Luna and gray + Paloma

Today's manicure:

1. Nail Nutrition
2. The bottom of the bottle of Insta-Grip, so it's a pretty goopy base coat. I'm trying to decide how long I hold out before I throw that bottle away. (There's still a little left! I hate waste!)
3. Unknown gray from the set I got for Christmas, about which I will say more later.
4. Zoya Luna - super-sparkly silver - paused there most of the day and then kept going with...
5. Luna
6. Zoya Paloma, to make it a jelly sandwich
7. Paloma
8. Paloma

...and I haven't put top coat yet but I suppose I should - but I think I'll wait until later and let this EIGHT coats cure first! Wow that's a lot of nail polish, but it looks beautiful. Still very very sparkly even with three coats of Paloma.

(Last week I stuck with Dancer Is the Best Reindeer all week. I redid it once, and this weekend I just patched it up and made it last. But I decided I didn't want to do that again today.)

"Dancer is the Best Reindeer"

I'm gonna have to check that title before I post, because I didn't even really look at the name on the bottle again since I first bought this. It might be Prancer, not Dancer, but "Dancer Is the Best Reindeer" is what the name is, in my head. (And I googled and I was in fact correct.) Anyway, this nail polish is definitely from Wet n Wild's Fast Dry line, and I bought it a month or so ago at either the grocery store or at Walgreen's - I've already forgotten which - because I thought it looked like something I would really like. And boy, I do. I'm a little bit in love, actually.

I put it on last night before I went to bed, and this morning I rolled over in bed and took an iPhone picture, because the light was streaming in and I thought that might be the best picture I was likely to get without going outside (so bear in mind that this has not been cleaned up at ALL):

...but it's enough for you to get the idea, anyway. Purple glitter with some blue mixed in. It's so thick I wasn't even entirely sure what color its base was, but I'm guessing looking at my cuticles that it's clear. It seemed like the kind of thing that would benefit from a dark undercoat, so I picked up something inky - I think it was OPI "Who are you wearing?" - see below for more on that. (ADDED: I forgot to say, and it was late and I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think this is 3 coats of the glitter. With top coat.)

Here's some other people's swatches, found on my google search:
A polished life
Allura
(The first of those went the same basic way I went, and put a black underneath. The other one has swatches with no undercoat, and I think from that that I definitely did the right thing!)

And in case you don't know what "Who Are You Wearing?" looks like - I honestly couldn't remember - or tell - last night if it was a blue or a purple but I didn't really care at the time either: here you go. (They call it a blurple in this link - I hate that word but it is useful). I'mna have to remember to wear it more often, in any case; it's pretty.

Bet On Red update

Just so you know, Bet On Red seems to wear quite as well as any of the other reds in my regular rotation. (Reds seem to be a bit on the chippy side anyway. Anybody else notice that?) I kept the manicure I described in the post below until I destroyed it changing the CO2 canister at work on Sunday - very unfeminine work, that - and actually I slapped another coat of red on and made it go through yesterday, too, but I did finally take it off last night and start over. What I'm wearing now is almost identical, though, except I have two coats of Bet On Red and no Kaufda, and also I picked up a different top coat this time - Revlon Top Speed, which I'm almost certain is several years old but seems fine. In fact, I smudged the first coat of top coat up a little (it didn't dry fast enough for my superpowers of smudging!), and so I put a second one over that, which means it's nice and extra-shiny.

Bet On Red

Well, I tried Kaufda over red - RBL Chinoise, which I don't really care for by itself so I tend to use for purposes like this - and it did punch up the red factor of Kaufda, so it was a success as an experiment. But I seem to be out of the orange mood. (I should probably just put Kaufda up for the year, in that case, because fall is normally the only time I'm at all interested in wearing orange.) I looked at the result and went, "Meh," and promptly covered it up with Milani Bet On Red, a shimmer. Actually I might should have anticipated this - we're well into December now, as much in denial as I am about that - and I have a long history of wearing red a lot in December and right through the winter.

So in summary, what I actually have on my nails is (1 coat of each):

1. SH Salon Manicure base coat
2. Rescue Beauty Lounge Chinoise (damn, it still looks good in the pictures, so why does it look so boring on my nails?)
3. Zoya Kaufda (see previous posts about this)
4. Milani Bet On Red, which that page says is number 94, and if you click on it says that it's a cherry-red shimmer
5. old-style Colorstay top coat, because that was what was close at hand

Seems to me that I didn't think Bet On Red wore very well when I wore it before. I'll try to remember to report back on that.

