Online shopping

Tip for people with retail websites: If you have a store, no matter how big or how small, it's pretty important to keep your front page updated, at the very least! This seems like it would be obvious, but apparently it's not to everybody. If it's March and you have a sale on your front page that expired a month ago, I'm totally not going to buy anything -- because that looks like you haven't actually looked at your website in the last month, and that makes me nervous about giving you my money. (That's a real example which I just saw; I'm not going to name the store, but it wasn't a nail website so it's unlikely that it belongs to anybody who's reading here.) I was pretty much an early adopter of online shopping, and if there's something I've learned over the years, it's that there's always another online seller - if you want to buy a thing, but something about a website or a seller doesn't smell right, metaphorically speaking, then go find another seller, no matter how much you love whatever it is you were about to buy. Nail polish, with its thousands of often-unique polishes, almost seems like an exception to my "always another seller" mantra (which I developed navigating the wilds of old-school eBay), but I try not to buy into the mindset of uniqueness too much even with nail polish.

I've been on a kick of buying stuff from blog sales lately. For the price of one higher-end polish, you can get half a dozen of somebody else's cool cast-offs, usually only used once or twice. I figure it's a good way to try out new brands! Here's part of the latest round of blog-sale purchases (from A Little Polish) plus a couple of items from Glisten & Glow:

• (top row) Funky Fingers Burgundy Scales - which I think is supposed to be a crackle, but which failed to crack at all on my nail wheel (but I think it cost a quarter, so eh)
• G&G Nail & Cuticle Balm
• (bottom row) Instant Artificials basecoat
• Liquid Lacquer Ice Hotel In Hell
• Glitzology Falloween
• G&G HK Girl topcoat

Every one of these was a new brand to me. I really like all of them so far, and I adore the cuticle balm, especially. I got the aloe & green-tea scent, but the scent is really light, in any case - I really don't notice the scent unless I stick my nose right in the tin. As far as the polishes, I'm wearing Ice Hotel in Hell right now - I'll get a picture of that up later in the week. (Falloween is probably going to have to wait - it seems too explicitly a seasonal polish to try out six months early!)