Wicked

This is Essie Wicked:

This is a very old Essie color, but it's still current. It's Essie #249 and I think it originally came out in the (late?) 90s when Chanel Vamp/Rouge Noir was all the rage. I got my bottle from KarenD a few years ago so I don't know exactly how old it is, but this is one of the few colors that's been steadily in production all that time. Anyway, very dark & vampy and all of that - almost black in some lights, which makes it different from the rest of this wheel. (The other dark swatch at the top of the wheel in this picture is Ignite, which I talked about the other day, but it's not actually near as dark.) You can see in the bottle that Wicked has some magenta highlights but it's a creme, not a shimmer and you definitely don't see any flash like that on the nail. Essie calls it a "sinister red" which I find sort of comical but Essie always seems to be drawn to the dramatic.

Added: a piece from Byrdie with lots of info about Vamp/Rouge Noir - which dates back to 1994, originally. It seems to me that I've seen a late 90s date for Wicked but I haven't been able to find that again. Finding historical info on nail polish (and I mean, well up into the 00s, even) is often really difficult.

There are a lot of dupes for these, I believe, but the only one I have that I think is really close is Revlon Vixen. This blog post is a couple of years old, but shows several of them.