OPI Pirates of the Caribbean - chapter I

One of OPI's spring offerings, the collaboration with another huge movie company and a simultaneous release with the new movie this collection shares its name with, has landed in my mailbox: Pirates of the Caribbean. This collection consists of six pastel cremes and a new color crackle, or shatter, polish, this time in a sparkling silver.

Today I'll be showing you these:

Skull & Glossbones, Stranger Tides, and Mermaid's Tears.

All swatches are three coats, without any base or topcoats.



Skull & Glossbones. Beige-y bone grey.



Stranger Tides. Dusty, beige green.



Mermaid's Tears. 60's kitchen appliances dusty mint green on the cooler side.

Among these, the formula was a tiny bit inconsistent, but definitely far from the worst I've experienced with pastels. I needed three coats for all of them, even though I'm known to be one of those habitual three coaters I would say you'll need that to even out the surface - at least if you have longer nails. (However, this is as usual partly a matter of preference.) Skull & Glossbones had drying time that exceeded those of the others, and the one that gave me more problems with unevenness and patchiness was Stranger Tides. But overall, I didn't have any problems with these, and I had no issues with bubbling.

The other three lacquers will be posted by Cammi soonish, but I'll give you my thoughts on the collection as a whole. even though I'm normally not a pastel gal, I do like this collection a whole lot more than I did for example the recent Texas release. These go well together, and they fit both the season, and for those of you who care, at least partially the trends. Its overall impression reminds me of Essie's Resort collection from last summer, which makes me reflect upon the fact that OPI could seem like being one year behind, but on the other hand, I'm okay with that because I think these are really cute and at least one is unique enough for me. That being Stranger Tides, which ends up being my favourite.

Like always, I went on a pretty extensive dupe hunt, and although I do have some similar colors in my collection (which is of course not that large when it comes to pastels), I'm happy to report that the only close color to Stranger Tides I found was a discontinued polish from Make Up Store, Maria, which is still not a dupe. Mermaid's Tears feels like it has been done a fair amount of times, but once I did actual physical comparisons to similar colors in my stash, I wound up with no dupes for it. If you like this type of color a lot, you should probably get it. Additional information on comparison matters will hopefully be yours once Cammi has done her part, due to being the one of us who is into pastel colors. Let's put our trust in her!

Short summary for those of you who don't like large masses of text: I like this collection, it's nice, but I might not be jumping up and down over it. Out of six colors, I will wear three or four.

Oh, and the Silver Shatter? I will leave you hanging on that one, and post it separately in what I hope to be a wide range of variations.

Swedish word of the day:
ben -noun bone
but also
ben -noun leg
Some pirates may have only one.