2014 favorites (less #1)

I did a top 10 but I don't have fancy pictures or anything, because I think everybody who knows me knows by now that that's not how I roll. (I would have taken some sort of pictures if there had been sun today, but no dice on that. I will see what I can dig up out of the Delicious Color archives, though!)

I have never done a top 10 before, and given that, I decided that it didn't make any sense to limit it to polishes released this year only. Because of that, my criteria for inclusion is not when it was made or purchased, but rather that I wore it for the first time in 2014. (I did pull several older releases out of the list and put them into an Honorable Mention category, though - see below for that.)

This is 2-10 - #1 is coming tomorrow. In alpha order by brand:

• China Glaze Travel In Colour
• Cover Girl Outlast Violet Flicker
• Dollish Polish The Angels Have The Phone Box
• OPI Alcatraz... Rocks
• Pahlish Pyrite
• Serum No 5 Yule Light Up my Life
• Sinful Colors Gilded
• Zoya Carter (Pixie Dust)
• Zoya Teigen

Yule Light Up My Life:

The Angels Have The Phone Box:

Carter, without top coat and with:

Honorable mention (older polishes which I just wore for the first time in 2014):

• Barielle Elle's Spell
• China Glaze Glitter All The Way (former holiday polish inexplicably in Mardi Gras colors)
• Kleancolor Sparkle Purple

Glitter All The Way:

Sparkle Purple:

Other nail products I loved in 2014:
Chick cuticle oil (works great, but mostly I love it for the scent, tangerine-ginger)
Orchid-brand nail polish remover (for the weird pump-action bottle)
Nailthins decals

Orchid remover:

This was rest of my shortlist:
Bonita Peonies Gone Wild
Chick Hipster Chick
Chick Once Upon A Time
Jade Vestido De Gala
Julie G Butterflies & Rosebuds
Lush Lacquer Ho Ho Holodays
Nyx Enchanted Forest
Orly Intergalactic Space
RBL Meow Meow
Serum No 5 Sunset Flare
Square Hue Vaclavske Namesti
Urban Decay Vice
Zoya Posh
Zoya Yuna

Christmas goodies

I don't have pictures because the sun hasn't been seen at all in the last couple of days, but I got some nice stuff for Christmas. In particular, I think my aunt must have gone into Sally Beauty and asked what to get somebody who was into nail polish! (I said this to her, and she looked surprised and then laughed, which I took as a yes. I know Sally Beauty stuff when I see it.) It was Tweezerman cuticle scissors (which... well, my first reaction was, "I'd never cut my cuticles!" but I do get hangnails from time to time so it's a good thing to have, really), a 4-in-1 nail file, Bridge the Ridge basecoat, a divided acrylic tray, and OPI I'm Not Really A Waitress, which I don't have and was interested in trying. So I was really happy. I told my aunt she did good. I got a lot of stuff off my wishlist from Rob, like a couple of bottles from Pretty Serious' Blogger Collaboration collection. (One was Swatch & Learn - and I've forgotten offhand what the other one was.) I got Today I Accomplished Zero, and one of those Miracle Gel duos with a color polish plus the topcoat - and Hard Candy Glamoflauge concealer, which I'd been wanting. And I got some other assorted stuff like a little crossbody bag, and a couple of gift cards.

I doubt that anybody remembers that I was talking about this a couple of months ago, but back then I had gotten a couple of Burt's Bees grab-bags, and I was planning on distributing all those lip balms and glosses and things among my female family members. Well, it turned out that this went over very well. I had kept some of the Burt's Bees stuff for myself, but there was still a lot left, and I also had a bunch of very-high-end samples that my sister had sent me, and assorted items culled from Ipsy bags and such, too. I couldn't decide how to split it up, so I enlisted my cousin's help, and we dumped it all out on the table late on Christmas Eve, and divided it all into piles, one per person, and had a great time doing that. And they all really loved it.

Today's nails are Ruby Pumps from China Glaze, two coats (with Nail Nutrition underneath, and NYC topcoat) - I've had it for a while but I hadn't gotten around to wearing it til now. Before that I had on Yule Light Up My Life, a Serum No 5 polish from last year's holiday season.

And that's all I can think of to say right now. In a few days I'll have 2014 favorites to post, and if the sun ever comes out I'll take some pictures. (Also, because I am utterly insane, I have a new stash project in mind for January. We'll see if that happens.)

Added: I forgot about this, I do have a picture of Yule Light Up My Life that I took at work and posted on Twitter. It does show off the sparkliness quite well!

To Pixie Dust or not to Pixie Dust

I'm still holding out on buying any more Pixie Dusts from the BOGO sale at Zoya. I was toying with the idea - maybe Arabella? Dahlia? but I just can't convince myself that I need any of those that badly. I have so much polish now that I can't keep track of it as it is.

(For example, I was thinking about wearing Here Today Aragon Tomorrow, only I don't know where it is. I'm not terribly worried about it, though, I have a zillion other dark greens and it'll turn up. I know it's here someplace.)

From the BOGO page up there, I wandered over to Zoya polishes by color, which I always love. Pumpkin Spice. (I'm still sort of coveting Autumn, except I know I wouldn't wear it until next fall.) Marsala - which has been taking a lot of heat but which I still rather like. Reds, although I certainly don't need any more of those. Also mattes - I'm still coveting the couple I don't already have there, which is Loredana and Harlow. If those were in a BOGO sale I would be considering it more seriously. Hmm, don't they usually have some promo thing in early January?

