OPI Nutcracker Sweet

 Puisque nous avons fini les Orly Dark Shadows, je vais vous montrer un autre vernis à gagner dans le concours (ici), le OPI Nutcracker Sweet. C'est un de mes vernis préféré, même si c'est une vieille formule toute liquide et pas opaque en trois couches, j'adore ses reflets!

 

 

 

Cet adorable lapin et les très belles boucles d'oreilles Alice sont également à gagner dans la Victoria Box ;)

 

Friends' Fridays - Meet the (Nutcracker) Sweet Mary

New Friday, new Friend! Today I want to present you Mary, from Body & Soul. What I like about her blog is the seriousness of the reviews, on polishes but also plenty of other beauty products. There's also a very friendly atmosphere in  her writing, I'm not sure I can explain it properly but I always take a lot of pleasure in reading it. I'm also always amazed at Mary's generosity, she's always throwing contests and giving prizes!! 

Once again, I can't really do a nail-art to present Mary's blog because she's not a nail-art blogger, but I owe her one of my treasures and that's what I'm showing you today. One day, her husband picked up a polish for her to wear, and it turned out to be Nutcracker Sweet, from the Victorian Collection. I had a complete crush on this "nude with a twist polish". It reminds me of ginger, the base colour being the colour of candied ginger and the shimmer is ginger as you find it in sushi restaurant. So when I put it on, I think of Christmas and gingerbread!! You see it here in three coats (OPI old formula + pale colour = opacity nightmare!!)

VNL is much less visible in real life

There you see the pale gold base colour 

You see here a hint of pink and even some green on the side

and with a flash, the pink shimmer just bursts out!

Nubar Prevail

Second beauty from the Nubar Modern Mattes Collection, here is Prevail. It's my favourite of the four, because as you know, I do love violet. Though to be precise, this colour is plum, that is a violet bordering on brown, quite like the greengage plum that we French people call Reine-Claude, violet on the outside and brown on this inside. It might not be obvious on my pictures, but I made a close-up of a nail and the bottle so that you can see the two shades of this pretty polish. This is two coats, no base-coat (but we'll come back to that), no top-coat.

And now with top-coat, and compared with some of my favourite shades, OPI Black Tie Optional and Have you Seen my Limo?. On the first pics, Black Tie Optional does look brown, but you can see later on the third pic that it's packed with violet and actually is quite the same colour as Prevail. Have you Seen my Limo? also has that same base colour but the silver and green shimmer gives quite a different result.

And now I would like to address the issue of matte polishes and base-coat. We are usually instructed to avoid base-coats with matte polishes because they dry very fast and a basecoat can make application more difficult (just as with holographic polishes). While I never had any problems with my OPI Suedes, the Nubar proved hard to bring to opacity. It wasn't overly obvious, but with two coats, you could easily end up with something like that:

This was the only way I found to show you the uneven opacity, it was impossible to get on pictures. I could have done a third coat of course, but with matte polishes, the more coats you apply the less matte it gets. So I looked for another solution. Holographic polishes go from nightmare to dream application when you use a special base, the best known being Gosh Fix Base Coat and Nfu Oh Aqua Base. I thought that if it worked with holo, it might work with matte as well. And it did. I have elected my Nfu Oh Aqua Base as the miracle base for crappy application. It's been tested and approved by yours truly for holo polishes (Nfu Oh, China Glaze OMG and even Gosh Holo), matte polishes and even... Khromes!! Yep, you read me right: I can fully enjoy my China Glaze Millenium because with the Aqua Base, it applies like a dream!!

So yes, the Aqua Base is a bit pricey when you buy it, but I would recommend it (or any similar one) to anyone, it makes the life of a polish addict truly easier!

That's it for today folks, I will continue with my matte polishes in the coming days, and well as trying to empty my "draft" folder!

OPI Pikaki Phakakta Plum

Today's polish is not only a tongue-twister, but one of my treasures. It's an old OPI which I started lemming after seeing it on Helen's Blog Just Nice Things. Her own words were that this polish is everything Chanel's Paradoxal ought to have been. Since I love taupe and greige polish and that my dupe of Paradoxal's (Barry M Dusky Mauve) is one of my favourite colours, I kept that name in mind. And some weeks later, I found it on Ebay France, sold by someone who had no idea it was a HTF polish and was asking a bargain price. 

In the bottle, the base colour is not very enticing, kind of a light coffee brown, but once on the nail, the violet shimmer makes it a beautiful warm taupe. That being said, putting it on said nail is not as easy as it sounds. I've read several bloggers raving about OPI's old formula (the black labels bottles), and I can't understand why. This polish is a runny sheer mess, and it needs THREE coats, which is really bad for a dark colour. Add to that the old slim OPI brush, and well, it really shows how much I love that colour that I should through all this bother to put it on!! This is three coats with top-coat to I just added a violet stone to enhance the shimmer inside.

And just to give you an idea of where PPP stands compared to other taupe polishes and to Dusky Mauve / Paradoxal. I added China Glaze Below Deck and LM Barenton in the comparison (comparison was done before the swatch, my nails are longer.)

As you can see, Dusky Mauve's base colour is darker and leaning more towards grey, but the shimmer is similar in both, and a tad more visible in PPP (that's one good thing about such a sheer polish!!)