OPI | Vegan Claws

A vegan nail polish blog. A celebration of colour and light, as well as of justice for nonhuman animals.

Archive for the ‘OPI’ Category

Orange/Coral Holo Birthday Mani!

Today is my birthday and here is the polish I wore! It started out yesterday when my partner took me out go-karting and mini golfing as a surprise for my birthday! So much fun, but when I was taking off my seatbelt to get out of the go-kart, I messed up the nail polish I had put on that afternoon (of course, it was totally worth it! haha)

So later on at home, I took off the smudged polish and decided to put on an old OPI, “Nice Hand… Great Nails” just to see what it was like… Well, it’s very very sheer, and not really in a good way in my opinion. And this is coming from someone who likes sheer polishes that show visible nail line… Anyway, this one was a very sheer orange coral shimmer that looked about the same colour as the stains on my nails from the neon coral I was wearing the other day, so I wasn’t too impressed! (I guess I should have taken a photo of it anyway to show it, but I didn’t…)

I had only put on two coats, so normally I would have added a few more but I didn’t feel like staying up any later to let them dry and see if I liked the result any better. I was about to take it off and start over with something that I knew would dry quickly, but then I decided to try adding a layer of Ozotic 522, a coral holo. Magic! It turned out wonderfully.

Two coats of OPI Nice Hand Great Nails followed by one coat of Ozotic 522, topped with OPI Designer Series top coat.

It was recently announced that the entire Ozotic 500-series is being discontinued. The 500-series includes a lot of great holographic and multichrome polishes… the good news is that they’re all on sale right now until they’re sold out! So I just “had” to get a bunch of them while I still could, and 522 is one of the ones I got.

They’re sold online from Picture Polish in Australia, Harlow & Co., Overall Beauty and Llarowe in North America, as well as some other sellers in other countries. If you want some, best to get them now while they’re still around!

Hopefully Ozotic is only discontinuing them because they’ve come up with something even more awesome that they’ll release soon! We’ll have to wait and see…

Anyway, I really love how this mani turned out; orangey coral holo seems like a great birthday celebration colour to me! And it’s been a really nice birthday weekend with great weather and plenty of fun and relaxation. 🙂

Bonus photo of Jasmine who has claimed the nail polish storage area lately! (Well, she takes turns with Fred.) Here she is lying on top of the Ikea Helmers! I think they like them because the metal surface is nice and cool in this hot weather…

Category:

OPI, Ozotic

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OPI The Show Must Go On

Today’s post will be short on words but heavy on pictures. This is another example of my favourite type of polish – duochrome glass fleck!

OPI The Show Must Go On is from their Burlesque collection which was a holiday 2010 collection. It’s red but shifts colours from fuchsia through to orange, copper and even some golden yellow at extreme angles. I love it! It has a great formula too. Shown are three coats, but the third one I just put on before photographing because I’d had the polish on a while and somehow got some hairline cracks, not chips, in it while doing dishes! Two coats is enough for opacity. Shown in various lighting situations as listed.

Ott Light:

Sun:

Natural light, various degrees of overcast/partly sunny:

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OPI

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OPI Pedal Faster Suzi

I’ve been on a big pink kick lately, not sure how that happened! I decided to give light pinks another chance and determined that I don’t really hate them all on my skin tone like I used to!

This one is OPI Pedal Faster Suzi from the spring Holland collection. Silly name (why does Suzi need to name so many polishes after herself?!), pretty colour. It’s a light-medium pink, not too bright but not dusty either, with silver shimmer flecks that sparkle blue and pink in the light, which you can see if you enlarge the third photo. Shown are two coats. It has a nice formula with no application problems.

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OPI

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OPI My Pointe Exactly

This polish is OPI My Pointe Exactly, from their new NYC Ballet collection of sheer pastel jellies. It’s a lovely light grey jelly shade with a fairly smooth formula. I did still have some issues with streakiness, but the ridge filler I used was giving me some trouble so that was likely a contributing factor. It was a bottle of Milani Smoothe that is getting close to empty and seems to be causing bubbles. I probably need to add more thinner and wait longer for it to dry before applying polish… I honestly can’t remember now if this ended up being three or four coats of My Pointe Exactly, but I really like the result.

