I Just Can't Copacabana was released by OPI as part of the Brazil collection for spring/summer 2014. This polish was received with acclaim when it came out -- I've seen it on at least two blogger "best yellows" lists. It's sunny medium yellow creme with a fresh, clean vibe that's surprisingly easy to wear. I don't wear yellows well but I was actually quite pleased with the way this felt on the nail.
Application was amazing for a yellow, which is a notoriously difficult polish color tending towards streaky, sheer, uneven application and any number of other bad polish behaviors. I Just Can't Copacabana has a fluid, smooth, creamy consistency, a nice balance between fluidity and viscosity and a lovely slip over the nail. It built up beautifully with multiple coats and self-leveled very well. This is one of those polishes that displays darkness where the polish is uneven, and because of my irregular nail beds I ended up applying a third coat to make that go away completely. Someone with a lighter touch and smooth nail beds could definitely achieve smooth even coverage with two. It applied so well that I didn't have much cleanup to do, and what I did have was easy and straightforward. I Just Can't Copacabana dries naturally in average time to a sweet glossy finish.
Photos show three coats of I Just Can't Copacabana over treatment and basecoat with a topcoat of Poshe. Apologies for the fibers sticking to my pinky nail. I honestly didn't even see them until I went to edit the photos, and by that time I'd already layered over this mani with Deborah Lippmann Glitter and Be Gay.
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| OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
Although I'm unlikely to wear this again by itself, it was kind of a revelation to have it on my nails. So bright and cheerful! Too bad it makes my fingers look like they're decomposing.
Now we come to the reason that I felt the need to acquire I Just Can't Copacabana in the first place: to serve as a base color for Deborah Lippmann's Glitter and Be Gay! When I featured Glitter and Be Gay here in July, I mentioned having come across a review of it by Polish All the Nails where she layered it over what else but I Just Can't Copacabana. I loved the look of this combination in her photos and made it a mission to replicate it. Let me say at the outset that I don't feel I succeeded. Whether it was because my glitter application lacked finesse (which it definitely does) or my lighting wasn't conducive to capturing attractive photos or both, my manicure isn't nearly as frolicsome and appealing as I'd hoped it would be.
Glitter and Be Gay is a glitter bomb as only Deborah Lippmann can do them. It has a yellow-tinted suspension base absolutely jammed with multiple sizes of hex glitters in yellow, gold, and blue/violet, much of it holographic.
This polish takes some patience to apply. It must be dabbed on (or as I like to say, ploshed and spread). Multitudinous amounts of glitter come out with each brushful and like to stay where they're planted, in clumps. Wiping the brush before application quickly results in a build up of glitters around the neck of the bottle. In short, as I said in my previous post about Glitter and Be Gay, application feels like a hot mess. And yet I still love this glitter!
Photos show one dabbed coat of Glitter and Be Gay over the I Just Can't Copacabana manicure above, with a layer of Gelous to help smooth the considerably textured finish followed by a topcoat of Poshe, which was immediately consumed. I really need to start using another non-fast dry basecoat as my glitter smoother -- Gelous is a bit thin and has an unexpected tendency to block fast-dry topcoats from penetrating all the layers of polish and drying them. At least, that's my best guess as to why glitters smoothed with Gelous sometimes pop off the nail completely within hours of application.
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| Deborah Lippmann Glitter and Be Gay over OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| Deborah Lippmann Glitter and Be Gay over OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| Deborah Lippmann Glitter and Be Gay over OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| Deborah Lippmann Glitter and Be Gay over OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| Deborah Lippmann Glitter and Be Gay over OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| Deborah Lippmann Glitter and Be Gay over OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| Deborah Lippmann Glitter and Be Gay over OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
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| Deborah Lippmann Glitter and Be Gay over OPI I Just Can't Copacabana |
Like I said, it's not the coherent sparkly yellow colorfest I was hoping for. To me, it's too random, too chaotic and really really busy. Fuzzy was appalled by this manicure: "Look at the clumps!" *lol* In person, this combo is actually much closer to how I wanted it to look than in the photos, but the macro is merciless and unrelentingly thorough. It probably would have turned out better if my application technique was more skilled and my judgment more refined, ie, if I'd used about half as much glitter as I ended up using. But I've had it on for a day now and I have to say, it's growing on me. ;)
I don't have the patience for glitter that I used to, but I still love it, love the sparkle, love the multiple colors, love the random geometry of it. I've got some glitter polishes on their way to me from Hare Polish, my most favorite indie glitter polish maker ever, so perhaps I can regenerate some of my affection for working with this genre of nail polish. Doable, no? Totally. Or as Fuzzy likes to say, either it's all right or it's too bad!
love,
Liz
I'm not the biggest fan of yellows but I really love this combination! It's unique and very eye catching. Not to mention those beautiful sparkles. I could stare at it all day! I don't think I'll ever get tired of glitter but I agree, sometimes it can be a pain to apply. What I hate most is when it's hard to get a decent amount of glitter on the brush but instead you get a lot of base. I've found turning my bottle upside down helps a lot. I've never done the dabbing method though but it seems to be pretty effective.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of top coats, you should try Rica Glossy Glam! I've been using it for a while now and it's awesome. It's not an overly thick polish but it's thick enough that it makes all of my polishes smooth. It also hasn't gotten disgustingly thick with use. It's not marketed as a fast drying top coat but it doesn't take a long time to dry either. Gelous on the other hand, I wasn't a fan of it. I hated how slow drying it seemed to be.
Oh thank you for loving this combo, Melissa, you've made my day! So you paint your glitters on like regular polish? Every glitter manicure I've seen on your blog has looked perfectly distributed and even on the nail, I could never get that kind of evenly random coverage. Even when I dab it on I tend to get clumps and have trouble separating them out. You must teach me this skill!
DeleteRica Glossy Glam is on my list of topcoats to try. I've got a bottle of Sephora X Shine fast-dry topcoat here, have only used it once but it worked very well to smooth glitter. Supposedly, though, it gets really gloppy and sticky about a third of the way into the bottle but that's what Seche Restore is for right? I used to really like Gelous but I'm kinda over it now since it seems to prevent any fast-dry topcoat that I used on top of it from permeating and drying the layers of polish underneath. The thing I really liked about Gelous was how thin and easy to use it was, with the great big flat brush that stuff would go on lickety split and didn't add a lot of bulk. The Sephora X Shine is rather bulky, maybe even more so than Seche Vite.
I love trying new topcoats!
Wow, this is a great combination! What an awesome summer look. :)
ReplyDeleteThank you, Michelle! Compliments are so reassuring! They bolster my faith that I actually can do glitter and create a wearable manicure with it....
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