Bourjois Magic Nail Polish Remover Review

I was so excited when I saw the first reviews for the Bourjois Magic Nail Polish Remover, Red Fruit and Vanilla fragrance. It is a nail polish remover in a plastic bottle with a sponge inside. It promises to remove your nail polish in 1 second per nail without cotton wool. It also says that it's nourishing because it contains sweet almond oil. I expected all that to mean that it would smell different to regular nail polish remover. It smells pretty much the same. There's a different scent to it but I think that's pretty much the same if you're switching to a new brand of remover.

The first thing I noticed was the size. It's a lot smaller than I was expecting it to be. It's 125ml. That's 4.2 fluid ounces. That's so tiny. Look at that picture. The ingredients are: ethyl acetate, isopropyl, myristate, parfum (frangrance), panthenol, tocopheryl, acetate, prunus amygdalus dulcis (sweet almond) oil, hexyl cinnamal. It is acetone free and paraben free. It also says on the side of the bottle: Its Magic Power? All you need to do is dip each finger into the sponge, twist and remove. Nail polish is instantly removed without the need for cotton wool.

Here are some videos of the remover in action:

Removing with Deborah Lippman Superstar over Illamasqua Scorn.

Base coat and top coat as well.

Removing 1 coat of Illamasqua Muse.

No base or top coats.

Sorry about the poor quality of these.

It was dark and this is the only good light I have :)

As you can see, it doesn't really work as well as it claims to. It took me well over a minute to remove the polish on just one finger. I realize now that I didn't necessarily follow the directions completely (I missed out the part where I'm suppose to twist your finger instead of just dip it) but I'm not too sure it would have made that much of a difference, especially with the glitter. It could almost do with a soft scouring pad inside so the glitter can come off more easily. It was easier to remove the creme polish. But I did not apply a base or a top coat as I was just taking them right off.

Another issue I had was that I believe the glitter broke the sponge up a bit so that there were bits of black on my finger. In the video I said it was the nail polish but I did think afterwards it was probably the sponge. Which probably means everytime I use it from now on, I'll probably have bits of sponge on my fingers. Not too happy about that.

Now, back to the size of the bottle. I did think at first that it was really small. Then, as I was using it, I thought it was too big. Once it came to getting my pinky in there, it was really uncomfortable and awkward because of how tall it is and because of the fact that there's a neck on the bottle where there is no sponge. I remember when I was little, my aunts used to have similar nail polish removers. Except that they were in fat little jars about the size and shape of a ramekin. Because this is so tall, it's awkward to get your fingers into and therefore harder to move your finger around to get the polish off. Especially the glitter.

I do like the smell of it, as far as you can like the smell of any nail polish remover. I do like the fact that it has oils in it to moisturize your skin as you use it but I did feel like I had to wash my hands almost as soon as I was done because I didn't really like the feel of the oils on my finger tips.

Would I buy this again? It's hard to tell. I'll have to see how I feel after I've used it for a while. But the fact is that it's a small bottle of 125 ml/4.2 ounces and it costs £4.99/$7.50 a bottle. I had to order this from the Boots website because I couldn't find it in the store despite blogs saying it was going to be released at the start of April.