(FYI, none of the links above - or below, for that matter - are affiliate links.)


Let's see, I've been keeping up with my nails of the day on Twitter, mostly. I'm still wearing Bad Santa, which I've had on for several days. (I still think it's the best name for a red polish ever, but I told somebody that and they just stared at me like I'm crazy, so apparently not everybody gets that concept.) It's an old Ulta color, from a "Wicked Wonderland" set some years ago. I won it in a giveaway from Karen several years ago and I don't think it was brand-new then. But they are great colors. I wore Bad Santa mattified for a couple of days, and then that was dinged-up a bit so I added another coat of polish and this time used HK Girl so they're all nice and shiny.

Base-coat-wise, I'm still using up my bottle of Sinful Colors. That's probably what's under everything I've worn lately, although I haven't been keeping very good records.

Before Bad Santa, I was wearing RGB Slate, which is about what you'd think, a somewhat-metallic gray. I wore it for a day or so but I was experimenting around with various things to put on top of it and I didn't like the results so I finally just started over completely.

Before that, I was wearing Sinful Kissy - which is supposed to be a (near) dupe for Zoya Charla. I put it over SOPI Leaf Me At The Altar, which made it lean a bit greener.

And before that, I had on Triple Shine Slick Black, and since my thing lately is that I just keep layering, after a day or so I put NYC Blue Majesty on the tips. It looked pretty cute.

(And I think that finally gets us back to SC Gilded over red, which was the last NOTD that made it onto this blog.)

A wheel (half) full of recent purchases

I filled half of a nail wheel up with recent purchases, in no particular order (and this isn't all of them, either, it's just the ones I had handy.

I did go back and number these after I took the picture, but going from L-R:

1. Enchanted Forest (Nyx Salon)
2. Via Della Spiga (Square Hue Milan collection)
3. Houston We Have A Purple (OPI Texas collection)
4. Odette (Zoya Naturel collection)
5. Sansa (Zoya Ignite collection)
6. unlabeled mini (not new, but I found it under a table where I'm pretty sure it had been for a while, so don't think it had been swatched before - not that you can tell a lot)
7. Fires of Gallifrey (Lyn B)
8. Dovima (Zoya matte)
9. Gilded (Sinful Colors holiday collection)
10. Remy (Zoya Ignite collection)

I believe all of these were two coats, and I left an area at the bottom of each nail where it's only one coat so you can see where there's a difference. (It's most noticeable on Enchanted Forest at the far left.)

Here's the bottle pictures - slightly out of order but I think you've got enough information to sort it out without further help! - and below that is close-ups, with some comments.

Enchanted Forest is not nearly as forest green as I thought it was - in fact it's practically blue. (I don't think it's actually quite as blue as it looks in this picture, but it's definitely in the blue-green range, anyway.) I've worn it but I think I wore it over a dark-green base and so the blue shift wasn't noticeable. Via Della Spiga is the red and I still like it a lot. My only comment is that it does seem to lean a tiny bit to the pink side sometimes - but only a little. (That's not a bad thing as far as I'm concerned, anyway!)

So here we have Houston We Have A Purple (which is berry-pink, not purple at all, but I knew that when I bought it) and Odette, which is a slightly grayed-out purple creme. Houston We Have A Purple was one of several "sorbet"-finish colors in the Texas Collection and so far they seem really interesting. (I've tried the other one I bought, which was the orange one, but not this one yet.)

This is Zoya Sansa, which like all the Ignite colors is fabulous - much more fabulous than you can tell here - and an unnamed beige-ish mini which as I said I found under my TV table. It's one of that big collection of minis that I got for Christmas a couple of years ago. You can't tell much here but actually I think it has possibilities for layering. I'll probably play with it at some point.

This is Fires Of Gallifrey - which I've worn a couple of times, usually over something orange. I had no idea the base was actually this pinkish! And the black is Zoya Dovima, one of the matte velvets. (There were six of them in the last re-release and I have four of them. I'm always using them so I'm really tempted to get the last two, too, before they become unavailable again.)

This is Gilded, which I've been wearing like crazy lately but it's still interesting to see what it looks like on its own, and Remy, the blue Ignite polish. Which looks amazing - I haven't tried it yet.

Playing with polish: red, Gilded, & mattified

I kept adding layers to this - for that matter I think I mentioned the bottom layer in the last entry, Via Della Spiga, which is the bright red creme. I wore that for a day or so, and then I decided I wanted something more glittery, so I added Zoya Karina, which is a somewhat darker red microglitter. Then yesterday I added Gilded (which is Sinful Colors, and which I've used several times lately). I had in mind that I wanted a lot of red showing around the edges, and I played around with it, and then put Sally Girl matte top coat on it, for good measure, and this is what I ended  up with:

It looks more gold in real life, though - let's see if you can tell better in this picture.

Anyway, I love it.

Marsala? + NOTD

I ganked a picture off the internet as an example of Pantone's pick for color of the year, which, if you haven't already heard, is "marsala," a red-brown.

I've heard some derision about this color, but I think it has possibilities as a "new neutral" - I don't think it's something I'd want whole outfits of, but I kind of like it. Is there a nail polish that approximates this color? So far I haven't seen one that comes very close. Lippmann Bitches Brew was suggested, that I saw, and it's sort of generally in the ballpark, I guess, but it's not very close to being this exact color at all. It's way darker. Possibly the closest thing that I own (and I'm not really a earthtones/neutral person so I don't have a lot of candidates) is OPI I Knead Sourdough, from the San Francisco collection. It looks fairly close in those pictures - closer than I would have guessed - and it's probably still obtainable, I bet. (I suspect it actually reads darker than this, though.)

