The latest stuff

I keep forgetting to take a picture of my nails - I'm sporting my first Bubblegum Punk manicure, over Misa Quirky Smile (dark teal). And it's awesome.

I'm also doing my periodic rearranging of my stash - I've done this the last couple of years, and it's usually what ends up with me taking pictures of everything. However, I've done that twice and now my stash has pretty much grown beyond the point where that's practicable. I'll tell you what I'm doing, though. I tried organizing it by color and then I tried pulling out certain finishes (like holos and top-coats and so forth) and neither one of those has really worked out, completely. But I know I'm prone to wear certain things at certain times of the year, right? Brights in the summer, earth-tones in the fall, glitters in the winter, so forth. So I'm experimenting with sorting by season. Some things are basic and non-seasonal and those are their own category - creams, especially, tend to end up there. But it's kind of amazing to me how many colors fall well into the seasonal split. So I'll report back on how that's working out.

Here's the latest round of new stuff (all of which ended up in either a fall or winter box, as I recall):

L-R: Aura, Pitch Purple, I Know You Are But What Am I?, Casablanca, Legend

I actually broke down and paid full price for a Formula X for the first time... they lured me in with blackened red, what can I say? The one on the left was the non-sale one and the one on the right was on sale. (Placed at the ends, as the crafty among you might guess, to keep the other bottles from rolling away.)

The Models Own and the Black Cat are my first from both of those brands and came from the Llarowe closeout sale. I feel sad about Llarowe's scale-back because it seems like the end of an era. But really I suspect her own polishes were the best-sellers these days. And it's not like she's actually going away!

So here's the low-down on those:
Aura (Formula X Black Quartz) - I called this blackened red, but actually what it is is black-and-red microglitter. I believe this is pretty new and nobody has swatches of it out there that I can find, so the link is to the Sephora page. It looks great in the bottle, but when I swatched it, I was not as impressed. We'll see - I have so much new polish that it may be closer to Halloween before I get around to wearing it, anyway!
Casablanca (Sinful Colors) - a fairly light silvery-gray. Sinful calls this chrome but I don't agree, it's more satiny than that. I think I mentioned before that I had trouble getting this to dry. My bottle tended to go on thick, but next time I will definitely be doing thinner coats.
I Know You Are But What Am I? (Black Cat Lacquer) - obviously Pee-Wee inspired, I believe it's from an 80s collection. It's an almost-red fuchsia jelly glitterbomb. It's really gorgeous.
Legend (Formula X Shifters) - Sephora calls it "maroon and rainbow metallic" but in the bottle I thought it read purple. In fact I took pictures in pairs, I'll put those below.
Pitch Purple (Models Own HyperGel) - if you could get an even single coat of Pitch Purple on, it might be a brighter purple. But I couldn't manage that and I used two. With two it becomes much darker, but still very shiny and pretty. (I did end up using top-coat over it, but it's nearly shiny enough on its own.) Lucy calls it "ink purple" at the link above and that sounds about right.

See, Pitch Purple and Legend both look purple. This was in indirect sun and they are usually as true-in-color as pictures of purple ever are (which is to say, they mostly are, but they're not infallible). Legend probably has a more red-looking base than it appears, is my guess. That's presumably part of the Shifting duochrome-ness of it.

And here are the two redder ones. Aura does not seem to be quite as advertised, but it's still pretty. I am going to take Ignite (see below) and black creme and all these vampy red glitters and play around and see what I can come up with for my Halloween needs!

I was complaining about Ipsy never sending me nail polish, but this month they finally did. (In these days of employees whose only job is social media, I don't think it's completely paranoid of me to wonder if that's completely a coincidence, that I get nail polish right after I complained here about not getting any!) So Ipsy is partially out of my bad books, but I'm also getting Sephora Play starting this month, and if I like it I may continue that and cancel Ipsy. We'll see. I just feel like Ipsy can be very spotty and it annoys me when I see that other people got better stuff than I did! (In fact, one night lately I was wandering between YouTube videos and I saw a video with two people comparing their Ipsy bags - one got way better stuff than the other one, and I was like, "Oh good, it's not just me.")

So anyway, the Ipsy bag came after I had already taken the picture above, but the polish is a Formula X mini, and it's called Ignite, and I thought, "Oh, yawn, red," but then it turns out it's not a bright red, it's a blood-red (apparently Sephora's description was "smokin' red"), and I'm not entirely sure I have anything exactly like it - which is dangerous because next I may be wanting to buy the full size. It's beautiful. It occurs to me that I have actually not tried any of Formula X's normal colors because I've been buying all these sale ones, and they're all from other lines besides the core one - even the one that wasn't on sale. This is very shiny and very unlike the ones I have. (Apparently I am safe, though - I just went and nosed around Sephora's website and Ignite is not there any more.) (And I will of course take pictures of the whole Ipsy haul eventually. It had Nyx eyeshadows, which I would be more excited about if I wore eyeshadow more.)

(I got an e-mail meanwhile that Sephora Play is also on the way - and Square Hue, which I'd sort of forgotten I restarted again. More more more.)