OPI Fifty Shades of Grey Collection Swatches & Review

Happy Tuesday! Today I'm bringing you the OPI Fifty Shades of Grey collection. It's a six color collection released in conjunction with the movie it's inspired by. I'm not going to debate anything regarding the books or the movie here, I know a lot of people have rather strong opinions on them haha, because we're here to discuss the nail polish! :) I enjoyed this small collection. It's technically supposed to be their Valentine's Day collection I think, but it's giving us very non-traditional Valentine's colors (save for 1 red). I'm not crazy about V-day so I can get behind a collection like this haha. Let's take a look see!

Press Sample

First is Cement The Deal, a pale cool grey crème with a tinge of blue. It's thin but opaque and easy to apply. This is two coats. I love grey polishes and this is actually a shade of it that I don't have already which is nice!

This is Dark Side Of The Mood, a deep charcoal grey with a vein of a kinda milky pearl shimmer. I've heard that people had a difficult time with this formula, but I didn't have any problems with it. It's thin but I was able to get it opaque in two coats.

Here we have Embrace the Gray, which really should have an 'e' not an 'a' to make it the same spelling as the collection name, but whatevs. I've always preferred the UK spelling personally. This is a medium grey crème that applies like a dream in two coats.

My Silk Tie is a silver shimmer frost. It's got a bit of a warm grey undertone which makes it a little different than your basic silvers. It does leave brushstrokes behind, if that concerns you I'd try to paint straight haha. I liked this more than I expected to. It had pretty good opacity, this is two coats.

This guy is called Romantically Involved, a deeper warm almost brick red crème. I heard one girl on youtube call this a "mature" red haha. It's thin like the other crèmes in the collection, but very opaque. I used two coats but you can almost get it opaque in one. I actually really like this shade on me.

The last one is called Shine For Me. That name kinda creeps me out to be honest, but I like the polish. It's got a sheer-ish silver shimmer foily base with medium/dark blue microglitters. I put on three coats here. It dries slightly bumpy, some have said it's textured, but I don't agree because it's so slight it is just like a regular glitter polish in my opinion.

These shades are available in professional salons and stores like Ulta and Sally Beauty now. Let me know what you think of this collection!

How about a little giveaway! I have one brand new mini set of this collection up for grabs, so please enter below using the Rafflecopter widget if you'd like to win. This giveaway is open to United States residents age 18 and older and ends on 2/24/15. Please read all terms and conditions.

image via OPI

a Rafflecopter giveaway
Click here if the widget doesn't load.

Good luck!

❤ Kellie

The products mentioned were provided for an honest review.

About Time

"About Time" – A film from Richard Curtis, the creator of Love Actually, Notting Hill, and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Sponsored Content

For more than three decades, filmmaker Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral) has crafted his signature voice in the world of movies and television, giving audiences unforgettable characters who have alternately allowed us to laugh at our ever-so-human foibles and to shed a tear at the extraordinary journeys that accompany our ordinary lives.

Now, with About Time, Curtis gives us his most personal film to date. About Time tells the story of a young man whose gift allows him to go back and relive any moment of his life.  But instead of making every moment perfect, he learns that life and love are most extraordinary when you embrace all of their imperfections. 

About Time is a comedy about love and time travel, which discovers that, in the end, making the most of life may not need time travel at all.
--

I am a big movie buff, I watch new movies weekly. Both in the theaters and at home! Romantic comedies are not my first choice normally, but there are a few good ones that win me over. There are some that when I see the trailer, instead of rolling my eyes per usual, I get a catch in my throat and know, that that one is going to be good. "Love Actually" is one of my all time favorite movies so I was happy to hear that the same filmmaker is directing this movie.

I know firsthand how we can expect and plan for things to be perfect but they can turn out so upside-down and backwards but still make for a lasting and invaluable memory. I was going on a first date with a guy a few years ago and I was so nervous for it. He had gotten us tickets to a concert in a nearby town that I was really excited for. I spent hours getting ready, straightening my unruly curly hair and I even bought a new outfit. He picked me up and then halfway to the venue, his car got a flat tire and neither of us knew how to change one. Then of course it began to rain and the humidity turned my painstakingly achieved blow out in to a puffy mess. I was embarrassed and I just wished for the night to end.

We decided to start walking to get to a phone (this was before absolutely everyone had cellphones) and it was pretty awkward at first. We really hardly knew each other after all! It took about an hour to find someone to let us use their phone, and in that time we ended up easing into joking, laughing, and then really getting to know each other. Eventually we got a ride and help with the car. We missed the show but it turned out that neither of us ended up minding much. The unexpected misfortune of the night made us see each other in a different light than we were expecting to. We found out that we could both laugh off an unfortunate bump in the road (literally) and it wouldn't stop us from having a good time just being with each other. We dated a while longer after that and we're still great friends today, years later.

