Thanks Vanessa who accosted me on the street and asked to do a guest post!

As a lifelong devourer of nails, it came as a surprise to me a few months ago that I could kick the habit in a couple of short weeks. My secret? Making them look sufficiently pretty that I wouldn’t want to tear them to pieces. And since then (aided by a surplus of time, due to looking for work) I have been rapidly advancing through Nails 101. Words like ‘jelly’, ‘cream’, and ‘matte’ have become a second language to me. (Although, to be fair, I’m not entirely sure what a jelly is, even though I do use the word).

I started keeping up with nail polish blogs, checking reviews on the polishes I had my eye on before buying them. And it was there I first started hearing murmurings of a mythical ‘shatter’ polish, a fluid of such beauty and novelty it seemed almost too good to be true. Until, one day, I came across a display in Farmers, and lo and behold, there it was. Or should have been, if it wasn’t sold out. A quick word with a salesperson confirmed that this had been the case almost immediately.

Since then, I have checked OPI stands across the country (well, in Auckland and Wellington) for the OPI Black Shatter, part of the Katy Perry collection. And it was in the Queen Street Farmers last week where it finally came to pass that I held one of my own in my hands.

As a connoisseur of cheaper nail polishes (amongst my favourites, Chi Chi’s $8 mini range) this is the most expensive polish I’ve ever bought, but man, was it fun. You need to use it with a coloured base coat – in my case, it was two coats of Chi Chi’s Cyberella (a metallic silver).

The polish itself is very thick and dries extremely quickly – so much that it gathers around the mouth of the bottle in a rather alarming fashion. Application is both tricky and non-demanding – swiping from the cuticle to the end of your nail often results in an uneven distribution of colour, with there never being enough on the brush to reach the end of the nail in an even fashion.

But that’s where the non-demanding part comes in – as the polish begins to crack and fragment, the evenness of the application begins to matter less. In general, I’d say if you’re looking for chunkier pieces of black, put it on thicker, but for a finer, more shattered look, a thin application is best. My application is on the chunkier side (and my apologies for the state of my nails; they’re recovering from years of neglect).

The look? When you’re not directly looking at it, it reminds me of animal print. Which is odd, because I’m not really down with the leopard skin. I’ve really enjoyed having it on my nails – it cheers me up every time I see it, and it is such a joy to apply.

If I ran out, would I buy it again? Possibly, but in a different colour, to mix things up a bit. I understand it is available in other colours overseas, but I haven’t seen it here yet.

OPI polishes are sold in a range of outlets, and Black Shatter retails for $26.90.