Pretty Serious haul

I really really didn't intend to spend any significant amount of money on nail polish right now, but as I mentioned in the last entry, I went kind of overboard on Pretty Serious' website the other day, and that order has already arrived, so I have pictures.

This was what was on the box. As I mentioned before, I did this order on Friday night and it arrived on Monday, so bonus points to them for the mega-quick service. (They do have a US shipper, or that would have really been a miracle.)

I started out intending to look at the clearance polishes again, because there was a code over the weekend (now expired, of course) that knocked another 10% off the clearance prices. Then I put several things into my cart and the next step was that I started thinking about hitting their free shipping limit - which is $50, but that's 50 Australian dollars, not American dollars. I can't give you exact numbers, because exchange rates vary and all that, but I've done this several times and it seems to generally work out that $50 Australian is something under $40 in US dollars. So that's when I went a little berzerk. And I registered with a new e-mail address, because I wasn't at home at the time, and PS sent me an e-mail with more coupon codes. It didn't say anything like "new customers only" which would make me recuse myself from using the coupons. They were like "welcome10" and "welcome 20" and it said that each code would work once per customer. I may have gotten an e-mail before that had these same codes, but I certainly hadn't used them except possibly the lowest-value one (which was $10 off any purchase). Since I already had $50 in merchandise in my cart, getting up to $60 to get 20% off the entire purchase sounded eminently doable. (In fact I think it may have come out a little cheaper by the time I got done, but I didn't really sit and do that math at the time.)

So here's what I ended up with:

I love their cute colorful boxes.

Here's the labels (although reading that green one, in particular, may be iffy, depending on your monitor):

Going L-R on the picture above, there's A Christmas Time Paradox, which is basically more or less a Tardis-blue metallic. It's full of silver shimmer, though, which makes it somewhat different than my several other Tardis-blue polishes. Daphne's Birthday Party is just a mixed glitter in Happy Birthday mode, but I've never had one of those that I really liked and it seemed like a good time to give it a try. Then the other Daphne polish is Daphne's Disco Party, which is a matte glitter which I already had but I decided I needed a backup - I've gone through well over half the old bottle one way and another. Then, let's see, Mojito is a topper, basically, I think, a white that shimmers green. And Fairy Lights I'm wearing now and it's not at all a dupe for the Mojito-type things - instead it's a shimmery off-white which comes very close to being opaque after three coats. If you're very choosy about the VNL issue you might want to put a white or off-white undercoat on first. But after three coats and a matte top-coat I'm very happy with what I got. (I did order PS's matte top-coat but I didn't try that yet, I just grabbed my old standby Matte Me Crazy instead. And let's see, then we have The Singing Seed (from the Museum of Naileontology collection) plus Matte All The Things, their version of matte top-coat, and Cute Cuticles Purity which I think is meant to be the non-irritating version of your basic cuticle goo. (Added: I have now tried out Purity and I really like it. I don't have another one of PS's cuticle oils to compare it to, but compared to the several I already own, it feels super-light, like it just practically disappears immediately into your skin.)

I'll have individual swatches up later.