Color Theory, and more

I'm waiting to see if the pictures from my phone decide to upload or not (I really need to find a better way to do this - my current method usually works, eventually, but often takes a good while), but meanwhile I'll just start talking.  I haven't posted but once since Christmas, and I was all about talking about my jelly sandwich that day, and I mentioned this little set of polishes in passing and then never came back to it. And my photos have finally transferred over now, so here it is:

I saw these in CVS one day and my husband was with me, and I said something to the effect of, "Oh that's cute, that'd be a good thing to get me for Christmas if you want" (mostly thinking that it was more interesting than a lot of the gift sets out there) - and even though it was November at the time, I think, he remembered. (Or maybe he went back and bought it the next day, I never thought to ask, but anyway, he got it.) I thought it was a nice range of colors and had some cute glitters. I still haven't tried but a few of the colors, but it does figure into every manicure I've done since Christmas, one way or another. Luckily I did take this picture before I opened it up, because I promptly managed to send the little bottles flying all over the place - I did retrieve most of them, but I think there's still one or two lurking under the TV table that I haven't gone diving after yet. (It was not that the packaging was bad - I had been looking at the colors and had loosened most of them from their little slots, so it was entirely my own fault. I'm really talented at finding new and creative ways to make messes. Nothing broke, though, so it could've been much worse.)

Meanwhile, my jelly sandwich that I posted about before was lovely and lasted really well, which is the main reason I haven't posted much since I first posted about it! It held up unmarred for about four days (which is really good for me with my tendency to use my nails as levers) and then I patched it up and made it last several more. I remembered to take a picture, too:

This was the only picture in which you could see Luna underneath peeking out at all, but in real life it showed up quite well. In sunlight it tended to get quite flashy, in fact.

So earlier this week when I finally took that off, I was feeling too lazy* to go to the bedroom and look in my big stash. So I rooted around in the little bowl in the living room that I throw stray nail polishes and earrings and such into, and ended up with Who Are You Wearing? again, and Jem on top of that. It didn't wear terribly well, though, for some reason (I'm not even sure what base and top coats I used, so I have nothing particular to blame that on). So last night and this morning I started over and ended up with another long string of layers:

1. Nail Nutrition
2. basecoat: SH Salon
3. that same gray that I had under the jelly sandwich last week (from the Color Theory set above)
4. Orly Diamond Love
5. berry color from Color Theory set (which has no names or even numbers, which is going to drive me crazy)
6. Zoya Delilah - red glitter
7. Diamond Love again

I think of Diamond Love as a top coat, although I'm not sure whether it's actually intended to be one. I googled around and came up with a couple of pictures of DL in the bottle, and a description from a seller site of it as an "opalescent microglitter" which sounds about right, and also one which describes it as "rare" - which I take with a grain of salt on seller sites, because some of them like to call everything rare. But there doesn't seem to be much in the way of reviews, either, which makes me think it might not have been around long. I'm pretty sure I fished it out of a clearance bin at the grocery store a couple of years ago, along with Orly Pearl Wisdom which I really wore a lot for a while. The "opalescent" part means it tends to go on like an old-fashioned frost, which may be why I haven't worn this one a lot. But actually this mess of layers came out looking okay (if bumpy):

Depending on the light, the final result seems to shift back and forth between a purple-burgundy and a red, but it looks pretty nice, either way. I was surprised at how much of the berry-ish color shows up from underneath Delilah - I would have thought Delilah was more opaque than that. But see, this is why I like to play with layers, because you never know what you're going to get!


*Actually I have been sickly all week this week, so "lazy" is possibly being unfair to myself. But that part doesn't really matter when it come to nail polish, does it?