NOTD April 22nd: Essence Rebels LE Rock Coat 01 Punk Royal

Hey everyone!
I just lately talked about Essence's Rebels LE here *click*, and now I'm wearing the first polish that I got. It's called Rock Coat 01 Punk Royal.
Punk Royal looks just black in the bottle, but it's actually a very sheer gray which contains large black hex glitter particles. I love the idea of this polish, black glitter is so cool and I love that :)

When I swatched Punk Royal on a nail wheel I already noticed that the slight gray tint does transfer onto the nail, so I already expected it to influence the background color. It's for sure not a polish to be worn on its own, you'll probably never get it opaque. It's made for layering :) I chose a red jelly franken to layer it with, I thought I could kinda make a jelly-glitter-sandwich out of it. So here you can see 2 coats of the franken, 1 of the glitter and another one of the franken.
The consistency of Punk Royal is super thick and not easy to work with. The particles are so large that you can't really just apply your polish in a normal way, you just push the particles around. That would be fine if it didn't have this gray tint. But the thing is that as soon as you start pushing around the particles, the gray tint will look patchy, and that is really uncool. It does work, but it'll never be completely leveled out.
This mani was so so hard to photograph, because the jelly red is so shiny that my camera freaked out ;)

The combination of the red and the black glitter reminds be of ladybugs, which is really cool. And I would love it, if only the application was better. But, can't change that...You better think twice before you get this topper, you need to decide whether you want to bother with the poor application. I'm still glad I own it, but it'll never become my go-to polish.
What do you think of it?
xoxo, Misch