OPI iPhone App: Silly Fun For Your Apple Device

Author: Park

OPI, a nail polish brand that I really like, offers a free iPhone app so that you can see all the colours available and then see how they’d look on you. 

The app has a little cartoon hand that you can try all the nail polishes on.  The image of the hand can also be adjusted to match different skin colours.  It’s a nice idea, but I find the choice of skin tones pretty limited; especially for non-white people.  It’s a step in the right direction, but more choice in skin tones would make this useful to more customers. 

As for the “trying on” of the colours, it’s a lot of fun.  Last night, when I should have been sleeping, I spent 20 minutes spinning the little colour wheel around and seeing how everything looked.  The app also lets you save colours you like into a favorites section and look up colours by name.  How accurate the colours actually are is unclear.  For example, the sparkly colours look way sparklier then the versions I’ve seen in real life.  However, it is an animation instead of a photo, so it seems like a fairly decent representation of what your nails would look like if you were Jessica Rabbit.   

This app is definitely fun, but pretty useless.  While it’s neat to see all the colours OPI has available, I have never purchased nail polish by name.  I once went into a drug store with the name of a colour and the sales person just looked up from filing her nails and said, “is it red? Then look in the reds”.  Perhaps, if you were getting your nails done, you could call ahead ask for a particular shade by name, but I feel like you’d get a variation of “look in the reds”.

I rate this product as 3 tentacles out of 7.  It’s a fun toy to play with for a little while, but ultimately it’s pretty silly.  It is, however, free so it’s a neat thing to have on your phone for a week, and then delete.

One other thing I realized while using this app: every single OPI nail polish has a dopey pun name.  That means that there is a team of people at OPI whose job it is to constantly think up new colour-related puns.  I should call up my Dad, he's been making terrible puns for free for years. He could be a millionaire by now!

Rating: 3/7 tentacles