Just like in Tim and Mary's wedding in "About Time", you can plan for and expect perfection, but things can fall apart. It's how you react to adversity that really matters, and it can bring about the best times of your life!

Critics are already calling About Time "the first must-see movie of the fall" and "easily the most heartwarming, feel-great film of the season." Get ready to fall in love all over again -- with About Time. The film releases on 11-8-13.

Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Universal Pictures through their partnership with POPSUGAR. While I was compensated to write a post about About Time, all opinions are my own.

China Glaze - Flip Flop Fantasy

Hey folks, how the heck are ya? I have been overhauling my back yard with my family for the past few days and have been too tired to blog haha. We used to have horses and it's been a lot of work taking down fences and shoveling out hay and blah blah, not super interesting, but time consuming. I was wearing this shade for a few days this week, a neon from China Glaze's 2010 Poolside collection, Flip Flop Fantasy.

This is like four coats plus topcoat, it's got a terrible formula but it's a dope color. Very pinky coral orangey neon, bright as heck. Very hard to capture in a photo. I've been in a neon mood lately, gearing up for the summer I suppose. Also, if you're a fan of scary movies, or just crazy good movies, go see The Cabin in the Woods immediately. It's incredible.

BB Couture Girls On Tape Collection

Hi folks! Hope your week is off to a great start :) I have some new BB Couture polishes to show you today, yay! The Girls on Tape collection for Spring 2012 is made up of six glittery shades all named after movies. I'm a total film buff so I love the idea of course!

First is Happy Hooker, a light bright purpley toned pink with lots of silver glitter and sparse red and dark blue glitter. I thought this one would be super sheer, but it build up really well in two coats! The Happy Hooker is a comedy movie about a "true call girl", haha I've never seen it but it sounds interesting.

Next up is Carrie, one of my favorite films. This is a navy blue foil with silver glittery shimmer. It was opaque in one coat but I did two here. I am huge into Stephen King novels and Carrie is so classic, the film adaptation is really great. Horror films ftw!

Here is African Queen, a green yay! At first glance it reminded me of another BB, Frontier Woman, but that one is definitely darker. This is a happy spring green with nice silver shimmer, two coats. I've never seen The African Queen, a 50's film staring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. I'll have to add it to my Netflix queue :)

Gidget is a medium brownish-red pink with silver and red glitter and sparse dark blue glitter pieces. I love this color and I love the surfing movie it's named for! It's more subtle than the other shades in this series but still nicely glittery. This is two coats.

Now on to Black Widow, a really special polish and another movie I haven't seen haha. It's a super dark plum purple with red and silver glitter. I can't think of another polish like this! Very cool and vampy. This is three thin coats.

And last is Pretty Woman, a guilty pleasure movie starring Julia Roberts. This is a medium berry pink with the same silver, red, and dark blue glitter as the other polishes. It dries semi-matte but I used a topcoat to make it shiny. This is two coats.

You can purchase these from the BB Couture website at www.bbnailpolish.com for $8.95 each or at www.overallbeauty.com for $9.95.

Products provided for review.

opi and icing comparisons

hidey ho folks! i have been in a bit of a funky mood today unfortunately, and i don't mean funky as in funkadelic and listening to Earth, Wind, & Fire and Wild Cherry. i've just been a bit down in the dumps :P but i'm alright and we all have those days i 'spose. i went to see the movie "Devil" tonight w/ some friends hoping a good scary flick would cheer me up. .... .... did it? .... no. it sucked. m. night shamalamamama ding dong sucks again. bummer. it was the first trailer i've seen in a long time that has genuinely scared the crap outta me, but no, i do not recommend it.

here is a lovely comparison between two opi's from their hong kong collection that came out early this year and some cheapy icing colors. i like icing polishes as they are usually ok in quality and you can get them on the continual "buy one get one half off" cosmetics sale that icing stores have all the time (no joke, it's always going on). i also enjoy the brush (when it's not a wonky one) as it is thick and wide like opi's, only a bit poorer in quality.

gorgeous in gold is the dupe i found for opi's bling dynasty. well, it's not exactly a dupe. it appears so in the bottle shot but it turns out that GinG is slightly more bronze and less shimmery than BD. the formulas are different too, BD is more of a foil and GinG is more a metallic kind of formula. both are shown with two coats.

