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All pictures are in natural light
Left hand with a thick coat of the blasted glitter.
Right hand with a thin coat of the blasted glitter
Sephora by OPI Blasted Glitter Turquoise and Julep Nessa
Hello Berry Patch! Today a have a failed football themed mani for you. I wanted to make sure to include this mani in my blog to remind everyone that nail bloggers aren’t perfect and neither are all nail polishes, haha. Since the college football season has started I wanted to do a mani that represented my school spirit. I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2008 and our colors are blue and gold, but as you can see from the pictures I didn’t quite achieve this look, haha.
I started with a base of Julep Nessa from my May Maven Box, which is a nice sunny, shimmery (almost metallic looking) yellow. But I guess Julep isn’t carrying this color anymore because I couldn’t find it on their website. When I was applying Nessa, I noticed that it was pretty opaque after one coat, but it was a little streaky – so two coats is a good idea to get an even look. And for my blue I wanted to do something fun, so I chose the Turquoise Sephora by OPI Blasted Glitter, which gives a crackle effect. I had this polish for a long time and had never used it, so I forgot that this was considered a turquoise and not just a blue, which would have clued me in that it wasn’t going to give me the color scheme I wanted. I had never used any of the “blasted” polishes before, so I treated it like a normal shatter by making sure not to apply too thick of a coat on my right hand. But since the glitter wasn’s super dense, it was really difficult to see the shatter effect, because it just looked like sparse glitter. So on my left hand I applied a thicker coat which worked well for some fingers and for others it didn’t really shatter because of the thickness. So I felt like I really couldn’t win with this polish. And then of course, I topped everything off with some Seche Vite top coat.
Overall this manicure did not turn out like what I had hoped. The blue was way too light to give off a Cal theme and the blasted glitter was very difficult to work with. While I really love the idea of a shattering glitter, I don’t think I will be buying anymore of these “blasted glitters” from Sephora by OPI :/ I also found that Nessa dried very slowly and was prone to smudging, which was pretty annoying. In terms of wear though, they both did really well. I wore this manicure for about a week with almost no chipping, so at least there was that upside. As you can tell, this was not one of my favorite manicure, but I figure I need to show the good as well as the bad sometimes…
Products used:
- Zoya Anchor Basecoat
~ average $5.00
- Julep Nessa ~ $14 (not currently available)
- SEPHORA by OPI Blasted Turquoise Glitter
~ $3.00 (only one seller on Amazon right now)
- Seche Vite Top Coat
~ average $4.50
- **All prices base on current Amazon prices unless otherwise noted.
Thanks for reading, I post every Sunday, Wednesday and occasionally on Fridays. And please don’t forget to “like” my Facebook page www.facebook.com/BerryPolished for extra news! I also have a Tumblr and a “nail ideas” board on Pinterest.com under the user name “berrybear”.
~ A. Berry
You know, I’m not a fan of the blasted line from Sephora at all. I got the regular blasted black a while ago. I liked it…when it’d actually work. It was way too hard to apply the right amount to get it to crack. The formula dried way too quickly too, sometimes right on UHF brush, then the brush would get all gunky. Just way too thick of a formula. I almost always had to redo a few nails, sometimes more than once, because it wouldn’t crack. Not worth spending the money on IMO. There are shatter polishes that work much better, and are cheaper.