My BLOWN MIND by OPI Blue My Mind

It's very rare that I do something like this guys, but this is going to get serious right now. The last time I did this was when I was accused by an anonymous comment-er that I stole their nail design (seriously?!). Hard to figure it out when the person was anonymous and wouldn't give me a link to their design. Over-dramatic much? Anyway, my witty, joking demeanor has taken a step aside and I think my inner b**** might be on her way out. I know we're talking about nail polish here, but here's what happened:

I sat down at my computer today to paint my nails. Because it was going to be a swatch post, I googled the name of the color to try and get the original collection name and year to include in the post. Which polish did I choose? OPI Blue My Mind, a polish that I bought originally a LONG time ago (I couldn't remember the exact purchase date). I looked at the google image results and what did I find? A much lighter and more powdery blue than what my purpley blue OPI Blue My Mind polish looked like both in the bottle and on my nails. I tried to figure out if maybe my lighting was just off. Nope, the lighting was what the lighting was. It wasn't affecting my polish at all.

The swatch post I looked at was from Paint Those Piggies (an absolutely awesome blog that I didn't even know about until now -- you should check it). You can clearly see the light blue of the polish and the tag on the bottom of the bottle.

Looks good right? And there were so many others that looked exactly the same. So I checked my bottle. Could I possibly have a FAKE polish in my collection? No way. But here's what my photo looked like:

Does it look the same to you?? You can see the barcodes are identical. By the way, props to Paint Those Piggies for being able to balance the polish like that....I had to use my thumb for balance. Anyway, I panic, thinking DID I BUY A FAKE OPI? Seriously? and I google "fake OPI." Turns out fake or counterfeit OPIs are an issue in the nail community. For example, TransDesign (a website that sells polishes for cheap) was sued by OPI for selling allegedly fake OPIs (there is one lawsuit I enjoyed reading -- because I'm a law nerd you know). I have such a hard time thinking there are fake nail polishes out there. I mean, they are nail polishes. OPI retails for anywhere from $7 to $12 and people are counterfeiting them?? They are nail polishes, not the crown jewels here. Anyway, I found this post, this post, and this post saying that fake OPIs EXIST, and I found this post showing How to Spot a Fake OPI Their blog posts also included some tips and ways to tell if your bottle is a fraud so I grabbed my bottle and started looking for clues.

Apparently, it's really hard to tell if a bottle is fake and, although you used to be able to look at things like the bottle shape and smoothness, the barcode at the bottom, whether there are two labels on the bottle or one, the stamp of a black or white number sequence on the bottle, the spelling and warning labels, and a little dot on the P in "OPI" written on the top of the cap, now the fakes are getting so good as to include all these things. As you can see, my bottle had everything a real bottle should: there's the little dot on the P in the cap, the ridges on the inside of the cap, the stamped "OPI" on the brush (although it might be hard to see on camera, in real life it's clear as day), the stamped number sequence on the bottle, proper warnings and labels, and an appropriate two label bottom tag.

Now I throw this out to you guys. Thoughts about this? Am I seeing things and my polish DOES look like the correct color? Are my nails faking it today? Or do I have the real deal on my digits? Suffice it to say that if I bought a fake OPI I'm going to be really really angry. It's just nail polish at the end of the day but nobody likes feeling ripped off or betrayed. Needless to say, OPI Blue My Mind did in fact end up BLOWING MY MIND today.

Don't worry OPI Blue My Mind, I'll love you either way. Jk. Seriously though, is that not absolutely gorgeous?