Is It Possible To Have Too Much Of A Good Thing (Or The Same Colour Nail Polish)?

Question: How many different nail polishes am I wearing in the picture below? Yeah, I know, it looks like the same colour on every finger nail. The truth is, I'm wearing 4 different polishes form 4 different brands ranging from £6 to £14. Confused? Let me explain.

I now have a ridiculous amount of nail polishes (over 500) and I managed to fall into the trap of buying the same colour several times. Partly because I didn't know what I had, although partly because I do have a tendency of buying colours I like over and over again. But even so, I never would've thought that it is possible to buy 4 nail polishes from 4 brands that will look EXACTLY the same. Similar, maybe, but exactly the same? All these polishes are fairly recent releases, so it seems that some brands are copying other brands here. Anyway, let me tell you what I have here.

On the index finger I have Deborah Lippmann Private Dancer. This one costs £14 for 15 ml. On the middle finger I wore Nails Inc. Cheyne Walk polish. It costs £11 for 10 ml making it the most expensive per ml. On the ring finger it's China Glaze No Plain Jane, around £7 in the UK (although BeautyBay are selling this for £12.75?) for 14 ml. I got mine on eBay for $4.50 plus pretty reasonable shipping, making it the cheapest per ml. On the pinky it's Topshop Amethyst nail polish, £6 for 8ml. 

So are they any different? I'd say there are very slight differences, but not enough to justify paying over double the price for the higher end brands. In fact for me the Topshop one had the nicest formula which is the second cheapest per ml (or cheapest per bottle, however you look at it, it's still one of the cheapest). The Deborah Lippmann polish is a tiny bit pinker, but really, noone would say you're wearing 4 different polishes on your fingers, they are that similar. The duochrome effect was about the same with all of them (not overly strong and a bit muddy).

I can't comment on how longlasting they are because I only wore the Deborah Lippmann polish on all my other fingers, the other 3 I only wore on one finger each, and I wouldn't compare the ring finger to my index finger, because the pinky and ring fingers are always the last ones to chip and the index finger is the first, whichever polish I wear. The Deborah Lippmann one lasted on me for 2 days without major chipping, but buy the end of day 2 it wasn't looking its best.

I would like to apologise about the application, but I was in a big rush to take pictures because my middle finger nail was actually slightly broken (you might be able to see it in some pictures), so I didn't have time to clean up properly. Also apologies about the picture quality, I took all pictures with my phone because my normal camera cannot handle purples and turns them into blues, but this is such a pretty shade of purple, I really wanted to show you the true colour. The pictures of the bottles turned out the worst, sorry about it.

Right then, onto the pictures!

Topshop Amethyst

China Glaze No Plain Jane

Nails Inc. Cheyne Walk

Deborah Lippmann Private Dancer