OPI Who The Shrek Are You - $8.50 at Trade Secret

I originally was going to pass on this entire collection. I am a big Shrek fan, but my favorite character is Puss in Boots, and before this collection was released I thought I might get a polish if it were named after him. What's With the Cattitude just didn't excite me. Much though I love light blue polishes, I do have a ton of them, and the name doesn't explicitly refer to Puss by name, so I passed. This Shrek-inspired green is one of those polishes that you either love or you hate, and I love it. I always thought that "off" colors like this looked horrid on me, but after my experience with the very similar SinfulColors Innocent, I thought I'd give it a try. Seeing it in person in the store pushed me over the edge, I snatched it up immediately. Innocent is definitely in the same family, but slightly lighter and softer in tone. It's got a bit more yellow as well.  If you like the Shrek shade but it's just a tad too warm or green for you, the SinfulColors might be a better, and cheaper, alternative.

This polish applies very nicely; pretty standard for the newer OPI formula. The first coat can be a bit streaky, and make the nails showing underneath have an orange sort of tone. Coat two evens everything out nicely, but it still seemed a bit warmer than bottle color, so I applied a third coat and that brought it up to the wonderfully vibrant Shrek-y green you see in the bottle. I apply thin coats, so take that into consideration. I think with two moderate coats it would be fine. I added a coat of Seche Vite topcoat to the top, and I am absolutely in love with the results. The first two photos are with flash, the other two are in natural light near a window.

Now, as for the nail art; it required no small amount of masking, taping, stamping and painting, and now that I see it, I like it, but might have done it differently. Instead of the stamping bit at the bottom, I might do it in the middle and leave the very bottom by my cuticles plain green. And I might not even use the striping tape again. I think that If I masked the bottom with masking tape and painted the top, then stamped over it, I might get a nice faded out graduated look. I'll try that soon. But for now, Basically what I did is paint the whole nail with Shrek, then mask off the top of the nail diagonally, stamp the bottom with Color Club Gossip Column, which is a nice medium teal, and Konad plate m51. Then I put some straight french mani guides along the top and painted the tips diagonally in Gossip Column. When everything dried a bit, I applied thin silver striping tape to the edges of the tip paint and the stamping. Then I topped the whole thing with a healthy coat of Seche Vite.