NPB & PBP

The title here refers to all the indie polishes I've been collecting up lately - specifically Nail Pattern Boldness and Paint Box Polish, in today's entry, but also Pipe Dream Polish (so PDP, I guess) and Nostalgic Nail Lacquer (NNL?) and a couple more that I can't think of right now.

I love love LOVE Elderberry. I don't think the pictures show the full goodness but at least you can get the idea. (Also, this is post-hair-washing, so the fault is entirely mine about the slight chipping going on there!)

This was over one coat of Zoya Savita - which I chose because it was the darkest purple that I had close by at the time!

Then last night, since it was chipped, I switched to Slightly Unstable, which is limited edition and which is described on Etsy as "a black crelly polish with a green-yellow-silver shift and scattered holo particles" - I wasn't sure what that would mean in real life but I thought it sounded interesting! So far, I read it as a green holo, for the most part.

(You can see that there's some color-shifting going on in those pictures, can't you, though? More than I initially realized. I like.)

Nail wheel weekend - paler pinks and pinkish browns

Hey, look, it's wheel 12!

After a long hiatus, I've finally remembered to take some pictures.

Unfortunately, I added some colors to this wheel in the interim since I first made the list, and didn't update it. So I'm not entirely sure what some of this is. (See, this is why I started writing names on the wheels in the first place! only that didn't solve things because I didn't keep up with that either.) Anyway, as best I know, this is:

1. Mist You (over Always Sheer Bliss on tip)
2. Jailbait (over Always Sheer Bliss on tip)
3. Always Sheer Bliss
4. unnamed pale-pink shimmer (over Shelby on tip)
5. unnamed pink micro-flaky (over Shelby on tip)
6. Chloe (over Shelby on tip)
7. Aphrodite's Pink Nightie
8. Purple Pizzazz
9. Departure
10. Shelby
11. Japanese Tea Garden
12. ?
13. English Rose
14. Lara
15. Departure
16. Dusty Spring Fields
17. Chic Peek (/Departure?)
18. -
19. As If! (over Lara AND Chloe) (w/matte top coat)
20. ?

This is the only bottle picture I got. And I was all set to say that this was 10-12, but I think it's 10, 11, and 7, or possily 11, 10, and 7! And I'm just not completely sure what 12 is, I hate to admit.

I always did have trouble telling Japanese Tea Garden and Aphrodite's Pink Nightie apart. I know that one is more of a cream and one is more of a frost (I suspect that Aphrodite is the frost) - and I used to wear them layered. It was one of the first polish pairs where I discovered that sometimes you can layer colors and get something you like better than either polish alone. I've had these (the two OPIs, that is) since at least 2005 or so, I think.

Anyway, I've been intending to post this for so long I figured I would just post what I had, and I'll add on later if I figure out more or get more pictures.

Here's some links that go with this wheel:
Pale pink portion of my stash (from last summer)
Bottle shot of As If!
Bottle shots of a couple of Zoya pinks
English Rose mani

Holiday haul photos

Pictures of the Christmas haul (see last entry for the full list):

I should add that, lest you imagine that I got a lot of Christmas gifts other than this, I really didn't. This was what I asked for, and it was all I expected. My husband usually buys me some surprise things - one of them was the Revlon polish set, which wasn't on my list because I didn't know about them - and another one was a quilted tote bag. And we got a couple of small joint gifts from other family members, but this was the bulk of my gift list, and I am quite, quite happy with that. (I couldn't think of anything else that I especially wanted or even needed, quite honestly!)

This was the first time I'd gotten a Zoya Dream Box, and the box itself is surprisingly nice - it's not just a cardboard box; it's substantial. It seems like you could use it to store jewelry or something in, really.

(The thing that says Matte Velvet on it is a card that was inside, not part of the box. I did try out Savita, the purple, and it was really pretty.)

I took this picture mostly so you could see the little skull on the top of the Urban Decay bottle:

The color is another purple - darker than Savita, and shimmery - it is gorgeous. I knew I was getting this because we picked it up one day when we were walking through Macy's, back around Thanksgiving. I would probably never have bought it for myself, but since Rob was with me, I said, "Well, you could get me that for Christmas!" so he did. (They had the cutest UD salesperson, all pierced and hip, nothing like what I think of as a typical Macy's salesperson. She's probably a large part of why I decided I had to have this!)

I hadn't even seen the Revlon Parfumerie polishes, as I said above. The bottles are adorable, and these are fun colors:

I don't own many very-pale-pinks that I like, and this one seems to have possibilities. (I have a nail wheel upcoming for that, as a matter of fact!) And you can never have too many reds, right?

And here are the stray loose bottles:

This is Slightly Unstable, Alcatraz Rocks, and Elderberry. I think everybody pretty much knows about Alcatraz Rocks already, right? (Google it if not; it's pretty much universally adored, near as I can tell.) Slightly Unstable is part of a Women of Harry Potter line and it's the Bellatrix polish, sort of a green duochrome-ish thing. I haven't tried it out yet so I can't be much more specific than that! And I am totally in love with Elderberry; I'm wearing it now. Blue and green and purple sparkliness is right up my alley.

Oh, here's a better picture of the Take Ten set, I almost forgot that one:

(It had two separate boxes within the bigger box, which is clever. You could take it apart and give it as two separate gifts if you wanted to!)

Holiday haul

This is my Christmas mani - this is Yuletide Treasures, again, this time over Mingle With Kringle:

I love the manicure and hate how my cuticles look there. What's up with that? They don't look like that in person! (The wear on the tips is another matter. Also, my thumb on my right hand was an accent nail with a really thick coat - several coats, really - of Yuletide Treasures.)

