Mardi Gras manicure

I found my bottle of Mingle With Kringle (which is a gold foil), which had been MIA last summer when I was hunting all my polishes down, and which I eventually found under the bed - and swatching it gave me an idea for a Mardi Gras manicure:

...which is Glitter All The Way lightly over the tip of the nail over Mingle With Kringle. The problem is, Glitter All The Way, despite being Mardi Gras colors, came (I'm told) from a holiday collection a number of years ago, and so it's most likely something not terribly easy to get your hands on. (It was holiday 2012, apparently.) Apparently they meant to make a Christmas polish along the lines of what people are now calling "ugly sweater" manis - but they happened to make this one with very prominent purple and not-at-all prominent red, and it came out looking like Mardi Gras rather than like Christmas. I do really like this polish but then I like a lot of the Christmas polishes too, so make of that what you will.

Now unless you live in New Orleans, where they start the Mardi Gras parades the minute the bowl games are over in early January, the window to get a Mardi Gras manicure in is kind of narrow. Since the date of Mardi Gras varies and it's tied to Lent and ultimately to Easter, it can fall anywhere from early February to early March. I prefer it when it's later, myself, but I don't suppose the liturgical calendar is going to magically rearrange itself just because I say so. (But in support of my argument, let me point out that Easter being later lengthens the window in which you can buy Cadbury's Creme Eggs.)

So I lived for many years in Galveston, which celebrates Mardi Gras but in their own way. They have almost only weekend parades (because nearly everything in Galveston is based on the convenience of day-trippers from Houston, see) and this year, Easter being in late March, the first weekend of Mardi Gras was actually in January, i.e., this past weekend, and the big Momus parade is this coming weekend. (It's on the 6th, to be exact.) So I have to decide if I want a Mardi Gras manicure next, or if I want to do a Valentine's manicure. Mostly I've only been doing one manicure a week, lately, so a week from today - it's Tuesday as I write this - is actually Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, and there's no point after that. I'm not sure which way I'm going to swing, just yet. (Note that it's not like I am actually going to go to Mardi Gras. I don't do crowds. It's just a question of entering into the spirit of the thing.)

Anyway, whether I use this mani myself or not is immaterial to the idea of it. Here we're zooming in on the picture above:

If you look really close, you can see a bit of the red in the glitter mix there - I thought it was more noticeable on the nail here than in the bottle - but you do have to look close. Since not many people (presumably) have Glitter All The Way, I think you could substitute some other glitters, maybe - like, if you had a sparse purple glitter and a sparse green glitter, that would come out looking about the same over gold. Actually I don't suppose many people have Mingle With Kringle, either, but there's an obvious and available dupe for that one, Zoya Ziv. (You could also do a different base-color, and do a purple base with green and gold glitter, for instance - I can think of a couple of green-and-gold combinations, or you could improvise your own by layering.)

I'll have more to say about Valentine's manicures, and what I've actually worn, later on.