Jem again

Since I haven't posted here in a few days, I thought I would just tell you (in case anybody is actually waiting with bated breath to hear) that I am back to Chloe over Jem this week. I've had that on a few days, and it's starting to wear a bit now, and I am toying with the idea of trying bright red under Kaufda next, to see if it'll punch up the red tones a little more. I'll report back on that if and when it happens.

Zoya Kaufda

I'm still wearing Kaufda - not the same manicure as before, I redid it. This is just Kaufda with Chloe on top. (The flecks in Chloe are noticeable if you're really paying attention, but it didn't change the color much.)

You might realize, from the fact that I'm still wearing it, that Kaufda is growing on me. Here's its Zoya page, and here is a blog post I found when I googled, which is somebody talking about how much they love Kaufda and that it's sort of a Zoya Unsung Hero. (I think Zoya has something like 300 colors nowadays so some of them are bound to get lost in the shuffle.) Apparently it's also rated 5 out of 5 on Makeup Alley - but  I haven't looked up other Zoya polishes so they may all be rated high for all I know. I only found this color because I searched for "copper" on Zoya's website, and it came up along with Penny and Colette which are the ones I already knew about. I think I like Kaufda because it has more red undertones than I expected, which makes it more flattering on my skin tone.


disclaimer: The Zoya link is a "Share the Love" link, meaning I could conceivably get freebies out of it at some point if you buy through that link. But in general, nobody's paying me to say anything that I say here. If anybody does, I'll let you know!

Too early for tinsel

I put base coat on my nails yesterday before work, and then I got busy and almost forgot to put polish on. I finally slapped on a couple of coats of Let Me Go (which is Sinful Colors - a mother-of-pearl-ish duochrome) - although it's very sheer, it was enough to feel like my nails weren't naked. Let Me Go is a very odd color - I think I first heard of it through Holly so let me just link to her post about it. I don't think she says how many coats she had on in those pictures, but I think it must be a lot - I wore two coats to work yesterday and it was still much sheerer than that, so she must be wearing at least four, I think.

When I got home, I pulled out a set of Orly minis out that I've never remembered to use much, and put Tiara on top of Let Me Go - it seemed like it would coordinate. But my god, it's so very shiny - it should be called Tinsel, that's what it looked like. Maybe right before Christmas I would like it, but not now, it just drove me crazy. So I kept going. I thought of jelly sandwiches, and started to put Paloma over it, but then I finally went with Kaufda, the copper that I didn't put on the other day. And it looks really good. I suspect that the tinsel underneath livened it up a bit, but I haven't used it on its own enough to be sure. I like the final result, anyway.

Indecision

The Karina manicure was chipping, and also I broke a nail yesterday and then chopped the rest of them shorter to match. I stretched it out and left it on until I got off work tonight, but that manicure is gone now and I'm waiting for Nail Nutrition to dry a little more on my otherwise all-cleaned-up nails. However, I have no idea what I'm putting on after the base coat. (Nail Nutrition says on the bottle that you can use it as a base coat, but it's a pretty crappy basecoat. I use it because I like the way it makes my nails feel, but I put regular basecoat on top of it.)

I'm thinking that it's Thanksgiving week, after all, and after this I'll probably go into holiday mode and start doing bright colors and glitter and such, so that makes me think I should do something autumnal, one more time, at least. I pulled out some stuff from my Zoya boxes: Jem, which is a nice fallish burgundy, and Kaufda, which is copper. I have no reason to think those things would look good together, but experimenting seems to be what I'm all about these days, so we may find out about both of them together. But possibly not until in the morning. I've had an Ambien and I'm getting too sleepy to type, much less paint my nails.

IN THE MORNING: the answer was Jem and then Chloe. I wasn't feeling experimental enough to add Kaufda to the mix.

ADDED: (since it's more on the same subject) the barista at the coffee shop (The One That's Not Starbucks, as I like to call it) had me show her my nails earlier, and was very complimentary. Multiple coats of Chloe over dark colors really shows up well, which may mean I'll continue to use it a lot over the holidays. Last winter I was putting Disco Ball or my old bottle of Trailer Trash over everything, and Chloe gives a similar glimmery effect but is a whole lot easier to get off.

