Essence Open Water Dive or "Challenge accepted!"

Hey everybody! How are you doing? I'm having my cup of tea that I spoke of yesterday so I decided this is the perfect excuse to write little something here too. :) A week or two ago I wore this mani with Essence Open Water Dive and as it rekindled my obsession with the 'completely the same mani as it is in my head', I have to give it the special attention.

The thing is, in the beginning of my nail polish discovering I had so much energy, patience (and time, as it seems), that I was able to do infinite amount of coats for a mani I wanted, or even change one polish up to three times a day, because I got fed up with the colour I was wearing. Naturally, that didn't happen often, but it did happen. It seems so weird now, hehe. The phase luckily passed and I enjoy polish on a normal scale now. ;) Thus enters Open Water Dive. This is an oldie, Essence Into the Ocean LE came out in 2009 and I got it from a friend,  not even trying it on. It was always on my 'give away' pile and few weeks ago, when I did a large selection of polish in my stash, this little thing got the number again. As I watched the swatches though, Nail Junkie had such an amazing swatch of it, I decided to put it on. I love it over black polish but I really wanted to have its real bottle colour on my nails. Knowing Open Water Dive is sheer as hell (you can see that just by turning the bottle in your hand) I prepared for massive coat number, but Lyra's beautiful swatch convinced me it could be done. 

After putting 4 coats on my nails and still having very clear VNL on my short nails, I went back to the post and actually read it. Of course Lyra layered it over white and wrote that that clearly too. Facepalm for Ulmiel, yes. But here's when I got stubborn. I wanted the mani to look like that on my nails too! So I removed the 4 effing coats, put 2 coats of H&M White and two coats of Essence Open Water Dive and was a happy hobbit. 

Naturally it was a bitch to photograph. It is in fact a very complex shimmer, creating this soft minty-seafoamy colour, appearing to have only silver particles, but contains also green and purple specks of glassflecks, that are acutally visible to the naked eye, especially in the artificial light. And I needed all together 56 pictures taken, before I could semi-capture that on the 50th picture. Ho-ly crap! So here it is, set of my best pictures, plus a video to show how sparkly this is.

 This is direct sunlight, my camera barley handled all the sparkle.

The only picture where I actually captured the colours of sparkles. You may need to enlarge it. The artificial light makes my skin really yellow, but it's the best one to show all the sparkles.

Naturally I loved the result. It's an amazing shade, I love it. White with a twist, I guess (or, as my BF calls them, water-pipes-in-hospitals colour), I really like the greenish hue it has. And the glassflecks really make a difference. So yes, worth the troubles, at least for me. It also stayed on my nails for quite a few days. Next layering will be over dark blue, I think, Biba's mani looks amazing!

What is your 'Challenge Accepted' varnish/finish/colour? :)

Thank you for reading!