OK, so here's what I got for Christmas:

• Elderberry - Nail Pattern Boldness
• Slightly Unstable - Paint Box Polish
• Believe in Believing mini - Pipe Dream Polish
• Vice - Urban Decay
• China Flower and Pink Pineapple - Revlon Paradise Collection (my husband found these at Walgreen's - I'd never seen them before, and they have a completely different bottle than any Revlon I've ever seen!*)
• Zoya Matte Velvet set - Verushka, Savita, and Posh (these were LE and are apparently sold out)
• Zoya Get Even base coat (which I heard is advisable to use in order to get a good application on the matte velvets)
• Alcatraz Rocks - OPI
• OPI Take Ten set of minis (list below)

(Note: the next entry has pictures of most of this!)

Take Ten set includes minis of:

1. Pirouette My Whistle
2. Alpine Snow
3. Bubble Bath
4. Tickle My France-y
5. You Don't Know Jacques
6. Cajun Shrimp
7. Big Apple Red
8. German-icure by OPI
9. Malaga Wine
10. Lincoln Park After Dark

(A lot of nail junkies probably have many of these colors already, but I didn't have a single one. I really haven't bought OPI much in the past few years.)

*I found a lot of references to the Revlon Parfumerie line online, though - apparently this is just something new-ish that I managed to miss until now.

I took Mingle With Kringle off just now, and wow, it stains a bit. I am now experimenting with Elderberry over Savita. Will report back.

Trim the Tree duo

 Here's the Pahlish holiday duo, with something more resembling an actual glitter fade this time:

(And wow, I missed some territory on the far side of my pinky, didn't I?)

The two colors are Boughs of Holly, which I have been calling a glass-fleck but which the page above says is a jelly/flakie, and Yuletide Treasures, which is full of large round glitter of various colors, predominantly, I think, magenta & cyan and some gold. It seems to tend to read as red/green in low light and not at all so in most others. Anyway, it's pretty as hell, either way. (But if it reads as magenta/cyan rather than red/green, and I think it seems to, then it's not consigned to one-month-a-year holiday purgatory! I am still undecided on this issue, but I'm happy with it either way.)

Removal was surprisingly easy for a glitter this size. It took a little work, but not as much as many.

Bells Will Be Blinging

Disclaimer: the polish pictured was provided to me by the manufacturer. 

Here's my version of Bells Will Be Blinging over So Blue Without You:

I'm showing you the thumbnail shot again (literally, in this case) even though it makes it pretty obvious what a poor cleanup job I did, because this picture happened to catch a little bit of the holographic flash on the bar glitter, which is what makes this polish out of the norm. This is THREE coats of Bells - I wanted the bling! - over two coats of So Blue Without You - and, I think, 3 coats of topcoat, again.

I'm rotating fast because I have so many new polishes - now I have on another glitter pair that I love even more, and that's Pahlish's holiday duo - Yuletide Treasures, a multi-glitter, over Boughs of Holly, a dark green glass-fleck. I started to do accent nails of the glitter, like in that picture in the link, but instead I ended up trying a glitter fade again. This time I did better than I did with Holiday Spirit the other day. I'll try to get a picture before I take it off. Although I have to work this weekend so this one may stay on a couple of days, anyway.

(Every time I see "Bells Will Be Blinging" my brain starts playing "Please Come Home for Christmas" at me. Not that it's a bad song, but aargh.)

Put A Bow On It!

I took this picture at a stoplight today, because Put a Bow On It was shining so brightly I just had to try and capture it:

Disclaimer: this polish was provided to me by the manufacturer. See below for a bit more info on that.

(Added:) I forgot to say initially that I liked the way that Put a Bow On It (and the other two microglitters in that set, too) looked without topcoat - they're almost a texture - but as you can probably guess, this is with topcoat. Not surprisingly, it was a big topcoat eater. This is with 3 coats of topcoat - I had an old bottle of Colorstay topcoat that I used for this.

Also, here is Viridian, with a really sloppy attempt at a glitter fade over it:

Viridian looks greener in real life than it appears there, I would say. And I really like Holiday Spirit, and you may see it atop some other polishes in coming weeks. (If you're interested, I was wondering if Holiday Spirit was discontinued, and I'm still not sure about that, but I happened to notice when I was nosing around the other day that Transdesign has Holiday Spirit in what I think are the old bottles, for the fabulous price of $1.69. I am really tempted to go buy some other Sation colors just to try out, because this is the only one I have.)


* I received this polish directly from China Glaze as part of a random promotional giveaway, via Polish Insomniac (and, I believe, several other bloggers). It was provided to me without conditions, and all opinions expressed here are my own.

Happy Holiglaze!

What I'm currently wearing: Sation Holiday Spirit, a multicolor fine glitter, over Illamasqua Viridian. Before that, it was Holiday Spirit over black (the last of my bottle of Hard As Nails Jet Black - but I still have other blacks, I've been actively trying to use that one up on nail wheels and such this fall). Viridian is a really beautiful dark green and I like it, but it's beginning to chip. And I don't know what I'm wearing next, exactly, but I'm pretty sure it will be China Glaze! since I got a baker's dozen of them in the mail today.

I think I had said previously that the China Glaze holiday polishes were a set of 15, but it was 13 polishes that came in the mail. I think I just miscounted, or double-counted, when I said it was 15. I think a dozen plus the one top-coat is the full set. Anyway, they are lovely, and thanks to Jessika of Polish Insomniac for hosting the giveaway. (Yay for free stuff!) Also, I guess for once I have to do a DISCLAIMER when I talk about these: they were given to me for free, obviously - although not specifically for review - directly from China Glaze. (Even though they weren't sent for review, I'm sure I will end up telling you what I think about them anyway, because I have opinions, and usually lots of them - that's what I have a blog for, right?)

Did I say that these are the first China Glaze polishes I have ever owned? Isn't that kind of unbelievable, given how much time I spend obsessing about nail polish? They are probably about the last really major U.S. nail polish brand that I haven't tried. (Not because I have anything against them or anything - more because you can buy Orly and OPI in the grocery stores around here, but not China Glaze. You have to brave Ulta for that, and I try to avoid Ulta for fear of what I'll leave there with, if you know what I mean) So anyway, I am expecting to adore these, with the possible exception of the texture one, which I have heard very mixed things about. Some people seem to like it fine, but others seem to hate it with, well, quite a lot of passion. "Cottage cheese" is one of the more common descriptions I've seen.