As far as my own nails, I said I was going to switch to holiday colors, and so far I have. I also said I was probably going to start with Here Today Aragon Tomorrow, and that I did not do. I wanted glitter, and I didn't want to cover Aragon up with glitter the first time I wore it, so instead I covered Zoya Veruschka up with glitter - although really, the glitter wasn't all that heavy anyway, and you could totally see the base color. The glitter I used was Nyx Enchanted Forest. (Hmm, it looks pretty by itself and I'm not sure I've ever worn it that way. Maybe I'll do that this month while I'm on the red-and-green tear.) Anyway, I didn't get a picture of this combo. It was pretty but it was totally Traditional Christmas Green, just a glittery version.

Now I've gone red, and I'm wearing Via Della Spiga, from the Square Hue Milan collection, which was the October one. It's just a great classic creme red, and there's not much more to say about it. Goes on beautifully in two coats. (I guess I could say that it's what I wanted RBL Chinoise to be, and what Chinoise wasn't, somehow. Which is an old complaint of mine, but a compliment to Square Hue!)

Polish for the holidays

This is not really a stash post - well, it is part of my stash, but it's not part of my ongoing series of stash posts, because this is not everything I have in these colors. This is more an idea post about what to wear for the holidays, if you want to go for a holiday theme - and what to buy, if you need to buy something. (But this is just what I had already, I wasn't thinking about what was easily available when I picked these out!)

Reds (and golds) - Honestly, I think the lesson of this picture is that all reds tend to look pretty much alike from a distance. Some of these are very glittery and some are cremes, and on the nail they may look a little lighter or darker or more shimmery - and there's everything in here from $2 drugstore polishes to $20 high-end ones - but at arm's length, red is red. (Even Posh, the matte on the top row, looks pretty similar to the rest of these if you put top coat on it.) I didn't put any oxbloods or anything that leans really purple in here, those would look more different. As for the golds, oddly, they tend to look very different on the nail a lot of the time even if they look similar in the bottle. I guess it's the metallic component - some are mixed metals, some are brassy, etc. But still from a distance, people are just going to think, gold, unless you've done something very subtle with it like a glitter fade.

Top row: Square Hue Via Della Spiga (from the October Milan collection), Zoya Posh (matte) and Karina (microglitter), RBL Chinoise, OPI Big Apple Red (mini)
Second row: Sinful Colors Sugar Sugar (glittery), China Glaze Ruby Pumps (even more glittery), China Glaze Just Be-Claws (from last year's holiday collection), Butter London Knees Up (gorgeous foil), NYC Crystal Couture (which is LE, so snap it up if you see it) in Ruby Queen
Third row: Zoya Chyna (Pixie Dust) and Delilah (another glittery one), Milani Bet On Red, Serum No 5 Poppy Fields, Triple Shine Pearly Whites
Bottom row: LASplash Sparkling Fire (glitter), Dollish These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For (mixed glitters), Milani Gold Glitz, Sinful Colors All About You (brassy-looking small glitter), Aldo Gold Digger (chunkier glitter)

One great holiday red, if you can find it, that didn't make it into the picture is Glitterati, from Ilamasqua. I suspect it's discontinued but I'm not sure. Here's somebody's swatches - you can see that it's much darker than the ones above, with scattered glitter.

Greens (plus some glitters and a few blues):

Top row: Funky Fingers Unicorn Farts, Different Dimension Out Of Space Convertible (from the Santa Baby collection), Zoya Indigo (glitter), Sinful Colors Ice Dream (silver-blue small glitter)
Second row: LynB Blue Whale (from their QI collection), Pahlish Yuletide Treasures (with the one below, a duo from last year, a chunky red & green glitter), Serum No 5 Yule Light Up My Life (red & green mixed-size glitter)
Third row: Colorstay Rainforest (glass-fleck forest green, discontinued unless you can find it at Big Lots or somewhere), Pahlish Boughs of Holly (glittery dark green), Xtreme Wear Emerald City (a lovely shiny green which I'm also pretty sure is discontinued), Dear Rus Noblesse No 601 (green and gold and possibly discontinued, as well)
Fourth row: Zoya Veruschka (matte), OPI Here Today Aragon Tomorrow (suede-finish), RBL Meow Meow (green glitter)
Bottom row: LASplash Sparking Seaweed (green and silver glitter), Julie G Textured Mistletoe, Nyx Salon Enchanted Forest (at least I'm pretty sure that was the name of it, the bottle is completely illegible!), Zoya Chita (Pixie Dust), Layla CE61 (foil)

There's more noticeable differences between the greens. I was trying to pick "Christmas" greens, things in the emerald/forest range, but still, there's just more noticeable differences between these, to me. I think it's at least partially just the way I picked the reds, because to me a real holiday red means something within a very small range, where there's more leeway on the greens.

