So when last heard from, I was in the middle of applying Ipanema Girl. Well, I said I wanted it to be bright green, and it was. By the time I got a third coat on, it was basically a kelly-green foil. Almost a Christmas green. It's pretty, but very flashy. I wore it today all day, and now I'm toning it down (sort of) by putting Rimmel Cutie Colada on top of it. It's still flashy, it's just a slightly lighter, glittery-foil kind of flashy now. I'm being flip, but it's actually a really nice combination. It's a shame I managed somehow to bruise my knuckles in the last day or so, which kind of ruins the effect, somehow. (Don't ask me how, I seriously have no idea.)
(Saturday)
I was thinking about how I am really a nail polish novice compared to a lot of nail-bloggers. It's one of several reasons I say from time to time that this is not a real nail blog - and it's not and probably never will be. There are plenty of people who do swatches and beautful pictures and all that kind of thing, I don't really think that niche is in need of filling these days, do you? I started this just to record what I was doing, especially with layering and such, and while I have expanded a good bit from that - especially with pictures, even if they're not usually very good ones - still, I'm not the norm and probably never will be. (If you know me that may make you laugh. I'm usually not the norm at anything.)
Anyway, back to the nail polish novice thing - well, as I said in another entry lately, I've been painting my nails off and on for most of my life, but for many, many years I was strictly a drug-store polish girl - Revlon and L'Oreal and the occasional Maybelline. Really there wasn't much else, for a long time - I know Clinique had polishes by 1980 or so, and I remember somebody saying they cost all of $4. Haven't we come a long way from when that was a huge amount of money for a polish? I don't remember how much the Revlons and such cost back in the 70s, but it must not have been much over a dollar. (And the new Cliniques are $12.50, but you can still buy some pretty good polishes for a dollar, so I guess we should feel fortunate!) I'm usually embarrassed to tell anybody other than a nail-polish junkie that I own an $18 polish - I have two, actually. But I try to stay out of that kind of price point, generally, since I'm not working full-time and I can't really afford it. Most of my collection is still lower-end polishes, although that's expanded to include an awful lot of Zoyas, mostly acquired when they were having sales, and various other mid-priced things.
What I was really thinking when I started off on this tangent was the brands I never owned at all until lately: I'd never had a Jesse's Girl or a Color Club or a Finger Paints, or an indie or any foreign brand other than one single Butter London. I'd never had a magnetic or a crackle or a holo. I still haven't ever owned a China Glaze (I imagine that one will rectify itself fairly soon) or tried nail strips or wraps. (I don't know whether nail strips and nail wraps are different, or just different names for the same thing, either.) I had to figure out within the last year or so what a franken and a lemming were, and there's still a couple of other terms I've heard slung around in the nail world that mystify me (although I can't even think what those were right now). It also occurs to me that I had never had a Wet n Wild or very many Sally Hansens until a couple of years ago, because I had the idea (now happily dispelled) that anything that cheap couldn't possibly be any good.
And to finish off with a picture, this is part of the first bunch of Orlys I ever bought, a couple of years ago. This is one of the things I kept saying was missing when I took all those stash pictures back in April - I knew I had this little set of minis that were missing, among a few other things, and I did finally lay my hands on these, at least:
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