Top 3 swatches

To recap, if you haven't been reading the last few days, these were my picks for my top 3 polishes of 2017, in what I decided was my order of preference:

1. High Tide (ILNP)
2. Prince Cornelious (KL Polish)
3. Turn On the Northern Lights! (OPI)

Honestly, if I had it to do over again, as I mentioned, I might jump So Jelly up to #3, even though it's discontinued. But I already did the swatches and I'm not doing them over again. (I don't think it would have been #1 in any case.) Actually, Turn On the Northern Lights reminds me of So Jelly, in a way - the shimmer in it reminds me of the Unicorn Pee pigment that's in So Jelly. But Turn On the Northern Lights sort of got graded down because I couldn't see that pigment all that well in the living room, even with some extra lights set up. I haven't looked at the pictures blown up large so we'll find out shortly if it shows up here.

(They may not be in the same order every time, but this one, at least, is in the order they're listed above. They don't look anything alike, at least, so that helps. High Tide is the bright blue-green one, Prince Cornelious is the red-brown one, and Turn On the Northern Lights is the dark-blue/blurple one.)

This is my first ILNP nail polish, as it happens. They're pretty expensive so I chose carefully, and obviously I seem to have done a pretty good job with that! The KL polish is part of the fall collection, which is the one where I bought the whole collection. And... hmm, come to think of it, I don't even remember where I got the OPI. I do know this is the only one I got from the collection, though. (Oh, huh, I'd forgotten this completely - I got it on eBay. The spreadsheet comes through again.)

I was experimenting with doing swatches on little plastic spoons, so this is what I did. Really I don't much like dealing with the little separate spoons so you probably won't see this much in future, but on the other hand, I still have some spoons left so I'm not going to say I'm never doing it again, either. I was thinking of the old Zoya spoons - remember those? - and I do like the fact that you can turn them over and get a decent approximation of what they'll look like with a heavy top-coat like Seche Vite. So I took pictures from both sides - front:

and back:

Notice that you can see the pigment in TOTNL on the top spoon (at least, on my home monitor you can!), but not really at all when you turn it over. That's why it came in third. High Tide is so showy that poor Prince Cornelious really can't compete - but really I like it a lot, too, that's why it's here in the first place.

I did swatches the way I usually do them, too - here's High Tide:

Prince Cornelious:

(Prince Cornelious doesn't seem to show up best in swatches, really - and it doesn't help that I managed to mar the finish on this one. I didn't even notice until I looked at the pictures.)

and Turn On The Northern Lights: