OPI Skyfall Collection: The Dangerous Shades

As promised, today I have the cooler-toned half of the OPI Skyfall holiday collection, the so-called Dangerous Shades. Left to right below: Tomorrow Never Dies, Moonraker, The World is Not Enough, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Live and Let Die, The Living Daylights.



Tomorrow Never Dies is a blue violet shimmer, so finely balanced between the two colors that I spent quite some time pondering it in different lights. Sometimes it looks quite blue, sometimes quite purple, and sometimes it's definitely blurple. Whatever it is, I like it. As was true yesterday, all swatches today are two coats, no topcoat unless otherwise mentioned.



As you can see in the low light photo below, it does show a few brushstrokes, but it's such a pretty glowy color I don't much mind.



Moonraker is a blue-toned grey frost, and the problem child of the collection. If your nails are perfectly smooth and your application skills top notch, this is a polish for you. For mere mortals, you're going to want to use a ridgefilling or at least thick base coat under this and work carefully. Here's as good as I could get it to look:



Here's another angle—I am not sure if those bumps are bubbles or the polish failing to level out small imperfections in my base coat or what, but I know they're not attractive.



And here's what it looked like the first time I swatched it, without base coat. Not good.



Let's leave that mess behind and look at The World is Not Enough, which is a rosy taupe micro flakie shimmer. There appears to be some silver in this, too; it almost looks foil-y in some lights. I used three coats of this one.





The shimmer in this is really quite pretty; I saw a bunch of different colors twinkling off it:



On Her Majesty's Secret Service has a very similar finish to The World is Not Enough but with a greyed blue base. This one was also three coats.



I swear I saw a hint of duochrome in this; sometimes a reddish tint would appear when I tipped my nails this way and that.



The shimmer in this one sparks a variety of colors too:



Live and Let Die is a deep green with golden green shimmer.





In low light, the base goes nearly black, but look at that shimmer:



Our last polish in this sextet is The Living Daylights, the only glitter in the collection. It's got gold, silver, copper, and teal hex glitter in a clear base.



Here is it over Live and Let Die; the glitter lays pretty flat even without additional topcoat:



The glitter looked surprisingly sparse, but at this point, I realized that in my haste to play with the glitter, I'd failed to shake, rattle, roll, or even gently turn upside down the bottle before I used it. I did that before I tried it over The World is Not Enough, and this is what two coats of glitter got me:





I also tried it over On Her Majesty's Secret Service:





Given my well known bias toward the cooler side of the color spectrum as well as my love of glitter, it shouldn't surprise anyone that I like this half of the Skyfall collection better than the warmer tones I shared yesterday. The Living Daylights is a winner; I don't have any glitter with that color combination that I can recall. Of the shimmers, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is my favorite, followed by The World is Not Enough. I wouldn't kick Live and Let Die out of bed for eating crackers, either. Overall, I think this collection is more interesting than the Germany one from fall, and that's before even considering the Man with a Golden Gun real gold topcoat that got released with it. I don't plan to swatch that because a) it's $30 and b) gold is not really my metal and c) I'm a bit uncomfortable with using up a precious resource like gold on something I'm going to swipe off my nails and throw away. If I see it on sale (which is very, very unlikely), I will probably get over all those things because it does come in a shiny gold bottle and I am nothing if not weak in the face of bling.

The polishes shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider.