It's been about 8 years since I wore OPI on my blog. No real reason - I used to love the colors, the collections, the ultra wide brush. OPI is much easier to find these days too... I can get it at my local Wal-Mart although this color I purchased from Ulta in order to qualify for free shipping. Sorry, not sorry. This is Alpaca My Bags from the Fall 2018 Peru collection. As soon as I saw it, I wanted it and I've kept it in my Saved folder on Instagram for months.
I started with Morgan Taylor REACTmax Optical Brightener, 2 coats of polish and finished with Glisten & Glow top coat.
So I was a little let down. For starters, the first coat was all kinds of watery and patchy and I thought "You know, maybe it's just my base coat." I'm not a HUGE fan of mixing systems, which I've talked about many times before. When I go for gel, I always use the same system no matter if it's Gelish or CND but I don't love mixing base coats with color with top coats.
That being said, top coats can also ruin a manicure quick. There are so many posts on the Internet dedicated to how some top coats "shrink" or even yellow a polish underneath.
Same can be said for base coats. I used CND Stickey for years until it just stopped working for my body chemistry. When I wear Zoya, I must wear their Anchor, or I can't get the polish to stay on my nails for more than a day. Considering that I don't tend to wear polish more than 3 days or so, it's not a huge issue but still.
Back to this polish. So my second coat was so much better. It self leveled and pumped up the color and honestly, I thought that's all I needed. I added top coat, let dry for a bit and then took my pictures which you can see clearly that this polish is still pulling some patches.
Okay, so maybe it's my base coat, right? Here's the thing. I went looking at other swatches on the Internet and I found more people with this patchy job but they didn't talk about it. Maybe a third coat would have done it - I don't know. Frankly, it's late, the world's on fire and I'm tired.
I'm still going to keep this polish because I did pay $10 for it, but I have to figure out a better application for myself. I do have OPI Nail Envy here so maybe that's the kicker for it to apply the way I wish.
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