I recently heard a tip for applying these types of polishes without streaks; It consists of applying a quick dry top coat over the first coat of colour, waiting for it to dry completely, then adding a second coat of colour and top coat as usual. It apparently lets you apply sheers and pastels using only two coats rather than 3 or 4 to even out streaks. I’ll have to try this next time. It should be especially helpful in keeping it looking like a translucent jelly (personally, I really like the translucent jelly look, although I know some people hate being able to see their nail line through the polish). This is the only shade I have from this collection so far, it’s the most unique of them and the one that initially spoke to me, but that might change sooner or later…

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OPI

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OPI DS Tapestry

A quick post today to show you OPI DS Tapestry, #29 in their designer series line (one of the later ones, so I think it’s still relatively easy to find compared to the original DS releases!). It’s a very nice scattered holo in a rusty medium red with orange and rosy brown undertones – I’d call it a true brick colour. Apparently OPI calls it a “dazzling deep rose”; I have to disagree. Anyway, this is two coats, and the formula is wonderful as is usual for DS holos.

Sunlight:

Shade:

Indoors (under halogen light):

And sunlight again:

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OPI

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Multi-Coloured Glitter Comparison

When I reviewed Soulstice Spa’s LA in October, I mentioned that I would do a comparison with several other multi-coloured glitter polishes I have. It’s been a while but here is that comparison. I don’t own the famous “original” glitter of this type, Deborah Lippmann’s Happy Birthday, but here are the ones I do have.

From left, OPI Rainbow Connection, Soulstice Spa LA, Essence Circus Confetti, NYX Girls Carnival, Wet n Wild Party of 5 Glitters. Click on any of these photos to see more detail in the larger versions. And please excuse the pink-stained nails! All of these polishes have clear bases and any pink or orangey colour you see is just the evidence of my most recent manicures.

Here they are at one coat, thumb to pinky in the same order as above: thumb OPI Rainbow Conncetion, index Soulstice Spa LA, middle Essence Circus Confetti, ring NYX Girls Carnival, pinky Wet n Wild Party of 5 Glitters. OPI and Essence are clearly the densest of the bunch, followed by the Soulstice.

At two coats:

And at three coats:

As mentioned above the OPI and NYX are denser than the others, and the Essence and Wet n Wild are least dense. The OPI is different in that it has larger hex glitters in addition to the small and medium.

Colour-wise, the Wet n Wild is the most different among them since it has fewer colours and lacks any yellow or warm-toned orangey red glitter. It’s also my least favourite of these polishes for that reason. The Essence polish has more pink glitter than any of the others, including some lighter pink, and has some darker blue as well. NYX Girls Carnival is missing the light pink and dark blue of the Essence, but also has small cool-toned cherry-red glitter that the others aside from Wet n Wild don’t. OPI Rainbow Connection and Soulstice Spa LA are similar colour-wise to the NYX Girls but without the cool-toned cherry red. I’d say the NYX also has a higher concentration of yellow glitter, and the Soulstice has a lower concentration of pink glitter. The yellow glitter in Essence is a paler than the yellows in all the others, more of a gold.

My picks from these are, well, the denser ones/ones with the most yellow glitter – NYX Girls Carnival and OPI Rainbow Connection, followed by Soulstice LA!

Category:

Essence, NYX, OPI, Soulstice Spa, Wet n Wild

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OPI Fly and comparisons

At the risk of making it seem like all I post is OPI, here’s yet another one! This is OPI Fly from their recently released Nicki Minaj collection. I wasn’t going to get any polishes from this collection but when I saw them in store I couldn’t resist getting Fly. I’m powerless against turquoise!

I didn’t have any good light for swatching but I figured I’d just do it anyway. This is two coats of Fly, no top coat, in natural overcast light.

With Flash:

Since I’m a total sucker for this kind of colour, I (of course) already had a polish that is very, very close to Fly, that polish being Milani’s Fresh Teal, which is one of their neons. I also added Kleancolor Catch Me to my comparison, since it’s fairly similar as well.

These are all two coats, no top coat – index and ring: OPI Fly, middle and pinky: Milani Fresh Teal, thumb: Kleancolor Catch Me.

In overcast natural light:

With flash:

Milani Fresh Teal is just a tiny smidgen brighter and greener than Fly. I found the Milani more opaque than the OPI at one coat (it could probably be a one-coater if you use a thick coat). Both applied really well and were self-leveling.

