Mini Mani Month

I caved and ordered the Ciaté "Mini Mani Month" advent-calendar thing even though it was awfully expensive - I used that $20 off $75 purchase VIB promotion so I'm telling myself it cost $40 instead of $60. But so far it's really cool. I hope I haven't opened a whole new avenue for obsession, because swatching these Ciaté polishes they seem awfully good. I'm trying to resist the temptation to look ahead, but I'm writing this on Day 8, and so far I've got 7 minis and a "Gelology" top-coat. I looked at Ciaté's website and the 5ml minis are $9 each retail (a full-size polish is $17) - Sephora's website says that this set has a $215 retail value and I guess that sounds about right, because there's 20 minis, one full-size polish (which will probably be the Christmas Eve polish, at the end, I'm guessing), and a couple of other things that I haven't gotten to yet.

(The "Cushy Vibe" thing is a Kaja lip stain that I already had in my cart - I had to get something else to get to the $75 minimum to get the $20 off, after all! It looks kind of weird here because the packaging for both of these are almost the same color.)

The advent calendar flips open like a book, so here's the inside:

And here's a window that I'm holding open so you can see inside:

They all have something printed on the inside - mostly sayings and stuff like this one, but the one with the top-coat had information about the product, which is kind of nice. (This was Day 1, which was a polish called Cyclone.)

This is Cyclone & Hoopla, the polishes from the first two days. In the first eight days, there was a variety of finishes - cremes, a glitter, a shimmery top-coat (as well as the clear one). Cyclone is a kind of a shifty thing, and there's another that's a very heavy shimmer. The color palette so far leans heavily towards fall-ish colors, nudes and browns and the one coral, above. The glitter is silver and blue, though. Anyway, I'm happy so far with this purchase, but I will of course report back with more.