Karina over black

I thought I had a picture of my latest manicure, which I really like, but so far, no dice. That is, the picture does exist, but it's on my phone and so far I have had no luck getting it onto this computer. Anyway, the more I look at it, the more I think you can't really see the awesomeness of it from the picture anyhow, so you will just have to use your imagination.

What I ended up with was this:
1. base coat (SH Salon)
2. black - Starry Night, Sonia Kashuk
3. and 4. Zoya Karina - red foil/microglitter, similar in finish to the Surf collection from last summer
5. and 6. Zoya Chloe

I didn't know what I was going to put over it when I started with the black. I think I had some vague idea about glitter. But then I pulled out Karina, and it really looks great over the black. Even with two coats of Karina, enough of the black shows through to give it a little bit of a vamp/goth kind of vibe. Then I put two coats of Chloe on top of that, and furthermore it was my OLD bottle of Chloe, which is getting quite empty, and apparently a lot of flecks had sifted down to the bottom, because it's a very glitzy two coats. And it looks great.

Oh, look, there's a picture after all:

(Ugh, I did kind of a crappy job of cleanup. And really it's prettier than this - the red is not very true. It's darker than it appears here, but you can get a general idea, at least. You can certainly see Chloe here.)

And now for something completely different

Well, it feels different to me, anyway. I've been wearing warm colors - oranges and metallics - for the entire last month, and now I'm wearing purple. PURPLE. It's wonderful. Zoya Roxy over Carly, which looks great!

Top coat and base coat

I'm no expert on the technical aspects of nail polish, not at all. (Loodie is the nail blogger I think of who falls most into that category.) But I thought I'd talk a bit about top coat and base coat, from my experience.

I was thinking this morning (while I was waiting on my nail polish to dry) about how much the climate I live in makes a difference here - when people online talk how long it takes their polish to dry, most of the time it's considerably less than I find it is for me. But I live in the land of high humidity (on the Gulf Coast) and presumably that's the main reason for the difference. I spend a LOT of time waiting for nail polish to dry. (I tend to do something like read during that time, or goof around on the computer. Keeps me from picking up something else that might be more likely to mess my nails up.)

I like Sally Hansen's basic Insta-Grip and Insta-Dri base coat and top coat, but I haven't been using either of them lately. I do have a half-empty and slightly gooey bottle of Insta-Grip that's my backup basecoat these days, but when I went to the grocery store to buy another one, they were out. My grocery store has a whole aisle of nail polish, so they usually have a lot of selection, but that day they were sadly short on base coats. They also happened to be out of Orly Bonder, and a couple of other things I thought to look for, but they did have Sally Hansen Complete Salon base coat, so that's what I came home with. I had never used it before, but like most things Sally Hansen, I quite like it. It seems to do a good job - of course it costs more than Insta-Grip, too, so it should!

I have several different top coats I've been using, but since Fleck Effect also doubles as a top coat, I've been using that most of the time and not using the general-purpose ones. (I like the way that multiple coats of Fleck Effect looks - I was using three, a lot of the time during the summer - and a nice side effect of that was that it really makes your polish wear well. I am rather famously hard on my nails, so I like anything that'll extend wear life!)

Today's (redone again) version of the Rage combo I keep talking about is:

1. base coat (SH Complete Salon)
2. Flagstone Rush
3. Rage
4. Rage
5. Orly Pearl Wisdom
6. Orly Diamond Love (both of these last two are pretty sheer, I couldn't tell that either one changed the color significantly)
7. and for good measure, Chloe (and even Chloe only shows up a little - I see a flash of it occasionally, but that's all)

Small update: I found somebody talking about Rage on YouTube who also said that Rage looks different in the bottle - here. (I hadn't seen her videos before, but I like that one.)

What the Nail!?! Tag

They call this a tag, I would call it a meme, but I suspect it's the same thing either way. This came from a video, but I don't do videos so here is my texty version. (I did this in the middle of the night the other night, more or less, and then left it in draft mode and forgot about it for several days. So, y'know, the answers may be heavily colored by that whole "middle of the night" thing.)

(Holly's video is here, and she got it from Zenorah, whose video is here.)

Questions!
1. You are stranded on an island, you have all the necessary tools such as remover, etc... What polish do you have? I tend to get a bit crabby (crabby, desert island, get it?) about questions like this. I suspect if I was actually stranded on an island that I would not care about nail polish much. (Also, I lived on an island for 20 years. I can tell you that even though it was a big island, the very thought of not being able to get off makes me crazy.) But if I did... well, is a top coat allowed, also? I guess I would go with dark-pinks-plus-Chloe like I wore all summer. That seems island-appropriate enough. 

