Purple season

Like a lot of people, I have a tendency to do my nail polish in seasonal colors - orange in the fall, red and green in December (up until Christmas, at which point I go on a glitter binge if I haven't started before then, that usually carries over well into January), pink and red up til Valentine's, green in March, etc etc. And of course there's sort of a gap here between Valentine's and the point in March when I start thinking about St. Patrick's Day - especially in a year like this one when Mardi Gras has already gone by. I'm not Catholic, and I don't even drink much, nowadays, so Mardi Gras and St. Patrick's Day have no particular meaning for me, but still, they're strongly associated with certain colors, and I like that part of them.

Well, anyway, in the last big entry I said that maybe I'd try purple when Valentine's Day was over, and that's exactly what I did. I did Milani Purple Rush, which was one of those shimmers I talked about in that same entry, and then I did Revlon Plum Attraction, which leans more red-violet. Then I did zigzag off into some other colors, which I'll get to, but while I'm on the purple theme, I also went on a Walgreen's binge today, thanks to a $5-off-$20 coupon, and came home with 4 polishes, 3 of which are basically purple. I spent $16 and I decided that that was close to being half-price off of retail for all of this. I got two of those Revlon nail art wands (which are $8.99 but were buy-one-get-one-half-off AND had a manufacturer coupon for another $1 off). One is from the "Moon Candy" line and it's Orbit, a dark purple undercoat and a lavender-ish glitter. The other one is one of the neons with the white undercoat, in Ultra Violet. I also bought Sally Hansen Xtreme "Pacific Blue", which is a periwinkle and looks pretty purplish to me. (The 4th one is also Sally Hansen, CSM Black and Blue, which is what it says, a blackened blue. I can't call that one a purple.)

The non-purple things I did in the last two weeks were Essie Crocodilly, which is a magnetic polish, and which may have an entry to itself later because the metallic part didn't turn out so well. But I love the gray-green color, anyway. And over the weekend I slapped a couple of coats of Let Me Go on, on the way out the door to work one day, and then added a couple of coats of FeiFei on top of that. (Let Me Go is so sheer that I don't think it made much difference to FeiFei. It just looked the same as it usually does.)

Now, what do I do next? It's going to be purple, I know that, but one of the new purples, or something I already have? I'm not sure myself what the answer is!

(ADDED: The next thing on my nails is, apparently, SH Salon Plum It, a very dark purple, with SC Winterberry on top of that. Which comes out as a very elegant, slightly grayed-out purple. I like it.)

Raspberry pink

If you're a regular reader here and think these pictures look familiar, you're probably right. This is (top) Slammin' Red and (bottom) Paloma over Luna. I just was noticing how similar the overall color is. I thought it was worth putting them next to each other to compare. I compared Slammin' Red to Zoya Blaze in my last entry, and it is in the same family, but really I think Blaze is a good bit darker. It read as a red to me when I wore it, where these read as deep pinks.

Glitter and the removal thereof

My friend Karen wrote about using finger cots instead of foil for removing stubborn polish a while back - as you'll see if you click over there, she was using it to take off a gel mani, but I was mostly interested in the technique myself for glitter removal. (That's mostly because I am too cheap - so far - to fork out for a gel setup. If I find one on sale, all bets may be off there.) I finally remembered to buy some finger cots a week or so ago, in time to try it on my - sort of vaguely Valentine's-themed - repeat of Zoya Paloma over Luna. And it worked really well. It's basically the same idea as the aluminum-foil technique, but it's much easier. And finger cots are pretty cheap. I bought a package of 36 assorted-size ones at the grocery store for a couple of dollars. (They were in the pharmacy section with the first-aid items.) Cut some cotton rounds into quarters, saturate one with acetone, cover your nail with the acetone-soaked cotton, and then cover the whole thing with an appropriately-sized cot and let it sit a while. I haven't settled on a definite soak time but it really didn't take long, on my experimental round. A couple of minutes seemed to pretty much take care of it, but of course this may vary wildly depending on what exactly you're removing. Luna still required some extra silver-glitter cleanup afterwards, of course, but not near as much as I would have guessed.