Jessika kindly gave me permission to use her picture so you can see all the thumbnails:

I got a mini of Travel in Colour, the topper, plus full bottles of the other 12. (Jessika's full swatch post is here.)

SOPIs and new e-tailers

Two nail e-tailers I haven't seen before this week:

1. Beyond Polish - http://www.beyondpolish.com/ - they have CND Shellac, which I know you can't buy just everywhere, and also most of the other "standard" salon brands - Orly, OPI, Zoya. It looks like their prices are pretty good, too.
2. Nailbox - http://nailbox.co/ - I believe this one is brand-new. They have about the same number of brands as the one above, but there's not much overlap. Theirs are more upscale - Cult Nails, Scotch Naturals, NCLA. (Actually the only overlapping brand between the two I saw was Essie.) Their prices appear to be regular retail, but since some of the brands are more unusual, they seem worth noting as a place to look for some harder-to-find colors.

I haven't had much to say this week because I've had Ruby Without a Cause (which is Sephora by OPI) on all week. I reapplied it once because as usual I messed it up washing my hair. But it's really pretty. I would try to take a picture if it wasn't all chipped. Anyway, I usually take my pictures when the sun is out and it certainly isn't today.

(The links just above and below are to other people's swatches, just so you know!)

Here's a blurry picture of I Only Shop Vintage, another S-OPI color:

 (I imagine the blurriness is why I didn't post it before. But you can see enough to get the basic idea, anyway. It's sort of a gold-bronze. I might've had a light-brown underneath as a base.)

Patricia and Thames

This is what I'm currently wearing - Nostalgic "Patricia" over Butter London "Thames":

Ignore the lobster-hands; I don't know why they always look that way in this light. I don't try to color-correct my pictures because that seems to me to be a bit contrary to the idea of showing what nail polish actually looks like! (But that's probably just ME being contrary, as usual.) Anyway, Thames is a lovely emerald-ish green with maybe a hint of blue - and hmm, I just looked it up on BL's website and they call it blue-green, but anyway. That seems to be sort of usual - the line between darker greens and blue-greens seems to be pretty fluid. Which makes a certain sense when you think about it, since a lot of colors that we think of as green in nature, like the color of a spruce tree, have a definite blue tinge to them.

And it is a really pretty color, with a sort of a foil-ish finish to it - but still, you know me, I couldn't let well enough alone, so I put Patricia over it. Patricia is a packed green glitter, as you can tell from the picture, but what you can't really tell is that it also has purple bits in it. It's terribly pretty. (Here is the blurry picture of Patricia I took a while back, which clearly shows the purple in the glitter!) This started out as an all-BL mani - Nail Foundation, 3 coats of Thames (it's a bit sheer to start out with) and Hardwear. Then I added 2 coats of Patricia and another coat of Hardwear, making a whopping 8 coats total. It made it through a hairwashing just fine - that's usually my acid-test because I have oily hair, even now that I'm over 50, and so I tend to use my nails on my scalp more than I should.

One note on my last manicure, and that's that I was wondering about how Jewel Tone would come off, but it did alright. I didn't have to trot out the aluminum foil to get it off, at least!

Early-December Diary

(Sunday morning, more or less)
It's after midnight so it's Sunday and it's December, which I can't believe. Aaagh, I'm not ready for Christmas. (Oh crap, that means Holidailies starts today, too. I gotta think of something to write!!)

I just wanted to record before I forget that I managed to chip the Glitterati - it was my own fault, using my nails as levers is not a good thing, I know! But I did keep it a couple of days, anyway. The thing I wanted to record was that it came off relatively easy, which is nice. I had one lately that was a bear to get off - I think it was In Through the Out Door - so I am skittish about glitter removal again. But then that's what I bought Glitter A-Peel for! I'll know the next time.

(Monday)
I stayed home yesterday, and I left my nails alone, for once, but now I have on Zoya Suri, which is a lovely royal purple with a subtle shimmer. It's the first time I've worn it. I bought it last summer, but it seemed fall-ish, plus that was in the middle of my big summer buying binge and I had plenty of other things to wear, so I decided to save it for a while. I knew I would love it, and I do.

My other nail news is that I got an e-mail from Jessika of Polish Insomniac saying that I was one of the winners of her China Glaze Giveaway. So woo! If it's really the whole Christmas set it's a whopping FIFTEEN polishes, so I am really going to be awash in polish. But many of them look lovely so I am thrilled.

(Tuesday)
Because I can't leave well enough alone, I now have stuff layered on top of Suri. It's a compulsion, I swear. I bought L.A. Colors Jewel Tone, because I wandered into Family Dollar and it was a dollar, and then I got home, and I'm pretty sure I have this color already. You know that set of minis that's been in my stash pictures and wheels all this year, that I keep calling "unlabeled brand" and things like that? I got it for Christmas last year, and it was labeled "Color Theory" - it just says "nail polish" on the bottles, but it must've actually been L.A. Colors, because I have the stuff out of the labeled bottle on some nails and the unlabeled on others, and I completely can't tell the difference. (Mostly I have not remembered to wear these polishes much.)

(This time last year, I had never bought an L.A. Colors polish. Looking at it now, the bottle shape even looks like L.A. Colors.)

No Black Friday For Me

I would just like to say that I made it through Black Friday without buying any more Zoya, so I am proud of myself. Did you see their Black Friday special? I think I tweeted it back a few days ago, and then after that I tried to forget about it. (I did go look longingly at it yesterday afternoon, but I restrained myself. I just don't really NEED another $72-plus of Zoya products when I have a ton already.) I'm already primarily getting nail polish for Christmas, anyway. I actually know what I'm getting, for the most part, but I'm going to pretend I don't until after Christmas. (I'd rather get what I really want than be surprised, but the rule in our family is that it gets wrapped up and opened on Christmas morning - unless it's something not easily wrappable, like a computer - even if you know what it is the whole time.)

