Olive & June Mani System Review

As a mother of three, one of the main things that is always on short supply is my time. So whenever I come across something that promises to save me time I feel compelled to try it out. I really bought into the idea of Olive & June during the pandemic because it promised to deliver a professional manicure experience in the comfort of your own home. This would save both time and money compared to having to drive to a nail salon.

The ads for Olive and June were particularly attractive to me because of the poppy that was regularly featured. The poppy is a tool that pops on the top of the nail brush to make it easier to control when using your non dominant hand. 

After reading through a bunch of reviews and checking out their site. I decided to try out their mani system that includes all the items shown below.  I also added on their dry drops that promise to dry your polish in 80 seconds! What could be better?

The mani set can either include one nail color or six, and of course I chose six. I thought it was a bit odd that all the colors that were available at that time were named with what seemed to be random letter abbreviations as shown below.  

When my package arrived I was super excited to finally have a kit that would give me salon quality nails at home! I also really loved all the tutorials on their page geared towards improving your overall nail health. The packaging was very cute and pretty.

Nail Colors Top to Bottom, Left to right
MG, OBVI,OMG
LD, WKF, CN

I really liked the look of the nail colors in person and went ahead to watch the tutorial videos. I followed all the steps religiously, prepping my nails as if they were headed into surgery and then began to apply the color. I immediately realized that the poppy tool I had looked forward to using so much was actually very hard to use.  Firstly because unlike most nail polish brushes that are round, Olive & June brushes are flat, so the poppy needs to be perfectly aligned with the flat edge to work properly. Their iinstructions tell you to find the flat edge and then mark it with a marker, but I promise that it was still very tricky to get right . Once I had the poppy on correctly it was actually a lot harder to use because it is so big and bulky, I ultimately gave up using it half way. It can also get stuck on the lid and was difficult to remove.

Their website said to wait 5 to 10 minutes between coats, so I did just that;  literally using a timer. It ocurred to me that a 10 minute wait between coats was a really long time especially with little children underfoot. That would mean for 3 coats of color plus a topcoat it would take 30 minutes of waiting, not including paint and prep time?

I started to wonder about the promised 80 second dry time from the expensive dry drops that I had added to my order but discovered that can only be used on the final top coat. 

I noticed that even after the 1st coat had 10 minutes of drying, once I applied the second coat, tiny bubbles immediately appeared which was super frustrating because even drug store nail polish doesn't bubble up like that.  Once I had the final top coat I was happy I could finally use the dry drops. I'm not sure what I expected from it, but I wasn't expecting the oily mess that occured. It's difficut to control how many drops come out and it drenches your fingers in oil. Although it was supposed to dry fully in 80 seconds, it took hours to dry and was still tacky to touch and smudging hours later.

I repeated the process on my toes with a different color and had the exact same experience with the bubbles after the second coat and nail polish never fully drying even hours later. By the very next day chunks of color had chipped off both my fingers and toes and I decided to just remove  all of it. I went to look at reviews and social media comments to see if it was just user error on my part but saw so many comments that echoed my experience. 

Overall I really wanted to love Olive & June but would not recommend them at all; aside from the cute storage box even basic things like the nail clipper and nail file seemed low quality and didn't match the price point.  Their mani kit requires way too many steps and products for a poor end result. I ended up going back to my trusty nail color Sally Hansen Insta Dri that actually dries really fast and goes on super smooth and haven't looked back since.