Sunday, February 19, 2012

Nicole by OPI 'A Lit-teal bit of Love' & 'A Million Sparkles'--swatches and review

The last time I was at CVS, I blew all my extra-bucks on 2 of the new Nicole by OPI shades (note--these are NOT part of the CVS exclusive 2012 Kardashian Kolors collection): 



Left: A Lit-teal bit of Love. Right: A Million Sparkles


Let's take a look-see (all swatches are taken outside in natural light because I'm a chronic procrastinator and haven't built a lightbox yet):




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Left: A Lit-teal bit of Love (2 coats, no top coat). Middle:  A Million Sparkles (2 coats, no top coat). Right: 2 Coats of A Million Sparkles over 2 coats of A Lit-teal Bit of Love (no top coat).


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Da scoop: A Lit-teal bit of Love is a very pretty blue foil made up of itty bitty nano blue and silver shimmer particles. Despite the name, this doesn't really read as a 'teal' to me (in my mind, a teal color would have more green in it), but its questionable name aside, it's a gorgeous polish that covers smoothly and effortlessly in 2 coats. There's nothing super unique about it. In fact I'll tell you about a dead-on dupe that I already had in my collection in a sec...

A Million Sparkles is another one of those crazy glitters that I can never stay away from. It's got large hex gold, small hex blue and pink and blue bar glitter (the blue bar glitter is a bit thinner than the pink bar glitter). Now I'm a massive sucker for bar glitter, which is why I snatched this up and I'm so glad I did. I don't have any glitter that comes even remotely close to this in my collection. This glitter looks awesome over A Lit-teal bit of Love but I'm sure you could build it up to opacity by itself as it's pretty dense. Despite its denseness, it applied easily with none of the typical annoying clumping that these kinds of polishes sometimes suffer from (oh the glitter clump--the bane of my polish-hoarding existence)...

Moving on to the dupe search for A Lit-teal bit of Love:





 The suspects in their line up
left to right: Orly Stone Cold (from the Mineral FX collection, Color Club Cold Metal (from the Color Club Foiled collection), Orly Sweet Peacock (from the Birds of a Feather collection) and A Lit-teal bit of Love itself


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left : A Lit-teal bit of Love, middle: Stone Cold, right: Cold Metal

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I don't really know why I even bothered including Orly Stone Cold in this comparison. It's too blue and its finish is truly unique--some kind of crazy mix of glass fleck and flake and it is one of my absolute favorites of all time. Maybe I just wanted an excuse to play with it again cuz it's just so frickin gorgeous. Cold Metal has a similar finish but is still a little more blue than A Lit-teal bit of Love is.  Ok, these guys are off the hook. Moving on to Orly Sweet Peacock...

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left: A Lit-teal bit of Love. Right: Sweet Peacock


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OK, THAT'S more like it. These 2 look like near dead-on dupes to my eye. Maybe if you stare at it til your head hurts, Sweet Peacock might appear to be a ghost of a whisper more teal, but really you do NOT need to own both of these polishes. If you had to choose between the 2, I'd say go with Sweet Peacock simply because it comes in a bigger, less ugly bottle (I truly do hate that Nicole by OPI bottle--WHAT were they thinking when they came up with that saggy boob-lookin mess?). Both polishes were pretty much the same formula-wise. Covered easily and gorgeously in 2 coats and both dried super fast as foils tend to do. Also, you can get the Orly for about a dollar cheaper (or more) depending on where you get it. I usually buy my Orly polishes from online nail supply sites like Transdesign where they're only $4.25-5.32 a pop. Nicole By OPI polishes, on the other hand, are usually about 8 bucks and I have yet to find them on any online discount shop.

So that's the straight dope on A Lit-teal Bit of Love & A Million Sparkles. And now I gotta go do boring housewife stuff. Rap to y'all later!

2 comments:

  1. See? I CAN avoid the dreaded "K" girls. that teal color is sooo beautiful, and Orly's is even better! ;)

    ReplyDelete

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