I had to work yesterday, so I didn't go shopping. I don't really do the whole Black Friday special thing, anyway -- by which I mean that I don't get up and go to Walmart or Target or wherever at 5am, I don't care what kind of allegedly-wonderful specials they have. We did both have Thursday off, but we didn't go see the relatives this year and went out to eat and to the movies instead. No offense to my relatives, but it was lovely! Neither one of us care about turkey so we don't really feel like we're missing the big meal. And we'll see everybody at Christmas, still.

So there'll be a picture in this entry (because despite my avowed intention to not be too picture-heavy here, I still feel like there's something missing without a picture), here is a picture of Dollish They're Hereeee:

This picture completely fails to give you any idea of its shimmery goodness, but it's accurate enough on the base color. (Go look at Polishaholic's pictures for a better idea. - I also bought Redrum from that same collection, which you can see there.)

(I just went and nosed around on the website and there's a good bit of stuff in Dollish's "clearance bin" right now - might be worth going to check out!!)

Glitterati and other NOTDs

Today: wearing Illamasqua Glitterati - two coats over one coat of Manishma Rambling Red. I just am not very interested in cremes lately - if it's not a texture or a shimmer or something, I just end up putting something else on top of it! I knew the minute I put it on (the Manishma, I mean) that I was going to end up with something on top of it, but at first I was thinking I would do a flakie. Then I remembered Glitterati, which is a similar(ish) dark red. I really liked it when I swatched it on the nail wheel, but I hadn't worn it yet.

This picture really picked up some of the glitter, anyway:

The glitter's not as scattered as this makes it look, though. There are bigger round pieces that are the ones you see flashing there, but then there are a lot of small bits as well. The colors seem to vary but I see red, blue, purple, for sure. Maybe some very tiny green pieces. The overall effect is pretty great, though.

Glitterati is available in a gift set along with Viridian, which I think is left over from last Christmas but which is still available at Sephora (and marked down, too) at least for the moment! I got mine last summer in the same order with the S-by-OPI closeouts, but it just looked so Christmassy (Viridian is a lovely emerald green) that I decided to save it til now.

Last weekend I decided to try out something I had seen online called a "syrup mani" - or I think I also saw it called a jelly fade, someplace. I did it with WnW Gray's Anatomy, which is not a jelly but is super-sheer so I figured it would work fine, and it did. Here's the tutorial but once you see one up close I think it's fairly obvious what you do, really. It looked good with Gray's, and then after a couple of days I tried to do a glitter fade on the bottom half of my nails with In Through the Out Door on top of that, which wasn't too great as glitter fades go but ended up looking pretty cute anyway. Gray's Anatomy seems to be a good base for that kind of thing.

Before that... I have to go look at twitter to see what I had on! I think I did two manicures worth of SOPI I Only Shop Vintage - the first one by itself and the second one with Decades of Shades for a base, to darken it a bit. (Here's Stephanie of Short 'n Chic's pictures. I wonder if she isn't why I bought this shade in the first place. I remember googling around looking for swatches of these when they first went on sale...)

And before that, I wanted to try out my new bottle of Glitter A-Peel, and I was experimenting and I ended up doing this thing with Daul and G-Listen to Your Heart (another SOPI) in layers. Glitter A-Peel worked great, except that I tore a nail and messed everything up trying to file it down. I'm going to have to be more careful next time! Daul and G-Listen to Your Heart looked better in tandem than I thought - Daul always looks less red in the bottle than it really is, I remember commenting on that before. (I'm not saying that it's actually red, you understand, but it does have a red-violet base, even though it doesn't look like it in most lights.)

Recent additions - Triple Shine, Glosstinis, Dollish

This is what I've bought in the last few weeks:

• Triple Shine Slick Black - which I've worn and really like, although it's more of a dark charcoal than a true black. It has really pretty shimmer in it.
• Triple Shine Vanity Flare - haven't worn this yet
• two Glosstinis from the Hunger Games collection: Pyro Pink, on top, and Seared Bronze, on the bottom. (I've worn the latter but not the former.)
• two minis from the Dollish Polish "Halloween Frights" collection: Redrum (top) and They're Hereeee (bottom) (both of which I've tried out already)
• my second Color Show Brocade: Amethyst Couture (and I really like these, I may be buying more)
• and finally, an OPI San Francisco, I Knead Sour-Dough - I wore this with NYC matte topcoat, and I liked it

I've completely lost track of the sequence in which I've worn things lately, but I think it's all been off of this list. They're Here (which is a shimmer, although you can't really tell) and Redrum (which is a rusty-red scattered holo), then Slick Black and the OPI. Maybe even in that order! - Oh, and Amethyst Couture made an appearance in there somewhere, too.

Nail wheel - fall colors edition

This is oranges and browns and some metallics - at least one (RIP) is a repeat that was also on the metallic wheel way back. A couple more of those are also fairly fall-ish colors and could have gone here, but I think with that one exception I didn't repeat anything. (I had several spaces on this, originally, but filled all but that one up by the time I took the picture.)

I have pictures, but they are on the iPhone and not too great, sorry. I may re-take them on the Canon later, if I get a chance, but I sort of wanted to get the fall colors wheel up before Thanksgiving!

