Playing with polish, Lippmann & Nfu Oh edition

I mentioned in my last post that I had been experimenting around with my new greens, but I didn't go into any specifics.

For one thing, I have had another weird experience with Glitter A-Peel. As many people have stated about it and the OPI peel-off stuff as well, you just can't use it and expect your polish to stay on more than a few hours. (OK, some people can, but I can't, and I'm clearly not alone there. I'm not sure if it's a body chemistry issue or that those people are just more careful than I am apparently capable of being.) So, I put it on, we went and had a nice dinner - this was on my birthday, a week ago - and everything was fine; then we went to the grocery store on the way home and by the time I got back in the car the nail with the big glitter had decided to start peeling off. That's not the weird part; that's just par for the course. What I was wearing was two of the Lippmanns I got for my b-day: Mermaid's Dream on 9 nails and Shake Your Money Maker as an accent nail. So it was Shake Your Money Maker that peeled first, but when we got home - presumably while I carried groceries upstairs in recyclable bags with handles that might have rubbed against the nails - Mermaid's Dream had peeled off of another nail - peeled completely off and was gone without a trace. And well, so that's two nails down, but the weird part is that the polish on the other 8 nails stuck on like glue, and never did peel at all, even with prodding from an orange stick. I had to take the rest - eventually - off with remover in the normal way.

But since they were on like glue, apparently, this was where I really started experimenting. I tried doing a French mani and/or a glitter fade with Shake Your Money Maker - it worked well as a french on top of Mermaid's Dream. It did not do so well as a glitter fade, it's too thick. (Maybe with some thinner, it might do better, but really I think it's just too gigantic a glitter to "fade" well.)

And then I had those two nails with nothing on them so I tried the other green I had that was new, and that was Nyx Enchanted Forest. It is a dark-green microglitter kind of thing, and it's no surprise that I am crazy about it. That's just right down my alley. (So I went around for several days with Mermaid's Dream on 8 fingers, accents of SYMM on some of them, and an index finger and thumb on one hand that was another color entirely. But it was all color-coordinated!)

Then my bottle of Nfu Oh 51 showed up. Back when I was first getting into nail polish a few years ago, everybody was all agog over this, and I didn't pay that much attention at the time, really, but I did remember the name since it was fairly unusual. (How DO you pronounce "Nfu" anyway? I still have not figured out the answer to that one.)

This picture is not great at all but it does show you what Oh 51's base color is very well:

What you can't see there is the flakies, which in most lights I was in seemed to show up as coppery. I thought it was really cool. I poked around other people's reviews on the internet and most people seemed agreed that it takes 3 coats to be really opaque if you don't put something else opaque underneath, and this is two coats and there is VNL so I agree with that assessment. Two is not enough.

(I notice that I called it Oh 51 above - that's because that's how I tend to think of it, like it's a zero, 051, "oh-fifty-one" - even though I know it's Korean and so that's probably not what it really means.)

Then yesterday I tried it over something else - I kept thinking at home that it looked garnet under the fluorescents, and I decided to try to see if I could bring that out. I had one of the unlabeled OPI minis handy - I'm pretty sure that it's Malaga Wine. So I did that and then Oh 51, and it did indeed turn out as a sort of garnet color, with the purple overwhelmed and not really noticeable, but still with the coppery highlights. It was very pretty, but I probably will stick with its natural color more often.

The other thing I have to say about Oh 51 is that removal was not easy - the color came off with no problem but the flakies wanted to stay on. It was not quite as bad with the OPI underneath, but just a regular basecoat was not enough. Maybe next time I'll try two coats of basecoat.

Oh, I forgot to say that where I got my Nfu Oh was fabuloustreet.com. I had not dealt with them before, but everything went entirely smoothly and since they are the official US distributors of Nfu Oh, you don't have to worry much about whether you're getting the real thing, as you might if you bought it on eBay or somewhere. It's not cheap, but I wanted to try it and I'm happy with the results!