Essies from Karen

Karen gives away a lot of stuff on her blog, and I don't always enter her giveaways, because we're friends and it would feel weird to be winning all the time, were that ever to happen. (I've won one prize from her nail blog, previously, but that was years ago.*) I suspect that this is one of those things where I'm way overthinking it; I've never seen any indication from anybody in the nail polish community that it's considered bad form to enter your friends' giveaways - heck, nail polish bloggers are not that gigantic a group, I think if everybody recused themselves for people they knew, there'd be nobody to enter, sometimes! So anyway, once in a while when I see something I particularly like, I enter one. She had a huge giveaway for her 5th blogiversary lately, and there were a lot of cool things among the 12 separate prizes, but the one that called out to me was the Essies - particularly because it included Shine Of The Times, which I failed to buy while it was still available, silly me. (I don't remember what my other choices were. It occurs to me that there may have been less competition for the Essies since at least two of these are polishes that many people probably already own. Added: It sounds from this post like that was in fact the case.) Karen assures me that I won fair and square - and really, she's just not the kind of person that I can imagine fudging on things like that anyway, so I never imagined otherwise.

Here's what I got:
Sew Psyched - a gray-green with shimmer. (This sounded familiar to me, but I think I was thinking of one of the Square Hues from last fall, a similar gray-green, but without the shimmer). (here's some dupes from Karen, though, and it appears to have several: compared with drugstore brands, and compared with RBL Diddy Mow)
Shine Of The Times - your basic Hidden Treasures type of flakie (except I don't have Hidden Treasures, either) - except having worn it now, I can say that it's really, really dense compared to most flakies I've worn. (I had seen this said somewhere, but man, I was not prepared.) I mostly noticed it shifting from coppery-orange to green. (also here's another dupe post from Karen for flakies)
Wicked - The link here is to the Daily Varnish, and she compares Wicked to I'm Not Really A Waitress - not in color, but in the way it's Essie's unofficial signature color in more or less the same the same way that I'm Not Really A Waitress is OPI's. It's even older than INRAW, too, apparently, although they've both been around since the 90s. As far as color, Wicked is much plummier and darker than INRAW - I'd classify it as a red, but a vampy (and slightly jelly-ish) wine-red, not a bright one. It does still seem to have some of the application issues that DV talked about - although there's certainly no noticeable chemical smell from my (presumably somewhat newer) bottle. It is streaky and wants to pull a bit, though.

Now I'm thinking about what other brands' signature colors would be. The ones that come to mind are reds - maybe Carmen, because it's Zoya #1 (although I think there would probably be other contenders there - Charla? Jem?), and Cherries In The Snow, maybe, for Revlon - that one dates back to the 1930s, I think. (Anybody got thoughts on this question? What would other brands' signatures be?)

Back to the Essies: I haven't managed to get a picture of these so I ganked Karen's picture of them (I'm going on the assumption that she will be okay with this, since I'm certainly not trying to take credit.)

(The same link is up above, but for the record, that came from here.)


*The box Karen sent me is in this picture from 2011, and I assume that the polishes are in there somewhere too, but all the polishes are scrambled around so much that it's hard to tell!