1. Sugar Rush
2. Hot Cinnamon (red, technically, but I keep wanting to read it as orangeish)
3. Sangria (ditto, really, an orange-leaning red)
4. Retro Red (matte - and this one is called red but reads very red-orange)
5. unnamed orange
6. Crushed
7. Times Square Tangerine Creme
8. Seared Bronze over Times Square Tangerine
9. I Knead Sour-Dough
10. Kaufda
11. Cougar Attack
12. Pumpkin Spice (which was an LE color from 2011, I think)
13. Cinna-man Of My Dreams *
14. R.I.P.
15. Flagstone Rush
16. Seared Bronze
17. Decades of Shades
18. Rich In Heart
19. Forbidden Fudge
20. -

* Is "Cinna-man Of My Dreams" supposed to be a Hunger Games joke, do you think? I didn't think of it until all the Catching Fire publicity started lately, but now I'm wondering. Anyway, I have now worn Cinna-man of My Dreams twice - I like it a lot. It looks kind of dull in some lights but it's got some colors of shimmer in there that flash in various lights. It's more interesting than it sometimes seems.

As I have said before and is pretty obvious, I don't have a lot of these colors - except coppers, which I keep collecting lately. Oranges are not especially flattering on me, which is why most of my oranges are red-oranges. I can wear browns if they're neutral ones, but I don't have many of those, either.

Here's numbers 1 through 5:

These all look redder in this picture than they really are, but the middle three of these really are technically reds, as I noted above. But they all have looked pretty orange-leaning to me in various lights at one time or another.

6 through 10:

Now number 8 is not Seared Bronze by itself - that's further down. This is Seared Bronze over the NYC tangerine, next to it. Seared Bronze by itself is further around the wheel. I wore number 9, the OPI from the San Francisco collection, over the weekend with NYC matte topcoat on it, which didn't really make it look matte, just sort of satiny.

11 through 15:

These are the metallic ones. The first three (in the picture, 13 and 14 are flipped from the wheel) are all discontinued, I believe - Cougar Attack, Pumpkin Spice, and R.I.P. - and 15 (Flagstone Rush) is one of those colors that I really like but that nobody seems pay much attention to.

16 through 19:

(At least you can distinguish the browns better here than the picture at the top. They're really all quite different.)

Nail wheel weekend - Reds

Here are the reds (finally), and next up is the fall colors - oranges and browns, which only take up one wheel because I don't have that many of them. I did them next (once my new set of nail wheels came, red was the last of the old set and I am starting in on my second package of 10) because they are seasonally appropriate. However, since I have been going in color-order all along, I have now messed that up and am going to have to go back and pick up what I have skipped, which was pale pinks, and burgundies. After that all I have left is black/white/gray, and some top coats and other stray things, I think. (As I noted before, I have NO yellows whatsoever. Only a few metallic golds, and I have already shown those. Other than that the yellow portion of the nail wheel is quite blank.)

Aaand once again I have no pictures of the whole wheel. Here is half of it, though, and polishes 1-5

1. Jolly Lolly (which is a jelly)
2. RBL Chinoise
3. Challenge Red-y
4. Sooki
5. Bet On Red

Bet on Red is darker than the rest, I think. mostly this bunch is the bright-bright reds. Sooki is described as a cherry red. Bet on Red goes with some of the slightly-darker red shimmers you will see momentarily.

Well, this is actually 6-10, but I can't convince the automatic numbering of that. It wants to start over at 1.

1. Razzmatazz
2. Karina
3. Unbreakable Heart
4. An Affair in Red Square
5. Knees Up

Then we get to the darker (and sometimes slightly pinker) reds, which are 11-15 on the wheel but which are going to get renumbered again by the autonumbering system.

1. Riley
2. Blaze
3. Echarpe de Seda
4. Blackberry
5. Sephora No. 8 (mini)

Echarpe de Seda is a holo, and so is Blaze. Riley is a raspberry that walks the pink-red line (and so does Blaze, again.) I had almost forgotten about the little Sephora-brand mini, but it's a pretty color. I talked about Blackberry here (and I really need to read back more often, because I had already forgotten about how much I liked that one!)

And one last set (undoubtedly to be numbered 1-5 again, but in fact numbered 16-20 on the wheel:

1. Stop (mini)
2. Red Carpet
3. Voodoo
4. Delilah
5. Bad Santa (mini)

Stop is a straight-up red creme, as you might guess. All the rest of these are shimmers and glitters. I've worn all of those a lot at one time or another.

If you go back and count the wheels I have previously posted, I believe you will find that this is the 9th one. The 10th one is designated as overflow, for things I've bought since I started this, primarily, and already is about a third full. I will get around to showing that one eventually, too. I've been numbering them on Evernote where I house the lists of what's on each one, and I went back and numbered the wheels themselves, although for most of the older ones I did that after the pictures were taken. From here on out you'll see numbering on them, most likely, though - just consecutive numbering, I'm not going to try for any kind of fancy number-letter scheme that would indicate the colors, although I was tempted to!

ADDED: I started writing this back a week or more ago, and I suspect from the rambliness of a couple of these paragraphs that I wrote it late at night, but I left them alone. Also, here are a couple of links related to red polish:
Here's the stash post from April - reds & silvers, to be exact
Some swatching of reds, from my 4th-of-July manicure
About Knees Up

Blogiversary/recent manis

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of this nail blog. (Technically, the blog existed before that, but it was just sitting there unused for nails or anything else, so I don't count that.) I can't believe that I kept it up as well as I have, really. I did slightly over 120 posts in the past year, which is pretty good - I never intended it to be something I'd update daily. And I have some readers! Maybe my goal for my second year should be to get somebody besides Karen to comment occasionally (hint). Although that would really be a goal for you guys, wouldn't it? I guess my goal for myself should be to keep up the same kind of twice-a-week-ish pace with the updating (and finish the rest of those nail wheels), and to maybe go out and comment more on other peoples' blogs. I read quite a lot of nail blogs off and on, but don't comment near as much as I read. (I'm a fairly regular commenter on Karen's blog, and on Miss Holly's. For some reason, I don't have as much to say most other places.)