(I did the Paloma/Luna combo more or less the same way I did the last time, except I think I did an undercoat there that I left out this time, and I couldn't tell the difference at all. Basecoat, 2 coats of Luna, 3 coats of Paloma, and topcoat. Still a lot of coats, but I like the result.)

So since I have an improved method of glitter removal, that put me in the mood for more glitter, specifically Studio M Slammin' Red. Which, come to think of it, I got from Karen in the first place, in a swap a year or so ago, I think. (Naturally Karen documented her end of the swap much better than I did. Although she sent me so much bonus stuff that I still frequently say, "Oh, that's one of the polishes I got from Karen," so I hope that tells you how great she is as a swap partner!) I know she sent me a couple of Milani shimmers that I have worn a lot, and she also introduced me to Studio M glitters, which I now love. I would have trouble feeding this addiction since they are exclusive to Meijer stores and we don't have those in Texas, but as it happens, my in-laws live in prime Meijer-land in Ohio, so I visit periodically and can indulge. My very favorite was a silver-gray one that I unfortunately failed to close properly and ruined, but Slammin' Red is a close second. I really think of it as more of a pink than a red - a dark raspberry-pink, sort of like Zoya Blaze's showier cousin. The Studio M glitters are really glitter-packed, with what looks like pink and silver holo glitter. I did try taking iPhone pictures in a couple of different lights, and this was the best one, in (rather cloudy) daylight today:

You can see the glitter a bit there, but for a better look at the total glitter effect, you have to try somebody else's pictures: Polish Monster, for example, has pictures that really show off the glitter. (She also said that Studio M is basically the same as Color Club, which I hadn't heard before. So if you totally fall in love with this color but you don't live in Meijer territory, that's something else to try!)

I almost forgot to say that this is two coats but one could easily be enough - this goes on quite thick, for one thing, besides being quite opaque as well. And boy, it ate up the top coat. I used two and it was still bumpy. But I like it too much to care.

So I've been having fun trying out one pink after another. I'm sure this one will probably last through Valentine's Day (although if you look at my pinky closely, you'll notice that it does have a distressing tendency to chip a bit), and after that I'll go off on some other tangent. Purple, maybe!

NOT Pink Champagne

I was talking in my last entry about buying NYC Pink Champagne, but apparently I only thought that's what I bought. In all fairness to me, I thought that because it was labeled that - but apparently it is mislabeled, because if you look all the way at the bottom of this page, Pink Champagne is there - it is, as you'd expect, a very pale pink. However, the bottle I bought which was labeled Pink Champagne looks more like it might be Fuchsia Glamour, from a couple of rows up. I'm not sure about that, but it's definitely more in that color family. And I like it, whatever it is. (I would never have picked up that super-pastel one, in fact.)

So I wore that polish (whichever it is) for a few days, and then I switched back to Zoya. I'm sort of on a Valentine's Day theme and have been sticking with reds and pinks, and it occurred to me that I hadn't worn Zoya Rory in ages - in fact, I'm pretty sure I only ever wore it once, because it turned out to be one of those colors that's kind of pale for my coloring. So I decided to try putting Kieko under it, to see if that would help. Kieko is a creme that's a pretty similar color family but quite a bit darker - and I do think it helped a bit. At least, I didn't feel like it washed me out as much as I did the last time I wore Rory. (I ought to try swatching these things to really see, but I never get around to it!)

I did snap a picture, at least:

and in fact if you look at other pictures of Rory, like the one in the link above and the one in, say, PolishAholic's blog, they do look quite a lot lighter than this. So maybe layering it did make a difference! (ADDED: I do think some of that is the lighting, though - it's still on my nails right now and it looks lighter than this.)