2. What is your least favorite polish? In my personal collection right now, I'd probably go with OPI Decades of Shades, which I mentioned a couple of entries back. Other people seem to like it but it just does not suit me in the least. I also have some Hard Candy pastels which don't seem to work on me.

3. Which polish best reflects your personality? I suspect that the kind of thing that I wear often - things that are not radically different but have some oomph to them, like glitters or Fleck Effects or layerings. I figure this reflects that I am a middle-aged woman who is not as stodgy as people tend to assume! (The assumptions that people make are another thing that makes me crabby. What can I say.)

4. Which polish could you wear all year round, to every occasion? I love reds, and deep pinks - I could probably deal with one of those year-round if it was necessary. (If I had to pick one, maybe OPI An Affair in Red Square. Or Peru-B-Ruby. Or hmm, any of several Zoyas.)

5. What is your favorite polish for your toes? Don't usually do my toes, because I don't wear open-toed shoes. I expend all my effort on my fingernails. But if I did them, it would probably be something bright.

6. What color makes you happy? I called this blog Delicious Color for a reason. I like color - which makes me tempted to answer "all of them" - there's no one color that I'm especially especially drawn to. If you ask me what my favorite color is, it tends to vary. I love purple, I love green, I love blue, and as I've already said, I love red and pink. I don't wear yellow (and only rarely wear orange) because it doesn't look good on me, but I like it on other people.

7. What is the most unique polish you own? I haven't gotten into indie polishes so far, so I'm not sure I have anything all that unique. I have some crazy glitters, but so does practically everybody nowadays.

8. Which nail trend do you like best?
a) bright neons - like them, but not so much for myself
b) soft pastels - not really my thing
c) sultry darks - this one, I guess
d) classy nudes - again, not so much my thing

9. What is the oldest polish you own? Not sure. The first polish I ever remember buying was a Revlon bright pink, but it's long (long, long) gone. I have some Jet Sets that are pretty old. 

10. Which nail polish has the cutest name of all? - I do enjoy OPI and their "cute" names but I can't think of one I especially love. (Late edit to add: maybe Warm and Fozzie.)

11. What is your favorite brand of polish? That has to be Zoya. Has great colors and great formulas.

Orly foils

I ask my husband periodically what color he wants me to paint my nails, and he tends to answer with something fairly nontraditional - I think the last time before this one, he said blue, and when I asked him yesterday, he said, "How about gold?" I only have two things that really qualify as gold - an old Cover Girl gold glitter, which I wasn't about to try (I save stuff like that to use around the holidays), and Orly Glitz, which I last wore just a couple of weeks ago. So since I didn't really want to wear either one of those, but I did want to make an attempt to follow his suggestion, I ended up pulling out some of the Orly metallics I bought last year. I have Glitz, and Rage, and Peacock (I didn't actually pull that one out, but I think it qualifies), and also something called Flagstone Rush that is sort of a brownish copper, a really good fall color.

So since I had just worn Glitz lately, I decided to try Rage. I remembered that I didn't really like Rage the one time I'd previously worn it, but I couldn't really remember why. When I put it on, I remembered why - I love Rage in the bottle, but it's just not a flattering color on me. It comes out pretty pale, and pale colors just do not really look good on me - at least I guess that's why. I don't usually think I look good in gold, either (or yellow - presumably because I have pale and slightly sallow skin, and yellow or gold brings that out). Oddly, Glitz looks alright on me, which is exactly the opposite of what I would have thought. 

I showed what Rage looked like to Rob, so he could see that I tried! and then I started layering stuff over it. (Although I might try layering Rage over something darker the next time, and see if that helps.) I did Flagstone Rush, and then I put a couple of coats of Pumpkin Spice over that - which did not come out near as glittery over Flagstone Rush as it did over RIP, but it did twinkle things up just a bit.

I got in a rush this morning and didn't put top coat on, so I may be re-doing the whole thing. I'll report on how that comes out later.

UPDATE: "Starting over" came out as Flagstone Rush and then Rage (2 coats), which looks much better. Still very pale, but not in a bad way. (But then this afternoon I broke a nail, so now that's messed up, also - which means I may be trying yet another variation on this soon - or possibly something entirely, entirely different. I'm moody that way, so you never know.)

Fleck Effect

I was looking at the few nail pictures I have, and the ones from this summer almost all involve Zoya Fleck Effect, mostly in Chloe. I'm pretty sure all the pictures below are Chloe over _____.