Here's some more things from my stash that are very "holiday" but didn't make it into these two pictures (most of the silver ones are in this post):

• Holiday Spirit (Sation - fine multicolor glitter)
• Dancer Is The Best Reindeer (WnW Fastdry - purple/blue) and Elderberry (Nail Pattern Boldness - purple/blue) (these two are quite similar, and another one that's pretty similar is LA Colors Jewel Tone, which last I looked was still a current color)
• Is that Silva? (OPI - silver magnetic)
• Celeb City (Xtreme Wear - bright silver)
• Luna (Zoya - bright silver glitter - a great jelly sandwich center)
• Glitz (Orly - bright gold)
• Gold Gleam (Milani - gold with a "mixed metal" effect)
• Fairy Dust (Khroma/Kardashian - gold topper)
• Mingle With Kringle (China Glaze - gold metallic) (note to self: go heavy on the base coat due to staining issues the last time I used this!)
• Sand & Stilettos (Funky Fingers - multi holo glitter)
• Jordana Crystal Glitter - just what it says, a fine glitter that shimmers like crystal - very pretty!)
• Disco Ball (Xtreme Wear - holo glitter)

Y'all Come Back Ya Hear

I think I mentioned a couple of entries back that I had bought some 1/2 price OPIs from Sleek Nail - well, they came extremely quickly and I am wearing one of them now and I'm very satisfied with that purchase. I bought 2 polishes from the Texas collection from a couple of years ago, Houston We Have A Purple (which does not appear to be purple at all but more like a berry) and Y'all Come Back Now Ya Hear? (a very bright orange) - both of these are what OPI called "sorbets" but which seem to me to pretty much be jellies in my limited experience here. I just did a jelly sandwich with YCBNYH and Sinful Gilded which is very pretty - I did 2 coats of the OPI, 1 of Gilded and another YCBNYH coat on top of that. There's still some visible nail line even after that many coats but I can deal with it.

Added: I posted the two iPhone pictures below and then I found this picture on the memory card of my camera, which I seems to be the same manicure, and which looks considerably more like I feel like the manicure actually looked. I usually only take pictures with the Canon when I have daylight; the iPhone pictures tend to be taken whenever I think of taking them and have any kind of decent light, which in this case was under the fluorescents at work. So I'm sure that accounts for a lot of the difference. (The Canon is about 10 years old; it's an old A510 with a whoppin' 3.2 MP. So I'm not sure saying it's a "better" camera than the iPhone is entirely accurate. It does have things like a macro setting that the iPhone does not, though.)

(above: Canon - below: iPhone)

The other thing I bought was Here Today Aragon Tomorrow which is on my unofficial lemming list and has been for ages. (It's unofficial because I never have made an "official" one. There's no list anywhere except in my head. I try not to obsess about polishes I don't have, there are too many of them!)

I do have another type of list going that I've never made before, though, and that's a shortlist for Favorite Polishes of 2014. I've never done a yearly favorites list before because I've just never been organized enough. But the other day I went through blog entries and compiled a (fairly long) list of things I loved, and then cut that list down to a smaller one - I'll have to wait and see what I wear in December that I fall in love with before I can get any further than that. I'll probably do a top 10, I imagine, if I can decide on ten. (I do think I know what my polish of the year is, unless something comes along to bump it off - but I'm obviously not going to tell you now.) I decided my criteria was going to be that it had to be something that I wore for the first time in 2014, rather than something that was released or that I bought in 2014, just because that's easier to track, mostly. I don't care about when things were released, and limiting it to things I actually bought in 2014 cut out most of what I wore in January and half of what I wore in February, which seemed silly - especially since I never did a favorites of 2013.

Karen was kind enough to send me a couple of sets of Salon Effects nail polish strips to try out - I have never tried the strips so it's going to be interesting to see how I like those. They are, let's see (I had to find where they put the names!) - Wicked Bamboo, a sort of neutral stripe, and Running Wild, which is a tiger-print, looks like.

(This may be my last "fall" manicure - we'll see, but I've been eyeing the Christmas colors. Aragon next, probably.)

Carter with topcoat

Yesterday I showed Carter with no top coat; now today here it is with top coat:

Once again, this is bluer than it really looks - although not by a huge amount, this time. (Also no lobster hands today - I need to figure out what I did right today!) Actually this is two coats of top coat - one of Gelous and one of Seche Vite. I'm not sure that was really necessary but I was experimenting. It certainly looks very pretty and shiny. Also there was some edge-wear by the end of the day yesterday, so you can see that I was able to patch it up really well. What I did for this was, I cleaned most of the polish off the brush in the Carter bottle, and just ran the brush along the free edge of the nails, making sure I filled in where it needed it. On a couple of nails where the finish seemed marred a bit, I added another really light coat on top, and let it dry, of course, before I went on to the top coats. Most Pixie Dusts and most textures in general will let you do this, I've found, and it usually ends up looking more or less seamless.

Black Friday & NOTDs

So Thanksgiving is over, and theoretically everybody is out shopping today. I'm at work, and they certainly aren't here. I don't mind being at work because I couldn't imagine going shopping today. (We used to, but that was way back before all this Black Friday madness.) Anybody know of any spectacular sales on nail polish that I should know about? If it's something I can buy online or something I have til Sunday or Monday to buy, that's different. I did bring yesterday's paper with me so I can look at the inserts - I didn't remember until last night that they had thrown it, although I vaguely remember hearing them throw it at 3 in the morning. We aren't supposed to get the Thursday paper, we subscribe for Wed & Sun only (and I mostly only wanted it because it came with the online access) but when I heard it land I remember thinking that was bound to be what it was. They want maximum distribution for all those ads.

