OPI New York City Ballet

So, you know I'm not necessarily a bridal person, or likely to wear soft shades. However, I do have a few swatches of OPI's upcoming soft shades collection New York City Ballet. Let's check them out.

Barre My Soul, three coats. Warm, pink sheer pastel shade. Actually pretty flattering on me, but it's hard to tell because my camera does weird stuff to my skintone.

My Pointe Exactly, three coats. Cool, grey sheer pastel. Finally, a soft shade the more gothic among us can get behind!

I also got the glitter from the collection, Pirouette My Whistle. I made some sort of snow fall glitter gradient with it:

And I think that's pretty nice. Small silver glitter and relatively larger white hexagonal glitter. I'm still wearing this manicure, it's holding up, and I don't feel like changing it until it starts chipping.

Bridal collections are seldom interesting, but despite my usual reluctance towards those, I'm liking the shades I tried from this release. Barre My Soul may not be very unique, but I don't have colors like that, and I've already found use for it twice. I did the snow fall manicure with Barre My Soul as well, and used a sandwich method and put some glitter between coats. It was really cute, but unfortunately I got no daylight pictures. I like My Pointe Exactly even better, if I add the possibility of using a soft shade for an occation like intended it is somewhat edgy - put in context.

Pirouette My Whistle is a very nice glitter, in all its cuteness. It's not a dupe for Nubar White Polka Dots, as the small glitter is different. The hex glitter seems identical, though. I think I like the OPI one better, actually.

Formula wise, these aren't the type of shades I'm used to working with, and they gave me a bit of trouble. You really have to watch your strokes as previous coats easily rubs off if you over-work it. Barre My Soul was a tad streaky until the third coat, but using generous layers made it all a little easier, while the streaks were less obvious with My Pointe Exactly, which on the other hand was a whole lot more prone to bubbling and wouldn't allow me the generous coats Barre My Soul did. Pirouette My Whistle is of standard OPI glitter formula, a bit jellyish and thick. Using it the way I did gave me no trouble, but because of its thickness, nails may look a bit bumpy until fully dried. The surface ends up smooth, though.

For a soft shade collection, and the parts of it I've tried, hats off to OPI for trying something a little new. It may not be what I usually rush out to get, but I will find use for these in my working environment and the like. I also like that OPI has released a sparkle shade with the pastels these last couple of years - last year's I Juggle... Men was a nice one too, and allows for some creativity to loosen up the conservative pastel colors.

These will be out in Swedish stores by the end of March, so I'm guessing about a week or two earlier in the US.

Swedish word of the day:
snöfall -noun snow fall
We've had plenty of it here in Stockholm over the last week.