I’m always up for a little nail polish challenge, and I adore OPI products. Naturally, I like Nicole by OPI nail polishes by default and I’m sure you can figure out why! I’ve seen Nic’s Sticks in the beauty department of my local drugstore and at Target pretty often, but I’ve found that whenever I was ready to take the plunge, the selection was lacking due to either stock issues at the store– or Nic’s Sticks were so awesome that they just weren’t able to keep a decent amount in stock for the people like me who waited too long. So finally I was able to secure a few, ta-da! Here are the four I tried:
From top to bottom:
Need it Yesterday — purple pearl
Snow Time to Wait — opaque white
Red Eye to NY — blood red cream
I’m on Deadline — violet-blue pearl
There’s a really interesting method to the madness here! The polish is in a tube in the center which is encased in a hard plastic cylinder and shaped like a pen, complete with a brush at the tip. In order to use, you simply point down, pump, then paint!
It took me a few tries to get this right, but it’s really easy to use. First things first: 2-3 pumps should be sufficient to get the brush saturated for the first use once you’ve opened it. Please don’t go pumping the pen maniacally thinking it will work better– it will splatter and you’ll likely get polish somewhere you didn’t intend to. Luckily, I had paper towels and a placemat on my coffee table! In all fairness, that was entirely my own fault. Lesson learned. This polish does dry quite quickly and the brush applies thin coats to begin with. I found that it was best not to allow the preceeding coat to dry prior to applying another, it’s possible the brush will drag and leave a streak if you do. Everything was A-OK as long as I worked on that nail in it’s entirety before moving on. I was able to get great coverage with 2 coats with all of the colors I tried except for “Snow Time to Wait”, the opaque white. That required 3 coats in order to achieve even coverage. Once top coat was applied on all of these, they leveled out smoothly for me and dried fairly fast. I actually felt like I had more dexterity because I was holding this like a pen in my right hand and was able to be more precise. Painting the nails on my right hand wasn’t as easy as the left since I’m a righty, but I did find it easier to control than a wayward regular nail polish wand. I am curious now to check out more of the shades!
A really cool feature I wanted to point out on the Nicole by OPI site is the ability to do a little cyber swatching in the Try It On Studio. It’s cute and I was having fun playing around on it yesterday. Okay… I never said I wasn’t easily amused!
I always wanted to try these but I wasn’t sure how well they would work or how well I would work with these. But now that I know these are pretty legit, I want to try them myself. Thanks for these tips, I would most definitely have pumped the pen waaaay too much and would have put on the second coat only after the first dried!
I’m gonna try them out- I change my nailpolish every other day- this could help a lot! The website is super fun too- Avery and I played nail salon for about an hour…lol!
Hiya Sarah!
I’m so glad I helped, I made a little mess that was my own fault before realizing what I was doing wrong. After the pen was started, I found 1 pump was enough to resaturate the brush when it needed more! Once I realized how fast it was drying and I didn’t move on to the rest of my hand before coat 2, all was okay! I think otherwise it’s almost impossible to really goof on these
xo
Amber
Aww Kris! I wanna see Avery play nail salon!
xo
Amber