Here's what I've had on my nails - but unfortunately I didn't get a picture at all of the first one, and the picture on the 2nd one is of limited use. -- As I said I was going to at the very bottom of the last entry, I put on I Volunteer As Tribute (over black) on Wednesday night, so I had it on when we went to see "Mockingjay" last night - not that anybody except my husband noticed. It looked great, though - it's glitter in what I think is meant to be fire colors in a black jelly base. (Here's Addicted to Lacquer's pictures, but I don't know how she got coverage that good with 3 coats - she must have dabbed it on, which I didn't do. Mine looked pretty but much more sparse than that, and of course my base made it much darker.) And then by last night I had banged that up, so now I'm wearing Zoya Carter, the purple Pixie Dust, which is also gorgeous. I'm not wearing top coat, so if it's banged up tonight I'll probably just patch it up and put top coat on to stretch it through tomorrow.

Here's Carter under the fluorescents, and as usual, in this lighting it looks much too blue. Carter is a dark purple base with sparkles that look almost fuchsia, so the overall effect shifts much more red-violet than it looks here. But at least you can see the sparkle pretty well.

One thing about Pixie Dusts is that they do patch up really well - which is good because they take a long time to dry, and I for one am prone to forgetting that and messing them up before they dry completely!

Oh, and if you're wondering, Mockingjay was really good. I never really thought the first two completely lived up to the books, but this one is much closer.

Trying the Untried: It Rubs The Lotion On Its Skin

I was wearing It Rubs The Lotion On Its Skin earlier this week - I had also posted a bottle shot of  it recently (2nd picture down, at that link). I know I took an iPhone picture of it the other night so unless it didn't get saved somehow it should be around here somewhere. It's really pretty - and really similar to those other two that were in the same picture, which is wonderful since those are both discontinued. So is this one, I'm pretty sure, but at least I have a full bottle of it. (Note to polish companies for next fall: there need to be more polishes with a brown base and copper glitter. I at least will buy it like a shot.)

OK, I unearthed the phone picture and it's not great but at least you can get the idea.

This was after I'd had it on for a couple of days, so there's some wear, but not too bad. It's prettier than it looks there, but I don't think it quite has the full Pumpkin Spice level of goodness. (Bear in mind that that's just saying it doesn't measure up to my all-time favorite polish. This is by no means a slam! Also, I did actually grit my teeth and throw P-Spice into the trash, finally. I guess I am a hoarder at heart, because it pained me to do it.)

(Note: I've fixed the link on my indie polish page now, but Different Dimension has switched to using Big Cartel, apparently - when I bought mine they were on Etsy. In any case I looked and I didn't see this polish listed any more.)

In unrelated news, I was poking around old entries and I clicked on a link which took me somewhere I wasn't expecting: apparently Beyond Polish is now Sleek Nail. I had not bought anything from them under either name, before now, but they had some older OPIs for half-price, so I bought a few - I think it was two from the Texas collection plus Here Today Aragon Tomorrow, which I've wanted for ages. With shipping it was about $16, so that's less than the price of two at full retail even counting shipping (which I do when deciding whether something is a bargain).

I took this picture the other day because I happened to notice that there was a similarity between these which I wouldn't have expected:

That's Honey You Should See Me With A Crown (Dollish), Teigen, and This Is Halloween (LynB). The first two definitely have gold glitter in them, and it's harder to pin This Is Halloween down because it has so many different colors in it, but I suspect there's some gold in there, too. There's kind of a progression from right to left from peachy to more fuchsia. I think it was the winter sunlight (well, autumn, but we've had some pretty wintry weather already) that made me notice this.

I've got another Ipsy bag that I will take a picture of when we have some sunlight again (and I remember before this early early sunset we have this time of year!). That's the one with Guys & Galaxies in it, which I believe I already mentioned. I went rooting through my stash yesterday looking for seasonal stuff - I'm starting to think about Christmas, although I'll probably wait at least until Dec. 1st to really start trotting out the Christmas stuff. (And much later than that on things like red-and-green glitters!) In the meantime I'm wearing Elle's Spell over Zoya Jem (man, my fingers want to hit that G and write "Gem" instead every time) and playing with whether to mattify it - it's gorgeous either way, really. But actually it's hair-washing day so I'll probably have to start over after I do that, anyway. I don't know what I'll do next! (Added: oh, yes, I do, too, I have I Volunteer As Tribute still unworn, and there won't be any better timing for that one!)

Jade Vestido de Gala + NOPI Guys & Galaxies

You know how I was saying that I had an awful lot of silver glitters, in the last entry? (Actually I believe I said a lot of "silvery silvers" which in retrospect is a rather goofy way to put it, but I think it's clear enough what I meant.) Well, I completely forgot that this month's Ipsy bag had another one - NOPI Guys & Galaxies, which apparently is an Ipsy exclusive. It looks in the bottle like a silvery version of Zoya Monet, with big chunky holo pieces that shimmer various colors. So it's not exactly like the silvers I already have, darnit. (I was half plotting to give it away before I looked at it closer.) There are some pictures on Ipsy's website that users have sent in; this one over purple is cute.

I actually got some decent pictures of Jade Vestido de Gala - the Jade "Special Glitz" polishes have heretofore eluded me as far as getting useable photographs of them.

(Both taken in late-afternoon sunlight in my bedroom, with no flash.) Anyway, if you haven't seen me burble on about these polishes before, they're jelly holos and they're some of my favorites. I have three of them, V.I.P, (orange), Echarpe de Seda (red, and which apparently translates as "silk scarf") and this one, which is darker burgundy-red and translates, near as I can figure out, to "ballgown" or "party dress." (You get these in the US from Llarowe, but they come from Brazil. The bottles are really small but they're only $6, I think, so that's pretty reasonable.)

