Stash: dark purples

It's so hard to tell one dark purple from another that I reswatched everything, using the other half of that wheel I showed yesterday.

Here are the bottles:

• OPI Who Are You Wearing? (which was originally from the 2007 Holiday in Hollywood collection) (one coat)
• Revlon Moon Candy Orbit (one coat plus a bit of the glitter)
• SH Salon Plum It (two coats)
• OPI Lincoln Park After Dark (the mini in the center - from a Chicago collection several years ago now, I believe) (one coat)
• Color Show Amethyst Couture, from the LE Brocades collection
• Sephora By OPI Just A Little Dangerous (two coats)
• Butter London Pitter Patter, which was an LE release in honor of the baby prince last year
• Jet Set Nightlife (one coat)
• Hard Candy Vinyl, a mini (one coat) (this is the long-gone "old" Hard Candy incarnation)
• Urban Decay Vice (one coat)
• Ulta Empty Stocking, from a "Wicked Wonderland" set some years ago (one coat)

If anything, they look somewhat lighter in this picture than they do most of the time, but that's probably a good thing, since you can tell more about the colors than if they looked darker.

Not too many of these colors are widely available; either they were limited edition in the first place (the Color Show Brocades, Pitter Patter, Vice, Empty Stocking), they're older colors that are now retired (Who Are You Wearing? and Orbit) or they're from entire lines that are retired (SH Salon, Sephora by OPI, the old versions of Hard Candy and Jet Set). Actually now that I look at them, I think the only one of these that's a current, widely available color is Lincoln Park After Dark, which is popular and a classic and probably isn't going anywhere any time soon. Vice is not terribly old and might still be obtainable even though it was LE, as are all of Urban Decay's polishes these days. (The Brocades came out around the same time, last fall, but I haven't seen hide nor hair of them since they were first released; they seem to have been snapped up and disappeared completely. Still, it's a drugstore polish and it's possible there are bottles of those floating around, too. I haven't poked around on the internet to see.)

But the availability question is not going to stop me from talking about these polishes just the same. Here's the wheel, in the same order:

Who Are You Wearing? is very much in the "blurple" camp. So is Orbit, although it's not quite as obvious. The glittery end of this polish "wand" is almost completely dried-up, but I smeared a little bit on the tip there on the wheel so you could get some idea what it looked like. I remember that back when I first tried this out I thought that by the time I got the whole thing on, base and glitter, that it looked completely blue and not purple at all. But the base on its own looks more purple than blue, I think. I tried to put these in order going from blue-violet to red-violet, and the next few are maybe more neutral purples, although Lincoln Park After Dark, in particular, goes on so dark even with one coat that it's hard to tell. Plum It, LPAD, Amethyst Couture, and Just a Little Dangerous all seem to be pretty neutral, though. And maybe Nightlife, too - at least in the lighting in this picture it looks like it - but I'm holding this wheel up in front of me as I write this, and in the light in this room I can't see that effect I see above, where Pitter Patter looks more red than the two on either side of it. I suspect that it's true, that it's a little redder, but I don't think you're going to be able to tell most of the time. And Vinyl almost looks like a dark-wine color in the light here. On the whole I don't think I did a terribly good job of ordering these, at least on the right-hand side. I think it's Pitter Patter and Vinyl that lean the most red - but I also think most normal (by which I mean non-color-obsessed) people are going to look at these and not see much difference, because they're all so dark.