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.