Sooki & Fairy Dust, & a red I wasn't supposed to buy

I was intending to wear fuchsia this week, but when it came down to it, I found myself completely unable to settle on anything, and I ended up with red instead - Zoya Sooki, with Fairy Dust, which is a flakie, on top of it. (I know there are at least two more Fairy Dusts from other brands. This is the e.l.f. one.) It actually looks really good and it's wearing well, but I had a hell of a time getting it on right. For some reason the Fairy Dust did not want to dry - I don't know if something in its formula wasn't playing nice with Sooki, or what, but I redid several nails before arriving at something that was wearable. Sooki is cherry-red and the Fairy Dust seems to give it sort of a gilded, slightly gold-shifted finish that's quite nice. I don't know if this flakie is a little gold-shifted itself - it doesn't look like it in the bottle, if so - or of it's picking something up from the color underneath. But I like it.

The picture picked the gold up really clearly where the sun was hitting it:

I have to 'fess up - I bought something. It was a L'Oreal jelly, and I would have specifically have made an exception for those if I had had any idea I would find them. I had only seen them once, and that was at the Rite-Aid in Ohio, and they were kind of expensive and I passed them up and have been sorry ever since, because I have not seen them anywhere else. And then they appeared at the grocery store yesterday. I restrained myself enough to only get one, the red one (I think it's Jolly Lolly) but since I have gone on and on about my no-buy status, I feel like I have to confess. Since it's still July, I'm still not going to make it count as the one thing I said I was allowed to buy in August, but I think I'm going to try to restrain myself from buying anything at all nail-related for the first half of August, because going anywhere near nail polish is obviously too much for me. (I only found the jellies because I went back there to get acetone.) If I behave, then I can still buy that one thing that I promised myself later in the month.

(I know this all sounds terribly silly but I know myself and I'm a chronic impulse buyer. I have to be realistic about this or I'll just be buying everything in sight again.)

I went nosing around on Sephora's website and looked at their new store-brand stuff:
Sephora "Color Hit" polishes - some really pretty colors here!
Also, Sephora X glitters and Sephora X top coats.
And a whole gel system, too.
(I haven't been in Sephora in ages. I'm a little worried about what may happen when I finally step foot in there.)

Giveaway spotted:
Imperfectly Painted has a giveaway of a whole set of Cult Nails polishes, open until August 10th. I decided not to enter because those colors all look too warm to be flattering on me, but they're really pretty just the same. Go enter!

No-buy update, and some deals

Deal alert:

• This one is good until tomorrow morning only, and I doubt that anybody who doesn't read my Twitter (and thus has theoretically already seen it already) will see it here in time, but I feel compelled to post it anyway: Hautelook has what appears to be the whole Orly SmartGel system at a substantial discount. The polishes are $7.50 and they have the LED lamp for half-price, and remover and a lot of other bits and pieces too. I didn't stop to figure out whether it would be everything you need because I am trying to resist buying it, but it looks like it might be. (Ooh, they have Rage, too. Rage isn't flattering on me - see here for my experiments with it last fall - but I know a lot of people adore it.) (Edit: I apparently left the link to Hautelook off the first time. That's now corrected.)
• A different Nordstrom Butter London deal, but still a good one (at least if you like pink): basecoat and top coat and Trout Pout for $27. They must just be switching the deals out as they run out of stuff. Which is smart. (Ooh! and Essie fall collection minis! And... more stuff that I'm trying not to look to closely at. There are some Lippmann sets in there, too.)

Since I keep blathering on about my no-buy thing - and I did successfully resist the Hautelook OPI sale last week - I will tell you what I've decided. The new rule is, I can buy one or two things a month, starting in August, but the Butter London I've already bought counts as one of my purchases for August, meaning I can only buy one more. I thought of saying I couldn't buy anything else at all in August and I decided that sounded like a rule that was made to be broken. I have a much better chance at sticking to it if I allow myself to buy one more thing. (And no, a Lippmann 3-pack does not count as one thing. ONE thing, ONE bottle of nail polish. I'm speaking mostly to myself here, you understand.) This time of year, I imagine that's likely to be something from one fall collection or another.

I am still wearing Hot Cinnamon but it is definitely starting to show tipwear and I imagine I'll change it out tonight. When I put Hot Cinnamon away, I put it in the box with the fall colors (i.e., oranges and browns), instead of with the rest of the reds, because I decided that's really what it is - a very red-leaning dark coral, I guess you'd say. The reds that look best on me are neutral or cool reds, and Hot Cinnamon is just not one of those. I still like it, though, and I'm sure I will be wearing both it and Sugar Rush a good bit this fall. (Question: if I still wanted to look for a cool-leaning version of this, what options are out there? Zoya Chyna?) (and that's an affiliate link, fyi)

As far as what's next, I imagine it's time for another fuchsia, but I haven't narrowed it down further than that yet. I will of course report back later.

Hot Cinnamon

Since I've been going on and on about Butter London lately, I thought I'd mention something else that I saw on Polish Insomniac this week, and that's that BL is about to follow up their nail polish and lip gloss with other color cosmetics, starting in August. They look very pretty in the picture she posted. As I have said here recently, I'm not a huge cosmetics user, so I probably won't be trying them out any time soon, but you never know. (And actually, on reflection, that blusher in the picture looks rather like it could be that shade I'm always trying to find, the one that's not too pink and not too purple - so someday when my current one runs out, I might actually try it!)

