Square Hue Kalbelia collection

It's been more than a year since I got a Square Hue box - I'm not at all sure how long I'll stick with it, but I was lured back by the changes they made, where you can skip months or you can pick two out of their three monthly polishes instead of getting all three. That's what I subscribed to - Box No.2, they call it. I just went in and picked the two I want for next month. I don't remember what the monthly theme was, but there were two brights and a "straw" color - and that's certainly not my kind of thing, so I got the two brights. (I think it's a coppery red and a plum.)

But that's next month. This year's Square Hue is dance-themed, and June is Kalbelia, which is a folk dance. Here is an example, and here are the swatch card and the polishes in the box (although I had already pulled them out long enough to swatch them, as you can see):

You can see the space in the middle where the 3rd bottle would go. In this case the third polish was a bright pink creme, and I figured I have plenty of those already and didn't need it. You can't see the bottles very well in the picture above, so there are a couple of different shots below. (If you're interested in knowing what these names mean, it's just below; if that doesn't interest you, the swatches are there, just skip the next few paragraphs and scroll down.)

First of all, Kalbelia is the dance, we've covered that (I didn't know the name but I do remember having seen that type of folk-dance before - I couldn't tell you where!) and I do actually know what a lengha is - like a lot of my general fashion knowledge, it's one of those things I learned from Pinterest. It's spelled various ways but basically in this case it means the skirt like the one above, which is tight at the waist and then flares out. You hear the term "lengha choli" and that is the name for the whole outfit - the choli is the top and the lengha is the skirt. (I can't believe I actually found a use for the time I spent looking this up one day a year or so ago!)

I did not know "odhani" but apparently it is also a garment - it means "wrap" but it seems to often mean the headcoverings that you see in Indian fashion, which are wrapped around the body and up over the head.

The garment names don't really seem to have much connection to the colors themselves - an outfit could be any of these colors, presumably. (For the Kalbelia dance, it may be traditional to have them be dark with bright embroidery, as in the picture above, but I'm not at all sure about that part. The videos I watched all seemed to have a color-scheme something like that, anyway)

In this case, Odhani is the blue - which is a crelly - and Lengha is a taupe/brown shimmer:

One way I can tell this (the blue, that is) is a crelly is because the color looks noticeably different depending on which side of the bottle you look at. It was darker on the back, here, and lighter on the side. I think that's because crellies tend to separate. (For a fairly extreme example, see this one.) You might notice that these colors are (coincidentally!) a little similar to two of the three Wet n Wild ones, I just got, but you'll also see in the swatches below that they are both darker. Definitely not dupes.

Here is Odhani:

See how much paler Odhani seems in this picture than the one above? But actually the swatch does seem to match this one quite well. At the top of the wheel you can see Periwinkle Of My Eye, and it definitely looks considerably lighter, although both are grayed-out blues and are certainly fairly similar.

And here's Lengha:

You could think of it as a darker version of the nice taupe from the Wet n Wild collection (again, visible at the top of the wheel). But it also has really pretty shimmer to it.