This is what I'm wearing now (which is #4 below):

So here's what I've been wearing lately (this is 4 different manis, in chronological order, in case that's not clear):

1. Walker Bait, from Dollish Polish, which I mentioned in the last entry. It's an olive holo.
2. Seared Bronze, from the Hunger Games Glosstinis, over Orly Retro Red. I didn't really care much for this combination, so I wouldn't recommend trying it. The Glosstini bottles are so small that I think I felt like I should put it over something to make it go further, but red-orange was apparently not the right choice.
3. My Halloween manicure (which nobody but Rob saw because I stayed home sick all day) was Dollish Deadly Nightshade over Leaf Him at the Altar. This is a combination I wouldn't have thought of if I hadn't seen something similar on somebody's blog - it was entirely different polishes that I saw and I don't know where that was, but it was a similar idea, a chunky purple-leaning glitter over green. It worked out better than I would have guessed. (I'm pretty sure I have a picture of this, but I don't know where it is right now. If I find it I'll post it later.)
4. and the current one - pictured above - which I thought wasn't going to work out either but did in the end. It was one of those things where I didn't really end up doing what I started out to do at all. I started with another Glosstini (non-Hunger-Games related), Sangria, which is another red-orange. Then I put Cougar Attack over that, and I was intending to stop there. When you think about it, this is a pretty similar concept to Seared-Bronze-over-Retro-Red, and I'm not sure why I thought this would work any better. And sure enough I didn't like it that much. However, I got the idea at some point to put Zoya Kaufda, which is a very coppery  - but not metallic - orange, on top of it all, and that worked much better. Kaufda is no jelly, but enough of the sparkly came through that it looks really cute. (Hmm, I wonder what it would look like over something like Traffic Stopper Copper, which is even sparklier.)

Purchases

Recent additions to my stash have been heavy on the greens - see the whole top row below.

If you've been reading regularly here you've seen some of these already, but I'll go through them all and link to what I said previously, too. Let's see, top to bottom and L-R:

• Colorstay Rainforest, a lovely glass-flecked forest green (I've worn this but didn't take a picture)
• Nostalgic Patricia, which was a St. Patrick's Day release, apparently, and is also really lovely, a mix of green glitters with a sprinkling of purple - see here
• Chroma Chameleon Topaz - supposed to be a chrome, as you might guess. It's an odd color, and very very sheer, but I like it - there's a picture here. It's really not at all what I'd call a chrome, though. (Also it's a small bottle and not at all cheap, so on a per-ounce basis it's actually quite expensive.)
• Dollish Polish Walker Bait, which is LE and already discontinued - you had to snap it up before the Walking Dead premiere, which of course has already happened. It's an olive holo and I like it a lot, although it doesn't seem all that different from the couple of other green holos I had already - I will have to do a comparison at some point.
• (starting on the bottom row) Color Show Black in Mirrors, which is also an LE color but should still be around. I would guess that this set is supposed to be a Christmas release, although I'm not sure about that. It's black-and-silver glitter. The line is called Brocades, I believe.
• Nostalgic Rid of Me, which as you can clearly see is a bright-blue shimmer, and very sheer
• Wet & Wild Gray's Anatomy, another really-really sheer one. I had trouble with it when I tried it - I mentioned it in the same entry where I was talking about Topaz - but it's a pretty color and hopefully the fact that it wouldn't dry last time was just an aberration. I'll report back when I try it again.
• Dollish Polish Deadly Nightshade, another Halloween color, a mixed-size purple glitter (also LE but I think maybe you can still get this one until Halloween)

I have a couple more Dollish colors on the way (one was Redrum, I think) and today I went in Walgreen's and came out with a couple of the new Sally Hansen Triple Shine colors. I also bought a couple of the Hunger Games Glosstinis since I took this picture. But you'll have to hear more about all that later. 

Cougar Attack and VitaSurge

I've been wearing Cougar Attack (I kind of hate the name, but I love the polish) for over a week now, I think - first on its own and then over SC Rich in Heart, which is a really dark brown. I'm not sure how many coats I had on in the last mani, but I think it was a bunch. At least 2 coats of brown and possibly 3 of CA, not to mention base and top coat. It lasted about 5 days, and then today about half of one nail finally cracked off in one big piece. Which I can't say is really surprising with that many coats. My nails are now marinating with Sally Hansen VitaSurge and cuticle oil slathered all over them, and then I think I'm going to do something orange, since it's getting really close to Halloween. I have to trot out the orange at least once a year!

Here are two shots of Cougar Attack/Rich in Heart:

On its own, CA is a lot lighter, of course. I didn't get any pictures of that, though.

Back to VitaSurge - I bought it on impulse because it was on sale, but I was happy to find a good review of it on YouTube. Of course I'd already bought it by then, so I didn't bother to look any further. If nothing else, that video confirmed for me that you're supposed to rub it in rather than just letting it dry - apparently it says so on the tiny illegible print on the bottle. (I think I need to invest in a magnifying glass since this is about the third time this month I've complained about not being able to read things on a label.)

I do have another nail wheel or two coming soon, hopefully - reds and after that, oranges and browns. (I have most of the rest done, after that, too - the pale pinks, one for black/white/gray, and half a wheel full of burgundy-ish colors, plus an overflow wheel for the ones I'd done previously. All that's left to swatch is some top coats and such.)

Fuchsias and such (or, nail wheel weekend)

I probably should not even say "nail wheel weekend" like it's going to be a regular thing. Knowing me, it probably won't. But well, it's alliterative, and it's true for this weekend, anyway.

So I did a whole wheel of bright pinks:

1. He Loves Me, I Love Him... Not
2. Scam
3. Alegra
4. Slammin' Red
5. Fuchsia Glamour (I think - it's mislabeled)
6. Peru-B-Ruby
7. unnamed fuchsia
8. Juicy
9. Reva
10. Kierra
11. Kimber
12. Hasty
13. Raspberry Rush
14. Hot Stuff
15. Dita
16. Ali
17. F*ck and Run
18. Strawberry Electric
19. Shopping Frenzy
20. Status Symbol

Hmm, I can't find the picture of the whole wheel but here are all the polishes, in order and everything. (If the wheel picture stays MIA by the time I finish this post, I'll take a new one and add it later!) You can see the wheel itself in stages below, anyway.

