Cover Girl Outlast Stay Brilliant Glosstini Review & Swatches

Arden here!  In my very first post on Casa de Polish I swatched a couple of Cover Girl's Outlast Stay Brilliatn nail polishes, and now they're back!  Cover Girl has just released a bunch of new summery shades in these cute smaller bottles they call "glosstinis."  I have long been a fan of miniature versions of items, so these mini bottles of polish called my name as soon as I spotted them.  I ended up getting four colors to try: Pink Lady (#500), Lemon Drop (#525), Blue Hawaiian (#535), and Purple Freeze (#540).  (Cover Girl still insists on not listing the name of the polish on the bottle, just the number.)

First up is Pink Lady, two coats plus top coat.  I will admit that this is probably my least favorite of the shades I bought, but I also am not a big fan of pink polishes.  It is a lovely light pink shade, and I didn't own anything like it (again, because I rarely buy pink polish), but on my nails it didn't really pop out at me as much as I'd hoped.

Next is Lemon Drop.  I really like this polish-- it's a shade lighter than the other yellows I own, but it's still plenty bright and summery.  It also had good coverage-- this is only two coats plus top coat.  The one downside to this polish is that it stained my skin when I took it off with acetone.  You can tell in the next picture how my knuckles kind of have a yellowish tint to them.  I'm sure I could have scrubbed harder with acetone to remove it all, but this is usually not as bad a problem with other polishes.

This is Blue Hawaiian.  I LOOOOVED this shade of blue.  It was bright and cheery and still on the bluer side of teal.  It had great even coverage-- this is two coats plus top coat.  I will definitely be pulling this one out frequently!

And finally, Purple Freeze.  This is a super interesting shade of purple polish I'm not sure I've really seen before-- it's almost a dark lavender.  I know I've mentioned before that good purple polish is basically my white whale: I'm always on the lookout for shades that are actually purple, not too blue or pink (or in the case of many lavenders, grey).  I will definitely be using Purple Freeze in my purple rotation in the future!

 
For comparison:  Here are all of the glosstini bottles along with a regular-sized Cover Girl Outlast Stay Brilliant polish.

One of the things I love about this new glosstini collection is how well all the shades go together!  So I decided to do a Skittle manicure using all the glosstini shades I picked up, plus a previous shade of Cover Girl polish, Coral Silk (#240).

Doesn't that just scream summer?  Final verdict: I really like the new Cover Girl Outlast Stay Brilliant summer shades.  Besides the ones I got, I also was really attracted to the light green Appletini (#530) and the bright orange Orange Oasis (#520), but I already owned polish in similar colors, so I resisted.  And their name is true to form: each polish I got was incredibly glossy, even without a top coat.

But I will say that these smaller bottles probably aren't terribly cost-effective.  Each one is $2.99 for 3.5 mL of polish, whereas the regular sized bottles are $5.99 for 11mL-- so they're half the price for less than a third the polish.  But if you were just looking for a small amount of polish for a special event or traveling, the glosstinis might be the way to go!  They'd actually make great party favors or stocking stuffers, if you're looking for that kind of thing.

What do you think?  Will you be trying out some of these smaller polishes?  Or just sticking to the regular-sized bottles?