1. Chloe over some L'Oreal Jet Set color - I think it might have been Presto.

 2. Chloe over Zoya Juicy.

 3. I'm pretty sure this one has Chloe as well, but it's hard to see it over the red base coat. This could be any number of things go I'm not even going to try to guess.

I have slowed down on Chloe lately but I'm sure I'll come back to it later. It looks great over practically everything. I think I had it on over one set of orange layers, pre-Halloween, as well.

(I also have another Fleck Effect color, Maisie - the blue-green one - but so far I haven't worn that one near as much.)

Social media

I mention in one of the posts from 2010 that I had been posting on Tumblr, and I still am, but now I'm using a different account and I had almost completely forgotten that the "Delicious Color" Tumblr account even existed. (It has some cute posts. I guess my idea was that I was going to make it into a craft thing, but then I forgot its existence, so that didn't go far.) The one I'm using now is mellificent.tumblr.com and it usually has very little about nails other than maybe an occasional reblog of somebody else's pictures. Also I warn you that it sometimes gets rather political. (You're welcome to look. I'm just sayin'.) And it does have craft stuff, fairly often, and sometimes some fashion posts. But mostly it's just whatever I see that appeals to me. Pretty much your usual kind of random Tumblr content, on the whole.

I do tweet a fair bit, occasionally about nails but more often just on general subjects - that account is @mellicious. Basically, if you see a "mellicious" or a "mellificent" on any given social media site it may or may not be me. Often one or the other of them is taken, which is why I tend to switch back and forth. I am not linking to my Facebook account here because (a) I don't post there much and (b) the whole "real name" business of Facebook's makes me antsy. I may relent on that in the future but for right now I'm not going there.

Also, the other blog that I mention having in the posts below is long dead. I switched crafts from beads to collage to papercrafting, and then sort of petered out completely on that. I'm sure I'll start some craft or other  again eventually, but for now, the bead blog is definitely dormant.

Fingernails

I think this is going to become a nail blog of sorts. I keep wanting to record what I'm doing with my nails and  if I do that in any detail, the posts become way too long for Twitter. I did posts like this on G+ for a while but I stopped doing that ages ago and for some reason I'm not especially interested in starting that up again - and this blog is sitting here unused, and the name is more or less apropos, so what the heck. This probably is not going to be what I think of as a "real" nail blog - meaning picture-heavy - because I seem to suck at taking pictures of my nails. I might post a few pictures now and then but they will probably be iPhone pictures and nothing great - as demonstrated below!

So, my early-November manicure is copper-themed. I think I have on a whoppin' 7 coats of polish at the moment, as follows:
1. Sally Hansen Salon Manicure base coat
2. OPI Decades of Shades (light brown), 1 coat
3-4. Orly R.I.P., 2 coats
5-6. Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice, 2 coats
7. top coat - I think I used Revlon Colorstay

R.I.P. and Pumpkin Spice are both coppery-orange glitters. (I would call them copper, myself, but other people seem to think they're orange, so I'm compromising on the description.) R.I.P. is hex glitter in a black jelly base, with a little silver microglitter thrown in for good measure. Pumpkin Spice is what I would call a "traditional" glitter - not a microglitter, not a large glitter - in what I think is a brown base. I bought R.I.P. last week (after reading Miss Holly's post about it which I will link below) and I imagine it's a limited edition polish; Pumpkin Spice is left over from last year, but I think it's still available. (I hope so, because at this rate I'm going to need another bottle soon.)

Here's (the iPhone picture of) my pre-Halloween incarnation of R.I.P., over black:

It does look very Halloween here. So trying to make it look not-so-Halloween, I started with the light brown, this time - specifically Decades of Shades, a color that I've previously referred to as "baby-poop brown" but which I keep to use for layering purposes. I figured that when you put the black jelly over it, it would look like a much darker brown, and it did. Then I layered the Pumpkin Spice over that, and I really like the results. It toned down the Halloween look without covering up the R.I.P. completely. (If I remember, I'll take another iPhone picture of it in the light, later.)

Other people's takes on these polishes:

R.I.P., from Misshollyberries:

http://misshollyberries.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/orly-r-i-p/

Pumpkin Spice, from Swatch and Learn:

http://www.swatchandlearn.com/sally-hansen-pumpkin-spice-swatches-review-layered-over-opi-espresso-your-style/