The Kleancolor is similar to Fresh Teal in terms of hue but is a few shades lighter (and is the most opaque of these three polishes, easily a one-coater, like a lot of Kleancolor cremes are); I just thought I’d add it for comparison’s sake.

I should probably redo this comparison when there’s sun to do a better job of showing the differences, as the flash tends to wash things out…

My preference/recommendation between Fly and Fresh Teal is Fresh Teal. Not only is it less expensive it’s also a bit more opaque and brighter.

Category:

Kleancolor, Milani, OPI

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A couple of recent OPI glitters

A few weeks ago I did this alternating manicure with two of OPI’s recent glitter polishes. Excuse Moi? is from the Muppets holiday collection, and Nicole by OPI Disco Dolls is from the Kardashian collection. They have a lot in common so I thought they would go well together.

The two polishes are very similar in that they have the same kind of multi-coloured medium hex glitter in them, but obviously the bases are different. Disco Dolls is an orangey-gold fine glitter in a clear base, while Excuse Moi has a pink-tinted base packed full of fine glitter. I think the glitter itself is mainly silver, but it looks pink with the base colour.

These swatches were 3 coats, although both of these are pretty dense and you could probably get away with two coats. Both were easy to apply without having the glitter clump together or anything. This is with top coat; both are kind of gritty and need a layer or two of a good top coat.

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Nicole by OPI, OPI

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OPI Man of La Mancha

Happy New Year everyone!

I recently got this discontinued OPI on eBay (it was released in their 2003 Holiday on Broadway collection) and it immediately jumped straight to the top of my list of favourites. It’s an amazing duochrome (well, multichrome really) burgundy/red that flashes through shades of orange, yellow and green at different angles, and also has a ton of fine sparkle in it.

Shown is two coats of Man of La Mancha over one coat of Kleancolor Black, my favourite one-coat black. Man of La Mancha is from OPI’s old formula (contains toluene) and so is super-smooth and easy to apply. It’s a pretty sheer polish, as many good multichromes are, so I put it over black which really shows off all the colours it shifts to. I haven’t tried it on its own or over other colours yet, but am looking forward to!

I also added a coat of Nubar 2010 flakie polish on my ring finger – the flakes have the same colour scheme as Man of La Mancha so I thought they would go well together. However, Man of La Mancha is just so sparkly and awesome that the flakies weren’t even visible in most light! In the the photos with the turquoise background below, you can see the flakes though. Those were taken in my bathroom under incandescent lights.

Anyway, I’ll let the photos do the rest of the talking – short version, if you have a chance to get this amazing polish, do it!!

Category:

Kleancolor, Nubar, OPI

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A few Halloween manicures

A few Halloween NOTDs (nails of the day) from the past couple of weeks! (Although, really, I would wear these anytime!)

Milani Flashy Orange with Wet n Wild Ebony Hates Chris stamped on (I’m not very good at stamping yet…)

The other hand, with scurrying spiders!

A candy manicure: China Glaze Liquid Leather with Nubar V for Men matte topcoat, in an attempt to make nails that look like Panda Licorice!

Wet n Wild Cougar Attack (I broke down and bought this on ebay… I doubt they even release these limited edition collections here in Canada…)

The next day I added some nail art using the orange and black striping polishes from the Orly Instant Artist “Flights of Fancy” collection. The collection also included a dotting tool which is what I used to create the web-like design.

China Glaze It’s Alive from their recent Halloween release:

It’s Alive with OPI’s glow-in-the-dark Zom-body to Love as slimy tips:

My attempt at capturing it glowing in the dark:

Happy Halloween everyone! 🙂

Category:

China Glaze, Konad (stamping plates), Milani, Nubar, OPI, Wet n Wild

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Vegan Claws

A vegan nail polish blog. A celebration of colour and light, as well as of justice for nonhuman animals.

Archive for the ‘OPI’ Category

Orange/Coral Holo Birthday Mani!

OPI The Show Must Go On

OPI Pedal Faster Suzi

OPI My Pointe Exactly

OPI DS Tapestry

Multi-Coloured Glitter Comparison

OPI Fly and comparisons

A couple of recent OPI glitters

OPI Man of La Mancha

A few Halloween manicures

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