I try, you buy: OPI My Private Jet

subtitle: My 3 Private Jets (or, what the hell is going on in OPI's quality control/quality assurance departments)

My Private Jet (MPJ) is a shade that was originally released with the Night Brights Collection in 2007. As a side note, this collection contained two deep blue shimmer colours that presaged the Chanel Blue Satin craze by at least a year. Anyway, I suspect this collection marks the beginning of my nail polish addiction/hording condition as it was the first one from which I bought every single colour. Buying My Private Jet at this time wound up being a stroke of luck, because it means I am the owner of the highly-coveted "holo" version.

OPI My Private Jet: It's made of rainbows!

It's a charcoal grey with a fine, dense holographic shimmer that OPI uses in many of their Designer Series polishes. It's quite sheer, requiring at least three coats for total opacity.

Everyone likes My Private Jet; it's edgy grey, it's fun holographic, it predicts corn yields, etc. They rerelease it. Unfortunately, much like Buffy's return on UPN, it just wasn't the same. Yes, it had the name and the packaging was right. But, whatever it was that made the first run so special and beloved was missing. Just like with Buffy. I mean, just look at this:

Dude, where's my holo?

Sure, the brown-grey base is nice, there's a fun blue iridescence, and the silver shimmer has a bit of holographic shine but there's none of the rainbow-y goodness of the original. I found this baffling, because the Designer Series polishes released around the same time were sick with the stuff, and a simple visual inspection would tell the production house that this batch wasn't the same.

One could speculate that this was a cynical attempt to cash in on a loyal and rabid fanbase by people who crossed their fingers and hoped that we wouldn't notice the difference in quality. And, yeah, that Buffy analogy still stands.

You know what, OPI, we totally noticed. We talked about it on the internets, took comparison pictures, and sought out dupes from other brands. That's why it's so wildly uncool that you decided to rerelease yet another version.

A few weeks ago I picked up a bottle of something brown and shimmery at a local OPI-selling place and I think you know where I'm going with this:

Deep brown base, amber iridescence, irregular silver shimmer with a holographic reflection that might actually be a figment of my imagination. There is no reason for this to be called My Private Jet. If the second version was UPN-era Buffy, this guy is a poorly-written fanfic filmed by Joss Whedon and a bunch of the secondary and tertiary characters.

I mean, check out this comparison:

Left to right: Re-release 2, Re-release 1, Original

Left to Right: Re-release 2, Re-release 1, Original

I almost feel like I'm being too harsh. On its own, the most recent version is nice and not quite like anything else currently in my stash. If it had been released as a new shade with one of the recent collections I'd be all over that shit. They could've bumped one of the reds from their current holiday collection and called this "Coal in my stocking" or "Hot Toddy" or something and I would've loved it. Instead, they tried to cash in by producing a substandard version of what was originally great when it seems that they're entirely capable of reproducing the original.

If you're looking for a black/grey polish with holographic shimmer and you can't track down a bottle of the original, there are options:

While none of these have the same rainbow effect that the OPI does, they all at least have a noticeable holographic shimmer. Icing Blackout is a deep glossy black with holographic silver glitter that's chunkier and more sparse than MPJ. Sally Hansen Night Lights in the Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear formula is a dark grey with silver holographic micro-glitter that, again, is more sparse than MPJ. Claire's Quicksand is a brown-grey base with a slight metallic sheen and silver micro-glitter.

While all of these have strong holographic shine, none of these have the same rainbow effect that MPJ does. I assume this is due to the fact that they're glitters as opposed to the silver holo shimmer/pearl that makes up the OPI, and that the shimmer in the OPI is quite dense. If you're after the rainbow, and you're a DIY type, I would pick up a bottle of OPI Designer Series Coronation or its more-holo, but harder to find cousin OPI Paris Couture for Sure. These two have all the holo and none of the colour. They're almost too pigmented to use as a topcoat, but you could probably franken them with a bit of black polish or pigment to simulate the original MPJ.