Zoya Matte Velvet Harlow Review + Swatch

Hi everyone,

Today I have for you a review of Zoya Matte Velvet polish Harlow. I buy my Zoyas from www.zoya.com.au and if you follow them on Facebook you'll see that they have sales fairly regularly. I picked up 3 matte velvets for $6 each which is a bargain considering they retail for $20 normally. The only pain is postage.

Zoya Harlow

Now onto the review! Harlow is a magenta polish that can appear either dark pink or red-based purple depending on the light. It also contains very fine silver shimmer and red/pink shimmer.

The polish was actually quite thin considering that it's a matte, I expected the formula to be a lot harder to deal with. I've read on other blogs that you have to be quick to apply these otherwise they get patchy and bumpy but these applied so well! You don't have as much room to play as normal polishes as they do dry fast, but I could go over the same area a few time without causing balding.

Harlow is a one coater if applied perfectly, however I'm not that skilled so I did two. But in between the two coats of colour I applied one coat of top coat (Poshe) as recommended by Chloe's Nails to make the polish more chip resistant. Despite Zoya advising not to use a base coat, I did use one, Essie Fill The Gap, which is a ridge filling base coat. I have fine ridges on my nails and matte's are notorious for showing every little imperfection so I waited until it was completely dry before adding Harlow. The only issue I have with Harlow is that clean up was not easy, the matte polish is a bit resistant to being removed and leaves shimmer behind, so you'll notice my cuticle line isn't as crisp as I'd like.


I applied this on Friday and then went rick climbing on Saturday. Because it's a matte I did not expect it to last, but from the photos below you can see that it performed beautifully!

From the photos you can see that there was a little bit of tip wear on my middle finger and thumb but there were no chips! I find this to be excellent and highly recommend sandwiching a top coat between layers as well as using a basecoat.

This polish is very easy to work with considering that it's matte and I can't wait to try the other colours I have! If my nails aren't too beat up from rock climbing I will be trying a matte/shiny combo with Harlow so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading,

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