(Added, nearly 2 weeks late: Oh, look, it's the whole wheel!)

1-5:

I have a bunch of pink glitters that are quite similar really. (1, 2, and 4, specifically.) They're not dead dupes but they're pretty close. The Studio M one is a similar color to the other two but is much bumpier. (This is one of a whole line of these super-packed glitters; I wonder if they're started calling them textures, yet.) Allegra, #3, is pretty shimmer-packed but not really a full-on glitter. And the NYC is more of a frost.

6-10:

I was trying not to get into reds and burgundies with this wheel, but Kierra - on the right - is probably the one that shouldn't be here, if any of them shouldn't. It doesn't look all that out of place, really, but I think it's more of a burgundy than a pink. Reva, next to it, looks fairly red on my screen but I'd call it more of a strawberry. Peru-B-Ruby, on the left, is poised right between pink and red - it looks red among the pinks, but if you plunked it on the red wheel (which is up next) it would look more pink.

11-15:

This bunch are the ones that are so bright they annoy me, sometimes. Although I quite like Hot Stuff. Every time I wear Kimber I end up slapping something else on top of it, though. (Usually Reva - they go quite well together.) Dita, on the right, is not annoying, but you can see that it's a bit darker.

16-20: 

Let's see, well, Ali is so bright I tried unsuccessfully to give it away. (I figure by next spring it'll look more interesting to me, anyway.) I like F*ck and Run a lot, as I've said several times lately, and I like Status Symbol, although I rarely remember to wear it. Part of the problem here is that I have SO many pinks that things just get lost in the shuffle! Shopping Frenzy is pretty too, but I haven't worn it much even though I've had it for years. Strawberry Electric is more in the "slightly too bright" category.

Artistic blur, and Patricia

Here's a totally blurry picture of my current manicure that I really like:

It's interesting, right? And it shows you exactly what glitters are in there. See the purple streaks? Yeah, that's purple glitter. However, I think I have another picture somewhere where you can actually see the polish.

The story here is about why this is sort of an unintended hybrid manicure. I know I mentioned at the time that I had ordered a couple more polishes from Nostalgic, since I liked the ones I got so much (F*ck and Run, in particular) and they were still on sale. And I had almost forgotten about that, but they finally turned up this week. And so last night I put on Rid of Me, which is blue jelly with shimmer. And then I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing, and the light in my living room sucks so badly that it's difficult to tell the difference between a blue-green and an outright green, and I accidentally slapped the other one, Patricia, on top of a couple of nails before I noticed. And well, it's really pretty, so I just put it on all of them.

(Just ignore the lobster-cuticles, ok?)
I don't know how much difference the base of Rid of Me makes - I suspect it might be a little less blue-looking. Although as usual, this is a bit blue-shifted in any case - it looks closer to an emerald when I look at my nails in the same light. Anyway, it was an unintended consequence with a happy ending.

Linkiness

Is that a word? Well, you know what I mean. Linky-ness? Linkage? (the latter is the word I use most for this, really.) Links. Whatever. (Note: Nothing here is sponsored.)

This post is mostly inspired by my discovery of More Nail Polish's color guides. If you're not familiar with her already, she is an Australian nail-blogger who has large collections of the brands listed below, and she has pulled together single-page roundups of her swatches of every color of these brands she owns. That make sense? I don't know if other people love this idea as much as I do, but I find this terribly useful. I guess it's something to do with the way my brain works - I like to see all the colors together on one page. All this information is on those brands' websites, I'm sure - I know that's true of Picture Polish because I looked at their website really extensively one time - but I like seeing it all at once. So anyway, here's the links:
Picture Polish
Ozotic
Lynnderella

And yeah, I'm aware that I'm not capitalizing piCture pOlish properly. It's pure crankiness on my part.

(She also has one for Ulta3, which I haven't included just because it's not useful to ME, but it's in her sidebar, anyway, so if you want it it shouldn't be hard to find. I assume that Ulta3 is a version of the Ulta brands available in the US but I have no idea what the relationship is and it just seems like something that's not worth exploring, for me! Your mileage may vary.)


Another cool link:
Definitions of a bunch of (mostly fairly simple) types of nail art:
http://www.jilltasticnaildesign.com/2012/12/nail-art-techniques-defined.html
(this is actually just the rules for a particular challenge, but I still found it useful and I've never seen another like it. I'm sure others exist. Also, for the OCD among you, there are some definite spelling issues there, so if that bothers you unduly I would consider avoiding it!)

Emerald and orange

(Sunday night)

I just put on Pixi Evening Emerald, and it occurs to me that I have a couple of other untrieds in the emerald family - they were among the colors I sort of had put by for fall. The others are Butter London Thames and Illamasqua Veridian. I might just wear them all in succession, as a sort of comparison. Evening Emerald is not what I'd really call an emerald - I think I may have mentioned that when I was showing the green nail wheel. BUT you could call it a blackened emerald, I guess. It's quite dark, but doesn't read as black at all, which is something I always like.

The Pixi bottle is really small - it's tall and skinny, almost like a Julep bottle, and probably is a comparable size, which makes it basically a mini. Which is okay if you know that's what you're getting. (I have gotten the impression that a lot of people don't, with Julep. See Miss Holly's rant about this on YouTube, for one.) Karen gave me the Pixi so I can't complain about the price, for sure! I rarely use up a full-size bottle - I can only think of maybe two or three things besides base and top coat that I have run through a whole large bottle of - but I always worry about running out on the small ones. Maybe we need an in-between size. Actually some companies seem to have quietly gone to .4 oz instead of .5 so I guess that's effectively what that is.


