Product Review: OPI Chip Skip

OPI's Chip Skip is a product that you would use in addition to a base coat, not instead of it. It works by dehydrating the surface of your nails, absorbing any surface moisture or surface oils. By eliminating that layer of moisture or oil, it lets your nail polish really adhere to your nails and stops your nail polish from chipping easily.

The brush that comes with Chip Skip is shorter and stiffer than the brush of a standard polish. The consistency is liquid, as runny as water, but it dries instantly, you can watch it do this within seconds.

All you do is paint it onto your nails, you don’t even need to be careful with application as there is nothing to clean up, and then straight away you can apply your favourite base coat.

I have to admit, it sounds pretty hardcore, dehydrating your nails every time you paint them? Wouldn’t that just dry out your nails and be really bad for them? Well, the answer is no. I’ve been using Chip Skip every single time I paint my nails for a few months now and my nails are actually in really good condition. Chip Skip will only dehydrate the surface of your nails, it does not penetrate the nail and so will not dehydrate the whole nail plate and bed.

In respect to it doing what it says on the bottle, it does work. Comparing the longevity of my manicures with Chip Skip to without, I get on average a few days longer before any chips start appearing.

Like I said, this is a product that you use in addition to your regular routine, not instead of it. Here’s how I use mine:

1.       Use polish remover to remove previous manicure

2.       Wash hands and moisturise to remove remnants of polish remover and make sure bare nails are taken care of

3.       Use Chip Skip. One quick coat over each nail and it dries instantly

4.       Base Coat. I’m using OPI Nail envy for dry and brittle nails

5.       Colour, nail art, nail gems, anything fancy and pretty!

6.       Top Coat. My favourite at the moment is Seche Vite dry fast top coat.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found Chip Skip in any stores yet, I ordered mine online. A quick google search brings up lots of places to buy this product and it seems to be around £6-7 at the cheapest.

The bottle will last you a long time, it is the same shape and size (15ml) as a standard OPI nail polish.

So, to round this all up, I love OPI Chip Skip. I will continue to use this product as it's definately doing it's job and once I run out, I will be buying more!

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Grape Pop, Some Stripes and Some Bling

I got really bored and decided to play with some nail deisgns.
First of all, I really wanted to wear a purple polish as I haven't worn a purple in a long time. I opted for China Glaze's Grape Pop. This is a lovely purple cream colour, very opaque and with a top coat, very shiny. I also have CG's Grape Juice, which is a similar shade of purple, but with shimmer.

Another reason I wanted the purple was because I had an image in my head that involved silver and gold stripes, so I needed a colour that would go with both silver and gold. Purple was all I could come up with.

The silver I used was China Glaze's Millenium and the gold was China Glaze's GR8, which is holographic.
I started out with vertical stripes

But I didn't like the way those looked, so on my other hand I went for horizontal stripes

Yeah, the stripes aren't really even or anything, but I like them. When asked which he preferred, my BF said the vertical, but I still preferred the horizontal. I think I'm going to do more horizontal stripes in the future, with different colours, maybe like a gradient starting with a light colour and ending up with a darker colour.

After all of that, I still wasn't happy with the finished product, maybe it was just that I was really bored after finishing my exams and having no work to do! I was looking through some nail pics that Katy Perry had tweeted and saw her blinged nails, silver with loads of nail gems, so I stole that look for my accent nails. I painted over the stripes with one coat of China Glaze's Millenium (amazingly opaque and quite space-age looking) then added the nail gems.

I was really suprised at how easy it was to add the bling! I thought it looked quite simple and had the method in my head, but I was sure that it was going to prove to be really difficult and end up looking like crap!

I used one of those orange sticks, dipped the tip in top coat to make it a little sticky, picked up a gem, added a little top coat to the bottom and put it in my nail. I used the orange stick to move the diamante into the right position if it looked slightly off.
Usually when adding these nail gems, I put a layer of top coat onto my nails then add the gem using an orange stick with the tip dipped in top coat, but as I had so many gems to add the top coat was sure to dry before I was finished, so I added a little top coat to each gem and then added a thick layer of top coat once all of them were on and in place.
I have to say that they really were a pain to remove! I had a cotton pad soaked in polish remover held against my nails for ages, but they still didn't come off! I had managed to remove all of the polish, the silver, the stripes, the Grape Pop, everything had gone, but those gems were still stuck fast! I had to pick them off with my nails and remove the polish underneath. There was no damage to my nails though, so that was good!

I'm reading: Grape Pop, Some Stripes and Some Bling

OPI Light My Sapphire and Water Marbling

This is OPI's Light My Sapphire. It's a deep, dark midnight blue that was released as part of the Night Brights collection.

The colour is actually so dark that it looks black in the shade or in a dimly lit room, you need some good light to let the blue shine through, but when it does shine through, you can see that the polish has a very fine shimmer to it.

I've had this in my collection for quite some time but have never gotten round to using it until today.

The brush is a good size for my quite-small nails and the texture of the polish is perfect, not too runny and not too thick, just a lovely creamy consistency.

It starts to look good after just one coat, but two coats is required to reach its full potential. The pictures I have taken show how it looks with 2 coats.

OPI's Light My Sapphire is a great colour to go for if you want a vamp look but don't want to go for black. It is also a great base coat for Konad, water marbling (As you will see after the pics!) and other nail art techniques.

Here are my pics:

2 coats of OPI Light My Sapphire topped with one coat of Seche Vite.

With Flash

No flash, just natural light

Of course, this was a bit plain for me right now, so here's my second ever attempt at water marbling.

Water marbling is a pretty popular nail art technique now, if you google it you will come up with loads of blogs and vlogs that will provide you with a tutorial. I don't know who originally came up with the idea, but it's truly a nifty idea that has infinite possibilities and always gives you unique nail designs.

Here I've used OPI Light My Sapphire as my base coat, and then I added LMS, OPI DS Shimmer and Eyeko Rain polish to the water and dipped my nails in.

Unfortunately I haven't quite mastered the technique of water marbling. I ended up with a few bubbles on my nails and a few smudges where the polish didn't adhere quite right. Aside from the few minor mistakes, I really love how this turned out. Holographic polishes, such as OPI DS Shimmer, are great to water marble with as you get that eye-catching swirl of holographic shimmer through the polish. I think I've developed a love for water marbling with polishes that are similar in colour, the navy and pale blue mix so well!

I’m quite tempted to add some Konad stamps over the top in silver, or a few swirls of blue glitter…

I'm reading: OPI Light My Sapphire and Water Marbling

First post!

Hi there and welcome to my blog!

This is a place where I can share my passion and my hobby of nail polishes and nail art with you. I'm a UK blogger and everything is from my own personal collection and was bought by me.

I'm going to show swatches, do reviews and show some great nail art techniques that I have picked up all over the internet, from magazines and from friends.

Here's some celebratory first-post nails!

This is GOSH's Peachy with Barry M Nail Effects over the top. There is no top coat as I really like the suede look of the polish over the shiny colour coat.

I'm reading: First post!