(FYI: no disclosures required; I paid for everything discussed here.)

Stash: silvers, oddball grays + Square Hue Prague

I started this round of stash pictures months ago and even though I forgot about it for a while (and I'm sure nobody was waiting with bated breath) I feel like I should finish while it's still 2014, y'know? So this is probably the penultimate installment - if I get around to it there'll be one more with some multicolor glitters and things like that. I did the plain grays the other day but here are the silvers and then further down I have some grayish oddball colors.

This one is a bit out of focus, so rather than blowing it up to a large size where that's more obvious, I'm going to put another shot down below that's in better focus.
Top row: Color Show Black In Mirrors (from the LE Brocade set from last Christmas), OCC Arsenic, Gem Crush Glitz Gal (which I think may be discontinued, thus the 75% off sticker), OPI Is That Silva? (one of the Skyfall magnetics), Xtreme Wear Celeb City
Middle row: Zoya Luna and London (Luna is an older silver glitter and may be discontinued; London is the "fog gray" Pixie Dust), 2 versions of old Hard Candy Trailer Trash (regular and mini), Barry M Silver Glitter (which was LE), a mini of Orly Tiara
Bottom row: Square Hue Parizska (gray with silver glitter, and you'll see more of these in a minute), an unlabeled OPI mini which I'm pretty sure is Pirouette My Whistle, and an Ulta mini, Twisted Tinsel

I have an awful lot of really silvery silvers, not sure how that happened. (Note to self: remember to wear some of these in jelly sandwiches this winter!)

This is what I was calling the oddball colors - some of them aren't really gray but they definitely have pretty strong gray tones in them.

This is Xtreme Wear Gray Area (which is more taupe), Square Hue Vaclavske Namesti (which I talked about an entry or two back - it's a plummy/brown shimmer) and Na Prikope (gray-green), Complete Salon Manicure Gray By Gray (which has bluish tones to it) and then Zoya Yuna, which is also gray-green with a LOT of shimmer. It's not as showy as the other Ignite color I've tried (Teigen) but it's very pretty.

The only reason I thought to put Vaclavske Namesti in the picture above was because it looked quite a bit like Gray Area, although they're nothing like dupes and aren't really terribly gray. Let me go ahead and show you the whole Square Hue set for November, even though you've seen all three above - they've been doing city-themed collections for months now (maybe all year? I'm not sure) and this one is Prague.

I actually really like this set, they are lovely for late fall. At first I went, "TWO grays?" but they are nothing alike. Na Prikope, as I said, is a gray-green creme, where Parizska is more neutral and has a strong silver glitter to it (which shows up better in the picture below than either of the ones above). And I've already worn Vaclavske Namesti and really loved it. It went on looking brown but has definite plum tones out in the sunlight.

This is more or less the same polishes as above, but arranged differently. (This was taken before I decided that it made more sense to separate it out into two groups.)

(NOTE: if anybody's wondering what you're seeing underneath the polishes, it's first of all a Sterilite plastic shoebox like you get at Walmart, and underneath that is a quilt. So the colors in the quilt are grayed out a bit because you're seeing it through the box. (It was a block exchange that I did about 14 or 15 years ago, I think, and I finally got it put together about 10 years ago. It took me a while, but it's really pretty, and I pull it out in the winter because it coordinates pretty well with my brown winter comforter and sheets. It's this one.)

Zoya Teigen

Here's Teigen, under the hotel-room fluorescent light:

There's some visible wear but I think this was the third day I had it on so for me that seems decent. And it's lovely; this picture does not do it justice. I already ordered more of the Ignite collection, I love it so much. And I'm wearing it (Teigen) again now.

Brown, bronze, & burgundy

I tweeted about Square Hue Vaclavske Namesti the other night - I thought it was brown when I was putting it on, but apparently it's actually a plum. Either way it's extremely pretty. Then yesterday I somehow managed to chip it getting in and out of the car; I'm not sure how I did that but after 10 days of driving and hotels I was getting pretty crazy. (We're home now and I feel much better after a night in my own bed!) So anyway, today I patched it up and then I added a coat of Sonia Kashuk Two Cent on top of it, which as you might guess is a really pretty copper-penny color.

Here's those two bottles:

You can see the plumminess of the Square Hue here pretty well, but still I think it's fair to call it poised equally between plum and brown. I've got other fall purples that are that way, really. And Two Cent is a nice shimmery copper which is warm without being so warm that it is unflattering on me.

I pulled out a bunch of fall colors earlier when I was fiddling around with the grays and silvers and blacks, so here are some other selections from my stash. This is my VERY favorite fall staple, coppery glitters:

I don't think any of these are available any more, unfortunately - I love these and they are always seem to be LE so basically, if you see a brown-and-copper combination and you like such things, you would be well-advised to snatch them up! (and then tell me about it so I can go hunt them down too) - anyway, these three are Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice, Spoiled Cougar Attack, and Different Dimension It Rubs The Lotion On Its Skin. (Yes, it's a Silence of the Lambs polish, isn't that awesome?) I have been nursing Pumpkin Spice along for several years now and I think it's about to give up the ghost - I keep adding thinner and I don't think it's budging, so that one may be destined for discard soon. It pains me but there's no point in keeping it if it's not useable, is there? Cougar Attack is really similar but I'm already halfway through that one as well.

