If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen that I’ve been on an absolute tear of publishing up posts this past week, and while I won’t make any grand declarations (I’ve done far too many of those in the past that I didn’t keep up) I’m feeling good! Instagram hasn’t brought me as much joy lately, so instead of focusing my attention of posting multiple swatches there each and every day, I’ve started on the mountainous task of working through swatched up collections in need of posts. So keep on following along with me, there’s a lot of polish on the way. It’ll be a lot of catching up on “older” releases from the past couple of years as well as sprinkling in a new set here and there in between.

In these moments of non-blogging, there have been a few brands that I decided to fully collect and therefore have piled up on my desk and in my drawers, and I’m telling myself that before I can buy more of them I need to work through some previous collections. In this post, we’re looking at one of them, ILNP! (Well to be fair, I did have quite a few collections from this brand gifted to me for my birthday, and my mother doesn’t need to know that she was enabling.)

Let’s start right out with this first quad! This is the ‘Thorns’ collection released last year, and it features 4 vampy jelly shades. They’re all deep and dark on the nails and have you covered for when you’re feeling vampy. ILNP is great at keeping collections around for quite a while so these are available on their website!

Now on into the swatches!

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I found all of these shades to have the same formula just with different base colors, so I’ll do a quick little write-up on that here first and then you can scroll on through the individual swatch photos and we’ll end with my final thoughts. Bing bang boom.

All 4 of these shades are a jelly formula, and with being such deep colors they will be more sheer and uneven with that 1st coat. It’s the first coat where you’ll see the most difference in color as well. But I found I could get these opaque and deepened up to match the bottles with a 2nd thicker coat. I do recommend a thicker application as when there’s not enough polish on the brush it can skip on application and create new streaks.

Even with how deep they are, I didn’t have any issues with staining around my cuticles or after wearing them for a while. They’re gorgeous little shades and I always love to wear a deeper shade especially when my nails are shorter.

ILNP Thorns collection – Live Swatch

Now for the individual shades: ‘Ivy’ is a deep blackened forest green shade.

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‘Midnight Ink’ is a deep navy blue jelly.

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‘Nightshade’ is a deeper, cooler toned blackened purple jelly.

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Lastly, ‘Dahlia’ is a deep rich berry red jelly.

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Overall I loved the idea of this collection. I’m always a fan when a brand takes a more honed in idea and then really expands on it giving you every option you could ever need. And being a fan of deep dark polishes, especially when my nails are shorter, I was excited for these!

But in the end, do I think you need all 4? Nah. You can see that even in my bright swatching lights, each shade is looking very similar on the nails and its only the tiny ring of color around the edges differentiating them. I do wish they were lighter and we could get more actual difference in final color while still keeping that vampiness. You could attempt to leave them more sheer to show more of that color, but I was finding the first coats to be more streaky so I’m not quite sure how good that would end up looking.

I suggest picking a favorite and just grabbing one, but also I can’t talk and I would never judge if you still choose to get all 4. What do you think?

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Upcoming Posts
Wet N Wild Chameleon Chrome collection • Mooncat Baroquen collection • Holo Taco Magnetic Attraction collection • OPI The New OPIcons Spring 2026 • Red Chamber Christmas collection

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