Clarins 230-type shifty shimmer polishes are of course some of my all-time faves, and OPI La Boheme has been one of my lemmings for quite some time now. An ebay alert a couple of weeks ago informed me that a new listing had gone up for $20 cheaper than I've seen it in years, and hey, you only live once soooo...
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| indoor, CF lighting |
Wait, what just happened here?! Yep, those nails are SHORT. While stepping into my bathroom to get some remover so I could start this here very mani, I cracked a fingernail off into the edge of the door frame. It had the good graces to snap off very neatly and squarely at the base of my free edge, but there was no way I could do anything other than cut the rest down to match. Sigh. So, here we are, starting back over at squared nubs for 2019. Huzzah!
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| indoor, CF lighting |
La Boheme is part of one of the most truly amazing holiday collections of all time, OPI's 2003 Holiday on Broadway. It's a deep red that changes from slightly berry toned to slightly scarlet based on your lighting - it really is both a cool and a warm red in the same bottle - and has both the glowy red shimmer that makes up the color as well as Clarins 230 "unicorn pee" type shimmer.
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| indoor, CF lighting at a steep angle |
These days, indie makers that are able to get a supply of this mythical sparkle tend to put it into fairly sheer polishes that allow the twinkle and color shift to really stand out. OPI was using it as a supporting ingredient, however, not the sole star of the show - the sheer jelly of the type we're more familiar with for this collection was Man of La Mancha, significantly less popular because it's pretty subtle when worn solo. La Boheme is totally opaque, which means it's pretty all the time, but also means that the amazing color shift we've come to expect from this type of polish is dialed waaaayyyy down to being super subtle. The blurry pic above that shows a few individual green sparks? That's as close to an emerald flash as I was able to see. The full rainbow is very much in evidence on the bottle, but is only a suggestion on the nail.
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| window-filtered daylight |
Now, let's be really real here - this is a drop-dead gorgeous red, super sexy, not
quite vampy but certainly saturated and deep, about perfectly classic for an evening holiday party of any sort. So what's not to love? Well, the old black-label brush kinda hated me this go-round, making clean up more of a chore than it should be. It was still ever so slightly patchy at 2 coats, so despite the apparent opacity I needed 3 coats. And then it had the gall to wear super quickly on me, even chipping 2 days later. Poops.
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| indoor, bright CF lighting |
Rating: despite this being a big ol lemming of mine, in my current state of mind It's a 3 stars out of 5 polish. Chipping is a mortal sin in my book, and the subtlety of the shimmer on the nail as opposed to the rainbow bottle was honestly disappointing. Then again, all the faults I had with this polish could be at least partially explained by the dramatic difference in my nails themselves. Super short free edges make tips harder to wrap and more difficult to get sealing basecoat all the way up under the nail, so the wear issues could be just the square shorties here. And hey, I didn't want my nails short, so maybe I'd be unhappy with everything, who knows? We shall be most definitely be re-visiting La Boheme.
Where to buy: stalk ebay, I've seen this polish nowhere but there for several years now.
~Michelle
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