Two colors from OPI's Hawaii collection

I absolutely love these colors.  I bought them at ULTA a while back, when almost every brand of nail polish was either on sale or offered a free gift with purchase except for OPI, but no other polishes really struck my fancy.  (Okay, many of them sort of did, but I have so much nail polish now that I have to really be blown away by one in order to justify making a purchase.)  You all know how much I love blue-green-sometimes-gold polishes, right?  Well, add This Color's Making Waves to my list.  (I may have to do another post showing off all of the other blue-green-gold polishes I've acquired since writing that first one.)   And My Gecko Does Tricks is such a brilliant shade of green that I couldn't pass it up!

This Color's Making Waves

 

This Color's Making Waves is a blue-green metallic polish with just a little bit of the occasional purple - and yet the purple doesn't blend into something awful with the green.  That's probably because of the tiny little purple flakies in this polish.  It's nothing short of incredible.

Just look at those flakies!

The formula on this was was very smooth, as usual for OPI.  The first coat is so sheer that your heart sinks a little, but the second coat makes it 100% opaque.  It is a little bit streaky, but I found that the streaks self-leveled pretty well, especially when I applied my top coat.  I actually have three coats on my nails, because I forgot to wrap my tips on the second coat (season five of Buffy was a bit too much of a distraction, I guess).  The third coat sort of intensifies the color, but it definitely isn't necessary in order for the polish to look good.

This photo is in direct, but slightly cloudy, sunlight.

I tried taking this outside, but there was a big cloud over the sun.  And there were two very large bees having a fight all over my back yard - a fight which I did not want to get in the middle of.  So I snapped a few indirect sunlight photos and got the heck back in the house!

Of all of my blue-green shifty polishes, I'd say that This Color's Making Waves is most similar to Nicole by OPI Candid Cameron - except that Candid Cameron doesn't have any traces of purple in it, and it also doesn't have any flakies.

This macro shot really captures the purple-green color shift, as well as the pink-gold of the flakies.

My Gecko Does Tricks

Ohhh my gosh.  Normally I wouldn't expect such a bright green to look good with my skin tone - especially since this is a yellow-toned green, rather than blue-toned.  Anything with too much yellow tends to just look like sick next to my skin.

BUT THIS LOOKS AWESOME.

My Gecko Does Tricks has this great purple color shift to it.  Purple-green?  That sounds ghastly!  But it somehow totally manages to work.  This one doesn't even have flakies in it - just the flat microshimmer that you expect from a metallic polish.

*excessive drooling* 

The purple-y shift didn't really get picked up in my camera, except for on the edge of the bottle in a macro shot.  Isn't that incredible?  OPI, I don't know how you got a rosy-purple to work well inside a bright green polish, but my hat's off to you.

It's like a sunset, only with green instead of blue.

As far as application goes, Gecko is very similar to Waves.  The first coat is disappointingly sheer, and you think to yourself, "welp, there goes my afternoon, this one's a three-coater," but then the second coat comes in and makes it completely opaque!  It's pretty streaky, too, but the streaks do level out on the second coat, and even moreso with top coat.  I found that the best way to avoid streaks was to use as few brush strokes as possible - the more strokes, the more streaks.  So if you try this polish out and have too many streaks, just let that coat dry and apply one more thin, wide coat.

Here's a macro of the center of the bottle, with much less of the color shift showing.

I recently did some nail art using this color, which you can find in this post here!

Hawaii is OPI's summer 2015 collection.  These two are really the only colors that I see myself getting - although Pineapples Have Peelings Too looks kind of awkwardly awesome and I think I might need it eventually.

Have you picked up any colors from the Hawaii collection?  What are your favorite blue-green-gold-purple shifty polishes?  Or do you prefer other shades of shifties?  Let me know in the comments!