OPI The Muppets Collection Holiday 2011 Swatches and Review

Did you know there was a new Muppets movie coming out? I didn't! It opens on November 23rd, and OPI has released an entire collection of Muppet-themed nail polish to go along with it. There are twelve shades; six glitters and six shimmers, in traditional OPI Holiday collection fashion. The shades are:


OPI Animal-istic. This is a really interesting red. It has a warm and coral-like base to it, but it has several colors of iridescent color-shifting shimmer which alter the look of the polish depending on the light. Sometimes it looks tomato red, sometimes cool pink-red and sometimes orangey-coral red. The shimmer is very bright and has lots of multichrome color shift.



OPI Designer, de Better! This one is a surprise- it's a unique foil! And it's gorgeous to boot. It has a pale champagne-taupe foil base with orange copper foil sparkle particles. If you were to take OPI Extra-Va-Vaganza and pulverize it into a fine powder, this is probably what it would look like. Really shiny and beautiful with sparkly orange accents.



OPI Divine Swine. This is small, round purple glitter and medium sized silver hexagon shaped glitter in a clear base. It's sheer.




OPI Excuse Moi. Hands down, my favorite of the collection. It's a warm candy pink tinted base with tiny silver and pink microglitter accented by medium round multicolor glitter. There's silver, yellow, red, orange, green, pink and blue. It looks like sprinkles and sparkles like crazy.



OPI Fresh Frog of Bel Air. This one is small, bright grass green glitter and medium silver hexagon glitter in a clear base. It is also sheer, best for layering.




OPI Gettin' Miss Piggy With It! This one is slightly more interesting than the rest of the sheer glitters. It's tiny ruby red glitter and medium silver hex glitter in a clear base, but it also has a bit of hot magenta hex glitter to give it a little more depth. The magenta glitter is the same size as the silver. Still sheer, though.




OPI Gone Gonzo! Light shiny blue glitter and medium silver hexagon glitter in a clear base. Sheer.


OPI Meep-Meep-Meep. Another interesting red. This one is a purple-tinged deep raspberry red with tons of broken flake shimmer. The little flake glitter particles are highly sparkly and shift colors from pink to violet to gold. It dries a little funny; it's like the flakes sink into the base and leave little holes. I'd recommend two coats of topcoat to even out the surface of this one.


OPI Pepe's Purple Passion. A medium to dark raisin-mauve colored creme base with tiny flakes of iridescent glitter. The little broken flakes in this seem like the same ones that are in Meep-Meep-Meep. They flash pink, purple and gold, though the gold seems most prominent in this one.



OPI Rainbow Connection. Pardon the thick polish in these pictures. The glitter in this had some weird clumping problems when I applied it, so it's thicker than it should be. This is small, round multicolor glitter and larger hexagon multicolor glitter in a clear base. It is somewhat similar to Deborah Lippmann Happy Birthday, but it's not an exact replica. This applies similarly, though- the glitter sticks together in strange ways so I had to push it around my nail instead of painting it on like a normal polish.





OPI Warm & Fozzie. Such a cool color! Though, for some reason it keeps turning out too dark looking in every picture I take of it. It's at least a shade lighter in real life. It's a very complex shade. It's made up of distinct shiny foil particles in many different colors. There's pink, gold with green duochrome, bronze brown that shifts to gold and at some angles it even looks like there's a purple/red particle in there. The whole polish has an overall gold duochrome color shift in addition to being made up of individual multicolored duochrome particles. Similar in finish to OPI Pros & Bronze.



OPI Wocka Wocka! This is the least complex of the reds, but it's still pretty nice. It's a vibrant blue-toned red with very fine gold-based multichromatic shimmer. In some lights, the shimmer almost seems holographic. The main color shift is pink to gold, but when you look closely in full sunlight, there's some even smaller shimmer that flashes even more colors. The shimmer is subtle, though, so the duochrome isn't the main focus of the polish.

The formula on these was okay. The six shimmer shades were perfect, pretty much everything I could ask for in a shimmer formula. The six glitters were not as good. Excuse Moi was perfect, but the sheer ones were runny and tricky to apply. I did three coats of each color, but only the sheer glitters needed three. In fact, they would really need four or five if you want full opacity. Dry time was good on all.

Overall, it seems typical of an OPI holiday collection. Heavy on the reds and glitters. The reds this year are better than usual, but I'm really not too keen on the glitters. I thought they would have colored bases, but I guess I was wrong! Normally I'm all about glitter, but the sheer ones just aren't doing it for me. They're really only good for layering. Excuse Moi is the exception; it's perfectly opaque in two coats and looks amazing with all those different colors shining in it.

I really love The Muppets, so I have to give them extra points on the theme. But who doesn't love the Muppets, you know?

My top picks are Excuse Moi, Warm and Fozzie, Designer de Better, Meep-Meep-Meep, Animal-istic and Gettin' Miss Piggy With It. The rest of the glitters aren't unique, opaque or complex enough for me to really feel excited about them. The shimmers are all fantastic, though. I like that tiny broken flake stuff they used in them. Worth checking out in person so you can see how shiny and iridescent it looks.


This collection is available now.

(This was sent to me for review.)