Topic Tuesday (a week late)

I didn't know until last night that #topictues was a thing - apparently it's been going on on Instagram for a month or two now. I always say I should look at Instagram more but then I forget to actually do that. I've had an account for years and years but I hardly ever think to post anything, either. (I am @mellificent on IG but I've posted like 4 pictures in the last year, none of which are nail polish. Go figure.)

This week's topic: "sentimental polishes" - I'm pretty sure I have some of these but I'm going to have to think it over some more.

But meanwhile, I thought I'd look at last week's question, which was, what brand do you have the most of? and you're supposed to pick five favorites from each. I have most of this information fairly close at hand because I did favorites for a lot of brands last year. All I have to do is add the new ones I've acquired since then and see if I need to adjust things.

When I did this last year the top brands were:

• Zoya - about 75 (links for this are below)
• Sally Hansen - 40 (but that's all the sub-brands together, and the more I think about that the less I think it's a valid way to count, since Insta-Dri and Miracle Gel and Xtreme Wear aren't much like one another, really)
• OPI - 30 (about 11 of those are minis, but I guess that still counts)
• China Glaze - 24

plus several more right around the 20-bottle mark - Sinful, Square Hue, Pretty Serious, and Revlon

When I look at what I bought since then, it seems that all of the numbers for last year's top four brands are holding pretty steady - I bought some of each, but I also did some selective destashing. In the meantime, I bought more Square Hue and Pretty Serious than I got rid of by far, probably enough to bump China Glaze down the list, for sure, and maybe OPI too. I'm not as interested in looking at those two again anyway, or Sally H., either, so I'm going to go with Zoya, SquareHue, and Pretty Serious for this purpose. (I put the links above for what I said about the brands I bumped off.)

Square Hue

• Akamai (blue-green foil)
• Lake Louise (shimmery light blue)
• Parizska (gray glitter)
• Victorian End (deep shimmery purple)
• Vogue (dark shimmery red)

Several of these are the same favorites I picked for Square Hue last year, which is here:

I bought 9 new SquareHues last year, and I think at least a couple of them deserve consideration as favorites. I think that Parizska, Vogue, and Lake Louise still belong solidly in my favorites. Y2K is a nice polish but I don't love it enough that I think it needs to be in the top 5. I added one that I slighted before instead, which is Victorian End, a deep purple, and then to make a fifth added a new one: Akamai. (Runner-up from the new ones was Limeña, a nice coppery-red.)

Pretty Serious

• BSOD (glittery royal-blue jelly)
• Elliott (bright blue packed with microglitter) (still available, for now)
• Ichi Hanami (cherry-pink shimmer)
• Party By The Pool (glittery dark-blue jelly) 
• Poltergeist Puddle (shimmery-shifty blue-leaning purple)

(Lots of blues, I'm not sure why. But they're all different.)

Here's my previous top 5, but several of those are discontinued. I haven't bought any of the "new" Pretty Serious polishes since they redid the labels and the website, but I bought a bunch of stuff while they had the closeout sale going on for the old bottles. (If you aren't on their mailing list, you may not know that they're in the process of discontinuing some more stuff. They are not going to have as large of a back-catalog as they have traditionally had.) However, since I don't have much that's current, it's hard for me to kick all the discontinueds off my list - there won't be much left and I really don't think there's much in more recent hauls that I would want to add, really. I'm going to go with a variation on the old top 5. I kicked off Kashmir and Swatch & Learn, because I'm not feeling them so much right now, and added a couple of different ones.

Zoya

• Alice (periwinkle Pixie Dust)
• Carter (purple Pixie Dust)
• Dream (indigo scattered holo)
• Leia (shimmery top-coat)
• Zuza (turquoise-green shimmer)

For Zoya, I picked a top 10 last year, so I needed to look at that plus the new arrivals since then and pick 5 out of that new pool. Here are the new arrivals. Here is the old top 10. (In fact here is the whole kit and caboodle, should you care to look.). I also realized that I had a couple in my 2016 favorites that weren't here and should be.

I had trouble getting this down to five - the ones it pained me especially to cut were a couple of the new ones - Destiny and Mimi, and then Jem and Carly off the old list. But I didn't have Leia on the old list and it's become my total go-to layering polish, so it needs to be in the top five for sure.

Here's Mimi, for the record:

It's a glass-fleck and I adore those in general, that's probably why I'm attached to it in particular. But it's also a really beautiful color. But I also have Carter already in there, and it's purple, and Alice is a lighter purple, so three purples seems like overkill. I put in poor unappreciated Zuza instead. (I've just remembered lately how much I love Zuza.)