I’m not Irish but I love Irish history and culture. I also love the color green and, lets face it, St. Patrick’s Day can be a blast. Roll all that together and it just makes sense that I had to have one of the new holiday polishes by Pretty and Polished, Irish Brawn.

Irish Brawn is a black jelly loaded with 3 types of green glitter – small hex, larger hex, and round glitter (eee!). This polish was designed by Pretty and Polished owner Chels to celebrate Irish immigrants and all that they had to overcome as newcomers to America. I saw the bottle shot online and this polish became an instant lemming, even without swatches. I eagerly counted down the days til release so that I could snap one up. Here are my own bottle shots -

Irish Brawn is a jelly and jellies tend to need several coats to eliminate a nail line. I decided to save myself a coat and put black undies on my nails first. I set my bottle upside down while I did my base and undies coats so that the glitter could get all up on the brush. One coat of Irish Brawn was opaque with undies but I put another coat on for depth. This is picture heavy because every photo I took just didn’t do this spectacular polish justice. I chipped my middle nail this week so I’m not pleased with my nails – they’re down to nubs and still not even. I am, however, in love with this polish. Here we go, click to enlarge:

Natural light

Indoor, no flash

Indoor with flash

Indoor with flash

Indoor with flash

Indoor with flash

Indoor with flash

The pros:

1. This polish is a stunner. There is so much depth to it with two coats – you can see layers of glitter peeking through the jelly. It looks mostly black from some angles and then flashes bright green when it catches the light. Oh man.
2. I did one layer on half of my hand with one brush dip.
3. This is an absolute glitter bomb. So much glitter with every brush stroke! I didn’t have to place glitter because there was so much on every brush stroke, plus the glitter distributed evenly without bunching up at the nail tip.
4. It needed topcoat but wasn’t super gritty like some glitter bombs are.
5. It’s gorgeous. Did I say that already? Sorry. Not really though.

The cons:

1. I might crash my car staring at my nails when I drive to work tomorrow.
2. I’ll have to foil remove it. That’s not really a con for me, but some people despise glitter removal so I’m putting it here even though it doesn’t bother me.

My verdict? I think you can tell. This is my favorite Pretty and Polished polish to date. Not that I have a massive amount of them, but this is at the top of my polish in general. It just has so much depth and sparkle to it, the pictures I took do it no justice. I also bought Old Green River but you’re going to have to wait to see swatches of that for now because I’m so mesmerized by Irish Brawn. So keep your eyes peeled!

You can purchase Irish Brawn for $9/15mL bottle on the Pretty and Polished website.