(Saturday - almost a week later!)
I'm taking a class so I haven't had time to obsess about my nails much this week. I sort of intended to do a different green once I took the Pixi off, as I mentioned above, but instead I decided to go textured. I put on Julie G Hot Cinnamon and then decided it was too red and sparkly and looked like Christmas - which is kind of weird since I'm pretty sure the last time I wore it I said it was too orange. Anyway, since this time I wanted more orange, I finally put a coat of Sugar Rush on top of it and was happy. Now it's red-orange.

Hmm, maybe I need a green texture. The only one I have is too pale to suit me! (That's Rock Candy, maybe I can try putting something darker underneath?)

Anyway, here's Sugar Rush with Hot Cinnamon underneath (and some wear I hadn't even noticed on my thumb!):

P.S. It's not as red as it looks here. I assume that's that blue shift I always complain about when I take pictures here!)



Recent manis

I got busy with nail wheels (and, um, SWTOR and Diablo III and occasionally, work) and haven't posted lately about what I've been wearing. Here's what I'm wearing now  - it's blue-shifted as usual, though - it's more yellow than it appears:

That is a Revlon Chroma Chameleon color (Topaz, apparently, although that seems like a poor name for it to me*) -- and I have to say that I am enough of a child of the 80s that I can't type that sentence without getting "Karma Chameleon" stuck in my head. (In fact I was not a child of the 80s at all, I was in my early 20s in the early 80s and I was all into the New British Invasion music at the time. I still love all that music.)

That is FOUR coats - it's very sheer. I may try it next time over something else. It's got a really pretty finish but it cost $8.00 for a very tiny bottle and I'd definitely like to stretch it out a bit.

I also bought Gray's Anatomy (WnW Fastdry) and I tried it out before Topaz, but I had one of those issues where it didn't want to dry. I don't know if it was something where it was disagreeing with whatever basecoat I had on, or whether it was a humidity issue since I do live in the land of sky-high humidity. But it wouldn't set and I finally just took it off and did Topaz instead. I can tell you, though, that it's another very sheer one, just as much so as Topaz. I might put a base of some sort under it the next time I try, too.

Before that I wore yet another very sheer color on its own, and that was F*ck and Run. I think I did three coats plus Seche Vite, and it was still bugging me after that and I put another coat on top of the SV, finally. But I do like it by itself. In most lights it looked sort of coral-red, but it does have pink shimmer in it as well as orange, so it shifts very prettily.

Topaz is a bit chipped so I don't know what I'll do next - try Gray's Anatomy again? Something else entirely? I'm tempted to get into the things I've been saving for fall, especially since we finally had a real cool front last night.  (It's supposed to be 57 degrees tonight (57F, that is) - by our standards, that's fall.)

*Mini-rant:
First of all, I don't think of Topaz-the-color (or the stone) as being green at all - although I know there is more than one color of topaz. And second, the name of the color is written on the bottle in type so small that I couldn't even find it until I looked online and figured out what the name must be. It's written in the same tiny type that they list the ingredients in, you know? It was like reading an eye chart at the optometrist's office or something. Once I knew what the name was, then I looked at the bottle and went, oh, I see a word there that might be "topaz" - at least it starts with a T and maybe has 5 letters! Do they not want you to know the color names? Or do they just assume that everybody is 20 years old and has 20-20 vision? It's just a bit weird! (On reflection, a much more likely answer: they just don't care.)

Nail wheel - pinks, from violet to fuchsia

This nail wheel starts where I left off with the last one, very violet-leaning pinks, and gets less and less violet as it goes along. (That's in theory, at least. I didn't necessarily do a very good job of ordering these. In fact I didn't do a very good job with this wheel at all - it's messy, or messier than usual, that is. In my defense, I did it on a day I wasn't feeling well!)

As you can see, I did the "stripe" thing again on a number of these - black at the tip, another color at the base. I used various pinks at the base - there's a picture of some of them at the bottom, but they're noted on the list, also.

I also almost mixed up two polishes, which is the first time I've done that. I meant to put G-listen To Your Heart as #2, because it's much purplier (that may not actually be a word, but you know what I mean) than It's Bouquet With Me, which was supposed to be #9. Instead they are reversed. But oh well, there is other stuff over there on that right side of the wheel that's very purple, as well. The other thing that bugs me is the big fingerprint in the middle of #13. Pretend you didn't notice, ok?

1. Convergence
2. It's Bouquet With Me ("striped" with Domestic Goddess at base, Jet Black at tip)
3. Domestic Goddess
4. Kieko
5. Morning, Moneypenny (magnetic)
6. Posh Plum
7. Paloma (striped over Posh Plum, JB)
8. Crushed Candy
9. It's Bouquet With Me (striped over Pink Sizzle, JB)
10. Perrie
11. Rory (partly over Perrie)
12. Magenta Mirage (over Jet Black)
13. Pink Sizzle
14. Lilith
15. Reagan
16. Ultimate Pink
17. Gimme a Grape Big Kiss
18. Big City Dazzle (a top coat) (striped over Hasty, JB)
19. Strobe Light (striped over Pink Sizzle, JB)
20. Girls on Film (striped over Hasty, JB)

(I probably should've done like everybody else and numbered these like a clock, starting from the top, but I think it threw me off that they were oval and so I started on the left and then went clockwise. Hopefully people who have been looking at these have figured out my method by now!)

1 through 5:



(See note at bottom about #3 and #4.)

6 through 10:

11 through 15:

Re #12: I have decided that maybe Maybelline knew what they were doing when they called their crackle version "Shredded" - it seems to shred vertically more than other brands do.

16 through 20:

As I noted when I first wore it, #17 appears very, very pink even though it has "grape" in its name and it's grape-scented. This has never made a whole lot of sense to me, but I do like the color.

These were my layering colors - there were more variations in these colors than on some other wheels so I thought my layering colors needed to vary too (except for the black):

I think my main point in taking this close-up picture was to show that Domestic Goddess and Kieko are pretty much dead-on dupes. So if you loved Domestic Goddess or you're feeling sorry you missed it, there's definitely an alternative!