Here are some more things in a coppery vein:

This is Dollish I Volunteer As Tribute - which I haven't tried yet because it looked so very fallish that I was saving it - and then Hard Candy Crush On Lava and N-OPI Cinna-man Of My Dreams (a texture).

And here are some burgundies: Zoya Jem, Carly, and Katherine (which is a jelly):

and some more: Violet Flicker (another one of that glass-fleck bunch which I keep talking about lately), Dark Side Of The Moon, and Bold Sangria:

Then here's some gold/bronze ones (which I almost forgot about):

This is I Only Shop Vintage, Gold Digger, and All About You.

and here's a lot of these fallish things spread out on my bed:

Let's see, things in that picture which I haven't already talked about include several unidentified dark reds, some older browns like Forbidden Fudge and Decades of Shades, and then some stuff I've worn fairly recently like Chick Once Upon A Time, A England Briarwood, and Dollish Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal. I really love fall colors, can you tell?

Stash: black, white, & gray

I did pictures of most of the rest of my stash back in the spring and early summer, but I broke down at the end and there was some stuff I didn't ever get around to doing, mostly black/white/gray and then silver. And of course my stash is growing, and all of those won't fit into my shoebox-sized boxes that I was using before, so this one is b/w/gray, and then we'll have to see if I can shoehorn all the silvers into one box next!

I tried to put most of the blacks toward the top and gradually get lighter, with the whites on the bottom left - I have far more blacks and dark grays than I do lighter things, as usual with me.

Left to right and top to bottom:
Top row: Square Hue Via Montenapoleone (from last month's Milan collection), Triple Shine Slick Black (glass-flecked), Cult Nails Fetish (a rubber finish), Sonia Kashuk Starry Night (black with silver glitter), Wild Shine Black Creme
Second row: RGB Slate, L.A. Girl 3D Effects in Black Illusion (a holo)
Middle: Hard As Nails Steely Gaze (which is the unlabeled one under the RGB - it lost its label at some point!), Color Show Clearly Spotted (from the Polka Dots set), Orchid Steel Guitar, Hard Candy Vibe (an older formula - it's a very shiny black), and next to that and under the Orchid bottle is an unbranded and unlabeled black - but I have come to think that set is actually L.A.Colors
Next to the bottom: Square Hue Parizska (gray with silver glitter, from the brand-new Prague trio); under that is an unlabled white (also probably L.A.Colors) and Chirality Symbiote (a holo), then the gray with the label turned backward is Essence Beauty Beats in As Long As You Love Me (this is a Bieber polish, but I promise that's not why it was turned backwards!!), and then finally Outlast Midnight Magic, which is from the group of glass-fleck type polishes that I was talking about yesterday - it's a black base with a lot of blue and metallic shimmer to it
Bottom row: China Glaze Texture in There's Snow One Like You (a white textured glitter which I have had no luck getting to go on where it looks decent so far - I tried last year and I'm sure I'll try again this year now that the holidays are rolling around again), Sinful Colors Nail Art (basically a striper) in Bad Chick, Xtreme Wear Wet Cement, and finally 2 Dollish minis, I Want To Believe (from Ultimate Fandom Deux, it's a blue-gray with scattered glitter) and They're Hereeee! (a holo glitter from last year's Halloween collection - it reads awfully gray in the bottle but as I recall it went on much bluer than it looks here)

As you can see, I'm not big on whites - I do wear light grays a fair bit, though. And some of the silvery ones are pretty much in the dove-gray sort of ballpark as well - I pulled all those today too so hopefully I'll be able to get those up soon.

Bonita & Cover Girl gift sets from K-Mart

K-Mart doesn't exist in Texas any more, or not my part of Texas, at least, so it's one of several places I like to go if I have time when we're in Ohio. Although actually, as far as nail stuff goes, K-Mart is pretty unexceptional. Unless I missed something on this last trip, K-Mart doesn't actually have much in the way of nail items that are different than what every other store carries - with the exception of these Bonita gift sets. I had only seen Bonita at Rite Aid previously (and we don't have Rite Aid in Texas either). If K-Mart had individual bottles of Bonita I didn't see them - but I did buy a couple of bottles of Bonita at Rite Aid last trip and liked them. I refrained on the gift sets, though.

I guess this set, called Santa's Crew, is meant to represent various holiday "characters" - Santa and an elf and so forth:

This second one is the only one with what looks like the "normal" Bonita bottle - as you can see, each one of these three sets has a different bottle shape. This one is called Jolly Nails, and it has glitters and metallics and what looks like a couple of plain old cremes. (The silver and gold metallics are the ones that interest me the most!)

Actually on reflection (I've now looked at the bottle pictures, but I decided this was the case before I even looked) I don't think this is the same bottle as the ones I have - which are Bonita Salon. Here is the Bonita website, where you can see that there are actually a number of lines, all with different bottles. But it doesn't particularly look like they used any of the regular bottles on any of these sets.

The third picture is terribly out-of-focus but since you can see the polishes so I'm including it anyway. This set is called Mani-More and it seems to be more on the glitter & shimmer end of things:

(I'm sort of wishing now that I had gotten names on these colors, but I didn't. I have no idea whether any of these are regular Bonita colors or what.)