the dupe for jade is the new black, a big hit with the polish community and myself personally, is jaded. this is basically a perfect dupe. i wouldn't be able to tell the difference myself if i hadn't have written down which fingers i swatched them on! of course, the opi formula is better though. it is more free flowing and creamy. jaded is very opaque but i got a tiny bit of drag when applying it. two coats for each :)

so if you wanted these colors but maybe missed them in your local stores or don't want to pay opi prices, you might be able to find them in icing for less. and just to throw in another icing to round out this post, chartruesly yours is similar to, but not a dupe for, opi's who the shrek are you? polish that is part of the shrek collection from this summer. i don't have that one to compare unfortunately.  the formula was THICK on this guy, but i really enjoy the color.  it's very uhhh...unique in my collection :)

lamp light

flash

i know i've seen an icing collection that looks SUPER close to the Alice in Wonderland collection opi did earlier this year. hmmm :) anyway, not saying anything definitive OF COURSE (haha) but in the interest of avoiding buying dupes or seeking them out, it seems that icing puts out a lot of colors that are similar to opi shades. have a great friday night luvies!

xoxo,
kelliegonzo

i purchased these products myself. please see disclosure statement for more information.

yay!

OMG everyone, i just reached an epic time in a blogger's life. i just reached the 1000 mark in terms of blogger followers. wow.  amazing.  i am overwhelmed with joy!  i never in a million years could've imagined that my blog could gain so much recognition from my target audience as that!   i never knew there was anything such as "beauty blogging" let alone nail polish blogging when i first started out.  i simply saw a swatch of a nail polish on a girl's photography stream (CCee) on the Sugar Network and thought...hey i could do that and a monster was created!

i want to thank each and every one of you from the bottom of my heart for popping in to read my blog or even just to look at my pictures. i totally write for you, but also for myself. this is my sanctuary, my therapy, my home away from my home. it keeps me sane in an insane world. so thank you for supporting me, talking with me, and sharing with me in this crazy journey.

as i talked about on twitter recently, since i think hitting this number is a big milestone, i want to do something special so i'm having a HUGE giveaway! details will follow very soon!

also on a silly side note, i went and saw "Piranha 3D" with some of my besties last night and it was the funniest, dorkiest, scariest, most hilarious movie i've ever expeierenced. so if you want a fun campy movie that will keep you laughing the whole time, go see it :D

la la love you all so much and talk to you soon!

shivon & kalista

so my camera is being whack-tastic and half my pictures have turned out blurry lately. these are the only ones of these notd's that survived :(

zoya shivon (on my CHOPPED nails) is sooo gorgeous i kept shoving my fingers in people's faces all day long to get them to stare at the beauty haha. i don't even know how to describe it! kind of a berry color with sun-tinged purple? haha i suck at this. anyway tons of goldish purple shimmer running through it so it looks almost totally gold at certain angles. LOVED IT! this was my first encounter with zoyas (as with zara in a previous post) and they take some getting used to for sure. shivon was the easiest to apply out of the three i got.zoya kalista was SOOO gorgeous, a dark rich shimmery brown red (which looks way more red in this picture (sorry, dumb camera!!) that flowed perfectly...on my left hand only. my right hand was a big fat fail for some reason. i redid that hand like 5 times. idk why. but these pics are of my beautifully polished left hand haha, so enjoy. the zoya formula is a little thick but their color range is so pretty pretty i might just forgive them.

hope everyone went and had some fun this weekend. i slept, cleaned, did laundry and went to a few movies. um, i have to do this sorry. i have to plug quentin tarantino's new movie "inglorious basterds". it's just amazing. i don't think many people are into that sort of thing, but if you are a tarantino fan you will love it. i was aMAAAAZED at how good it was. god i wish it was a true story! it was truly written well, and the actors all did their roles ultimate justice. even the "no-name" actors who had smaller parts did so well. i just can't say enough about it. yes, there is gore and death and violence and sadness and misery but there is also humor and vengeance and victory and pride. anyway, au revoir my dear lovelies!

quake

short post. discontinued :( nucolour nc2 quake. beautiful bronze brown.hope you all are having a FAB weekend! i'm feeling a little under the weather *cough*. but i still am going to a few shows, saw "post grad" last night HI-larious. now off to see "inglorious basterds". keep smiling :D

bare nails & entire collection

my bare nails (photographed a few days ago). they are pretty much the most perfect i could ever ask for them to be (minus the staining of course). not to blow my own skirt up or anything ;) i'm always diggin thru archives in other nail blogs looking for those elusive shots of their bare nails so i wanted to put mine out there front and center haha. i guess it's kind of like seeing me naked. i'm weird.my collection (minus a few i have added this week...oops!!). be sure to click to make this guy bigger, it looks ridiculously little on here. i just got some sterilite bins to store them in so phew my dresser top is not longer being held captive by these bad boys.
i have at least three posts i have been too lazy to get up this week so here's looking at you kid, they'll be up soon! later lovelies!

p.s. you all should go see "Julie & Julia" in theaters. it is a SUPER cute movie and i adored it! so funny and cute and fluffy and just great. but i warn you you'll want to eat like no other after you leave :)