It's been weeks

Two weeks since I posted, let's see if I can remember what I've been wearing since then. That bumpy Diamond-Love thing that I posted about two entries back didn't last long - which, considering how many layers there were, is not really a surprise. I didn't specifically say in the last entry what I was putting on, but I think the entry itself was a hint, and I'm pretty sure it ended up being my old standby of Daul-over-Purple-Haze. Which I still love.

After that I decided I should wear Zoya Roxy, which is a purple jellyish glitter. That would have been all well and good, but then I decided for some reason to put Chloe over it, which came out... slightly odd. Glitter AND flecks in one mani is just too much, I guess.

And I think by the time I gave up on that one, that my "3 free" Zoya order had come in. I ordered FeiFei, Blaze, and Indigo. (I really intended to order Smoke Storm, but they had a note that it was not out of stock but it was low in inventory, or something to that effect, and it could delay your order. So I decided to wait on that until the next order, maybe.) So naturally the next thing I tried was one of those: FeiFei. I put it on without anything but base-coat under it (which is unusual for me these days!) and I really liked it. In most lights, it didn't look blue, it looked gray, but a very lovely, sophisticated gray. - Actually, now that I look at the Zoya description again, it says "steel blue" perfectly clearly, which is exactly what it is. But I had in my head that it was going to be more blue than that. - Anyway, I think I used 3 coats, although I'm not sure how much I needed the third one. And it held up very well - I'm used to thinking that anything that's glittery is prone to coming off in big flakes, but it really did well. So that takes us up through the weekend, and then last night I switched to Blaze. Frankly, in the fluorescent light at home it looks kind of "meh" - it looks like a dark-red creme - but in better lighting it IS really beautiful. I've been admiring it all day.

I don't know what I'll do after this - hopefully I have at least a couple of days to decide. Wonder what FeiFei would look like over Indigo. Oh, also I came home from the grocery store earlier with a polish - NYC Pink Champagne, which did NOT look like I would expect something called Pink Champagne to look. It appears to be sort of a dark-pink shimmer. And heck, it was 93 cents. (It's not on the list of current colors so I guess it's discontinued. Which would explain why it was stuck out on the end-cap, I guess!)

Very expensive bases

A year or so ago, I got it in my head to try Rescue Beauty Lounge (there should be a link in my sidebar), and so I spent a little over $40, by the time you added shipping, on two bottles: Chinoise and Purple Haze. And it's really nothing against RBL - they seem to have a good formula, they go on well, and all that stuff - but the fact is, I just didn't fall in love with either one of these colors. They look great in other people's pictures (from a random google search, here is Chinoise and here is Purple Haze), but somehow, when I put them on, they just don't look as good. I'm not sure why.

So mostly what I have ended up using them for is as a base to layer other things over. Chinoise is great under a number of reds, and I discovered earlier in the fall that Purple Haze is great with Zoya Daul. It's kind of a crazy way to use up $18 bottles of nail polish, but hey, it works!

Color Theory, and more

I'm waiting to see if the pictures from my phone decide to upload or not (I really need to find a better way to do this - my current method usually works, eventually, but often takes a good while), but meanwhile I'll just start talking.  I haven't posted but once since Christmas, and I was all about talking about my jelly sandwich that day, and I mentioned this little set of polishes in passing and then never came back to it. And my photos have finally transferred over now, so here it is:

I saw these in CVS one day and my husband was with me, and I said something to the effect of, "Oh that's cute, that'd be a good thing to get me for Christmas if you want" (mostly thinking that it was more interesting than a lot of the gift sets out there) - and even though it was November at the time, I think, he remembered. (Or maybe he went back and bought it the next day, I never thought to ask, but anyway, he got it.) I thought it was a nice range of colors and had some cute glitters. I still haven't tried but a few of the colors, but it does figure into every manicure I've done since Christmas, one way or another. Luckily I did take this picture before I opened it up, because I promptly managed to send the little bottles flying all over the place - I did retrieve most of them, but I think there's still one or two lurking under the TV table that I haven't gone diving after yet. (It was not that the packaging was bad - I had been looking at the colors and had loosened most of them from their little slots, so it was entirely my own fault. I'm really talented at finding new and creative ways to make messes. Nothing broke, though, so it could've been much worse.)

Meanwhile, my jelly sandwich that I posted about before was lovely and lasted really well, which is the main reason I haven't posted much since I first posted about it! It held up unmarred for about four days (which is really good for me with my tendency to use my nails as levers) and then I patched it up and made it last several more. I remembered to take a picture, too:

This was the only picture in which you could see Luna underneath peeking out at all, but in real life it showed up quite well. In sunlight it tended to get quite flashy, in fact.

So earlier this week when I finally took that off, I was feeling too lazy* to go to the bedroom and look in my big stash. So I rooted around in the little bowl in the living room that I throw stray nail polishes and earrings and such into, and ended up with Who Are You Wearing? again, and Jem on top of that. It didn't wear terribly well, though, for some reason (I'm not even sure what base and top coats I used, so I have nothing particular to blame that on). So last night and this morning I started over and ended up with another long string of layers:

1. Nail Nutrition
2. basecoat: SH Salon
3. that same gray that I had under the jelly sandwich last week (from the Color Theory set above)
4. Orly Diamond Love
5. berry color from Color Theory set (which has no names or even numbers, which is going to drive me crazy)
6. Zoya Delilah - red glitter
7. Diamond Love again

I think of Diamond Love as a top coat, although I'm not sure whether it's actually intended to be one. I googled around and came up with a couple of pictures of DL in the bottle, and a description from a seller site of it as an "opalescent microglitter" which sounds about right, and also one which describes it as "rare" - which I take with a grain of salt on seller sites, because some of them like to call everything rare. But there doesn't seem to be much in the way of reviews, either, which makes me think it might not have been around long. I'm pretty sure I fished it out of a clearance bin at the grocery store a couple of years ago, along with Orly Pearl Wisdom which I really wore a lot for a while. The "opalescent" part means it tends to go on like an old-fashioned frost, which may be why I haven't worn this one a lot. But actually this mess of layers came out looking okay (if bumpy):

Depending on the light, the final result seems to shift back and forth between a purple-burgundy and a red, but it looks pretty nice, either way. I was surprised at how much of the berry-ish color shows up from underneath Delilah - I would have thought Delilah was more opaque than that. But see, this is why I like to play with layers, because you never know what you're going to get!


*Actually I have been sickly all week this week, so "lazy" is possibly being unfair to myself. But that part doesn't really matter when it come to nail polish, does it?