The other set that I thought was interesting enough to take a picture of is from Cover Girl. I have several of these  colors, and I think at least some of them are the colors that were released this time last year as a Catching Fire tie-in, in Glosstini size. They all have more or less the same glass-fleck-ish finish. Some of them were already core colors, I think, and at some point during the year this year the ones that weren't already core became core. They are some of my favorites, really, but since I already have (possibly) half of the six, it wouldn't be worth it for me to buy the set. I did look to see if the names matched, and they did, although I don't remember what they all were. The three I have with this finish are Seared Bronze, Pyro Pink, and Violet Flicker. (I may also have a black one, which I don't remember the name of offhand. But it doesn't seem to be included in this set in any case.)

(Here's All Lacquered Up's pictures of the collection, so you can get a better idea if you're interested. Going by what she says there, I think the black one I mention above must be Midnight Magic.)

Sugar skulls + various fall polishes

If you follow my Twitter, you may have seen the sugar skull decals already. I ended up putting them only on my thumbs, mostly because I just didn't have time to do more. And I put them over Chick Moss, a medium green. I think the decals would have shown up better over a somewhat lighter color, but they looked fine. I'm not sure how many other people noticed them, but I liked them, anyway.

Oh, and the sparkly stuff visible there is a topcoat, Jin Soon Gossamer.

I did a much better job of centering the other thumb:

These pictures were taken in a moving car (I was not driving at the time, don't worry) because the sun suddenly came out and it occurred to me to get pictures. All things considered, they are not too terrible.

We were traveling over the weekend, and Sunday night I figured Day of the Dead was basically over and the sugar skulls should go before I had to attempt to explain them to my in-laws. So I took that off and I put on another one of the Dollish Ultimate Fandom polishes that I've been putting off using until fall, Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal, which as most of you probably know is the Firefly polish, so there's no question of whether I get the reference. (The original pilot is one of my two favorite episodes, probably - that and Out Of Gas.) CYSBIB is, well, brown - like browncoats, presumably - and I wore that for a day and felt like it was really a bit boring, so I put Revlon Fall Mood on top of it. That one is one of the discontinued Colorstay colors, a sort of golden-brown shimmer, very pretty. Then today I put Cinna-man Of My Dreams on top of that - and then several more coats of topcoat on top of that, because it's a texture, and I really wasn't in the mood for the texture. Actually it's extremely pretty with topcoat - I don't think I tried that when I wore it before. It becomes very, very sparkly.

I had a very interesting and unusual experience yesterday - I got to take an Amish girl shopping, and talk to her a lot about nail polish and other assorted subjects. She's helping to take care of my mother-in-law, and there were workers at the house yesterday so they asked me to take her somewhere for a few hours so she wouldn't have to be there while all those guys tromped around the house. And I wanted to go to Lima anyway so she went with me. She hadn't been to Lima and hadn't been in a Meijer store before, so we did that, and we went in a couple of other places, and we actually got along very well. I'm not sure if she thought I was entirely insane or not but if she did she kept it to herself. She was very interested the whole subject of nail polish, actually (or else she faked it really well) although she didn't show any interest in buying any for herself. What she might have liked to buy, I think, was perfume - we spent a good while looking at the perfume displays, in a couple of different stores. I amassed some new jeans and underwear and a really cute cardigan that I've been wearing ever since we got home, and some t-shirts for Rob, and also a bottle of Ruby Pumps and a bottle of Orly Color Blast Plum Chunky Glitter that was marked down to $1.74. She didn't buy a thing. (She tried to pay for her breakfast, but since the powers that be in the family had already given me some money to pay for it, I convinced her that wasn't necessary.) If you're wondering, she was dressed exactly like you'd think - in a really beautifully-sewn, dark colored dress, and a black cap, and she had a nice black coat to go with it. And she had a tendency to follow me around like a shadow in public places, which felt kind of odd to me. But she was very down-to-earth and funny, and I really liked her.

Honey You Should See Me In A Crown

This is a terrible picture even by my undemanding standards - all kinds of wear, dry cuticles, etc. - but it seems to be a fairly accurate on the polish itself, so I'm posting it anyway. This was the manicure before the pumpkin one, I think (unless it's the one before that) but the picture disappeared for a while. Usually I take my iPhone pictures within Evernote so that they automatically show up on my computer also - which is the beauty of Evernote - but I finally located this one on my iPhone but not in Evernote, for some reason. Maybe I accidentally deleted the note? I don't know.

Honey You Should See Me In A Crown - hereafter HYSSMIAC - is one of the Dollish Fandom polishes. I did not get the reference on this polish name because I haven't seen enough Sherlock, although I gather it's Moriarty, right? - Anyway, the polish is orange with orange and gold glitter in it. (You can see it in this picture if you enlarge it, although do so at your own risk, because like I said, it's not a good picture. If you want to see the glitter enough to put up with seeing my dry cuticles etc as well, then go for it.) (As an alternative, here's Accio Lacquer's much-better pictures.)  HYSSMIAC is really pretty, even several days in with all the wear. It really reads as orange, but then you get up closer and you get the glitter effect, which I like. It's more subtle than I expected it to be. I do wish I remembered exactly how long I'd had this on when this picture was taken. I don't think I was terribly unhappy with the wear so it must have been several days at least. As I'm always saying, I'm hard on my nails, but I still expect at least a day or two out of a manicure.

In I did end up liking This Is Halloween quite a lot. I had had some wear problems with the big LynB glitters but this one was fine - I know I didn't get a picture of it, though. (I just poked around and Mishka's pictures seem to be the most accurate I could find - no, Google, I do not mean lynn b, thanks! grr)