Red (and also blue)

We'll start off with a list.
True reds in my collection, other than Knees Up:
Classic bright reds:
Chinoise (RBL)
Sooki (Zoya)
Red glitters:
Delilah (Zoya)
Red Carpet (SH Xtreme Wear)
Red foils:
An Affair in Red Square (OPI)
Bet On Red (Milani)
Karina (Zoya) (slightly darker than the other two)
Not-quite true reds:
Riley (Zoya) (darker and somewhat berry-toned)
Aurora (Zoya) (berry-toned scattered holo, but reads fairly red to my eye)


(I might have missed something, but this is the bunch I pulled as 4th of July candidates.)

I decided I didn't want to "waste" Knees Up on this, and given that I ended up drawing stripes all over my nails, I think that was a good decision.

I think An Affair in Red Square is still available, but I started wearing it, oh, six or seven years ago, I'm pretty sure, and this is my second bottle. It was my go-to winter red for a long time. However, near as I can tell from swatching all the above reds on top of the Raspberry Rush that was already on my nails, Bet On Red and Affair in Red Square are damn near dupes.

Here's my swatch experiments - bear in mind that the polish underneath was a mess to begin with and I wasn't any too neat about this. Still, it served the purpose for me.

This is (I believe) Chinoise, Affair in R. Square, Sooki, and Delilah:

 And I'm less sure about this hand - Bet on Red was the index finger, and I'm pretty sure that's Red Carpet on my pinky. The other two are Karina and Riley but I'm not sure about the order.

The differences between these were more apparent in person, but you can see some differences even here. I think you could probably get away with any of these as a 4th of July red, anyway. I was torn between the Affair in Red Sq./Bet On Red foils, and Sooki. I thought Sooki's cherry red seemed like a good choice, though.

I didn't do near so much thinking about blues. Essie "Mesmerize" seemed like a good blue that wouldn't look black on my nails, so I went with that. I did alternating fingers on both hands. However, after one coat, I decided Sooki and Mesmerize didn't mesh well - Sooki just seemed a little too light - and I went with Bet On Red for the second coat.

Here's what it looked like after that:

I thought of stopping there but I do own one bottle of white nail art polish, Bad Chick, and I decided I was going to try it out. So I did my thumb. I figured wavy stripes would have more room for error, and this is what I ended up with:

I quite like it, and I think for my first-ever effort at nail art, it looks pretty good! I was going to stop there, but as it got later and later last night, I kept experimenting. I played a bit with taping sections off, but soon gave up on that, for this. The final result is kind of all over the place, and I still think that first thumb looks the best, but overall, it's not bad.

Here's some of the others (I think that index finger is definitely the worst job of drawing stripes, but even it looks alright in motion):

I like the wavy stripes, overall, although I think the next time I'll make sure they're all pointing the same way!

(I've never used jump breaks on Blogspot before, but I figured maybe it was time I started. Do you like it? Do you care?)

UPDATE: that index finger in the picture just above was annoying the crap out of me, so what I ended up doing was painting over the stripes on all but the ones that I liked the most - I kept the ring finger above, and the two thumbnails - I didn't put up a picture of the other one but it was horizontal wavy stripes - and everything else is back to just solid red or blue. I figure I can keep that at least until tomorrow, or until it starts chipping, whichever comes first. (I'm about to wash my hair so that's always the big chipping hazard.)