a polish in this price-range, either. With an expensive polish I tend to get a little more testy about it.

(Note that on the wheel, the four purples don't actually look all that much alike.)

I really just went by the swatches on the website, in picking these out, I didn't try to look up the different colors. (Although actually there are tons of swatches out there, mostly from European bloggers, seems like.) I was mostly thinking of it as a chance to try out the brand.

Kiko's an Italian brand and I gather is a popular brand in Europe generally. I found several different names for some of these polishes and I imagine that's because of the names being translated back and forth. (In one, cranberry became "blueberry" which is slightly odd, at least in English.)

Let's start with 497 "Pearly Indian Violet," because it's said to be a close dupe for Chanel Taboo.

It's very dark and pretty, and I always like pearly, so I probably will like it fine. I don't think you can see this much on the swatch, but it's almost a "blurple" - you can see a little of the blue-violet color at the bottom of the nail. I can't actually speak to the Chanel connection since I don't own that (or in fact any Chanel polishes) but there are plenty of comparisons around if you google.

This is 493 (Vino Perlato) and 495 (Pearly Vanda Burgundy):

More of the nice pearl finishes - 493 is redder and 495 is noticeably more of a burgundy/violet color.

This is 277 (Microglitter Cranberry) and 278 (Microglitter Dark Orchid):

These two seem to have exactly the same formula - it was pretty sheer, but I like it. (When I think of microglitters, though, I tend to think of the packed kind, and that's not what this is, just so you know.)

...and last there's 245 (Pearly Dark Ruby) which is the one-coater:

The two dark purples are the most obviously similar, but even they aren't anything alike past being pearly, dark purples (which, ok, for some people is as far as they'll look). This one is much more red-violet than the other one, which as I mentioned has a definitely blue-violet undertone.

I think I did pretty good on picking colors, on the whole. They're heavily weighted towards cool colors, yes, but then those are what I love.

Added: Just sort of as a matter of interest, because this is a new brand to me, I noticed that while the nail polishes are mostly extremely reasonably priced, that is not so true of the makeup. The makeup is more like Sephora kind of prices, while the nail polish is drugstore prices. Wonder why that is. (Although... the buy 3 get 3 sale was on everything, so that would have made the makeup much more reasonable. I just chose to use it on polish.)