I almost tried to stretch the purple Essence I was wearing through today, and then I took a close look at it late last night (because, y'know, I am an insomniac myself), and I decided it was chipping enough that I might regret that. So last night I took that off and oiled my cuticles up really good, and later I put on one of the couple of Julie G's I haven't tried, Hot Cinnamon. In some lights it looks really red, and in some lights it looks more like a not-quite-red - I think maybe it's shifted just a tiny bit towards coral from a full-on red, but it's hard to be sure. Anyway (and I knew this, because Karen told me when we were discussing our swap) it has the same basic formula as Sugar Rush (the red-orange), which is the formula I liked the most. So I was expecting to like it a lot, and I do. (The cool colors have a slightly different formulation, and so far I'm 1-for-2 on those: I liked one and one annoyed me. I still have one cool one - Rock Candy, the green - left to try, so I'm less sure about whether I'll like that one. Since I liked the blue, I'm cautiously optimistic, though.)

Here's Hot Cinnamon:

It's more interesting, and more matte, than it looks here, but at least the color is reasonably true.

In which I find an excellent bargain

I placed a Nordstrom's order that includes a nail polish; however, the nail polish is incidental to what I ordered so I decided this is not breaking my no-buy vow. Besides, it won't be shipped until after the end of the month, which is when I decided the absolute no-buy period ends. Yeah, I know, I'm grasping at straws, but I don't care. I am a sucker for a good deal, and this was a really good one, relative to the normal prices for Butter London - which is, according to BL's website, $19 each for the top and base coats. For that matter, Nordstrom's also has a set of the two alone for $25, which is also a really good deal, if the other one wasn't better. They all say 0.6 oz, which is normal size as I understand it! I looked because I keep wondering what the catch is. (The remover in the first set is a purse-size, but everything else seems to be normal size.) So anyway, I'm looking on the regular nail polish as being essentially a freebie, along with the nail care items which I have previously established are not included in the no-buy. And it is a pretty color (it's Thames, if you didn't follow the link and want to know). It looks rather like a foil version of Henley Regatta, really, but that's a good thing. I feel like I am totally awash in blue-greens these days, but I keep wearing them - and goodness knows, compared to, say, purples or pinks, I have an extremely small number of them. (Added: I notice looking again today that Nordstrom's page in fact calls Thames an emerald green rather than a blue-green at all. It's meant to be a color-of-the-year thing, apparently.)

Today's mani is Essence Break Through, which is a very nice red-violet. (Here are swatches from Polish Me Please - as usual, I may get a picture of my own but that won't be until later.) It's very thin but it went on well and was opaque in three coats. And I've had it on for 24 hours and it's holding up well so far.

P.S. I almost forgot to credit Polish Insomniac for pointing me towards the Nordstrom's deal in the first place. She posted a slightly different version of it two weeks ago (all the same stuff plus another polish of your choice for $36), and I didn't see that post at the time, but when I went to the Nordstrom's site today I found the one I posted instead. I would have been fine with either version!

Layers of green

Rikki over Irene:

Base coat, 2 coats of Irene, 1 coat of Rikki, & Seche Vite on top. I guess this is blue-shifted again, though, because in real life it's more yellow or maybe olive-leaning than this. I may have to try again in different light if I'm still wearing it tomorrow! (Hmm, would a blue shift also account for my fingertips always looking pinker in these pictures than they do in real life? I guess maybe it might.)

Added: this is just before I took it off after (I think) 4 days of wear, so it lasted well:

This picture looks only slightly less intense than the other one, but I do think it's more accurate (at least on my screen!)

The Last Haul

Friday night I took off the bright blue, and oh yeah, bright blue is a pain to take off. (Another big surprise, huh?) It made such a mess on one thumbnail that polish remover wasn't budging it at all, and I finally resorted to a bit of chlorine bleach to get the worst of it off. That's probably not very good for your nails but it doesn't seem to have done any serious damage.

My Zoya order came, with Liberty included, but somehow I have no desire to try Liberty right now. (No more blue for a bit.) This is, for the moment, The Last Haul. It's not a very big one, but it's what I got. And if you see me buying any more polish any time soon, kick my butt, ok?

L-R and top to bottom:

• Sally Hansen cuticle oil
• Montana Sky (Colors by Llarowe, which are apparently completely sold out now)
• Liberty (Zoya)
• Seche Vite
• Suri (Zoya)
• Rikki (Zoya)

The Llarowe and Liberty don't look that different in this picture, but Montana Sky actually has a darker base, with bright glitter. Liberty is just bright.

So (to continue the story), after I got the blue off, finally, I decided to try Zoya Perrie. And - like every other paler color I've ever bought - it's just not flattering on me. I don't know why I keep trying. It's a pretty color, and I'm not getting rid of it or anything, but in my stash it's probably destined for layering. Which is basically what I used it for, in the end - I put Convergence over it, the plum-colored holo.

But by this morning, that was chipped, and I decided to try out Rikki, above. I was thinking I really wanted it to be just a little darker, though, so I put it over Zoya Irene. And I really liked the result. Two layers of Irene, one of Rikki. (Our waitress at dinner liked it, too.)

Two blues

I love it when people get all technical about nails: The Lacquerologist Tells All: Eponychium and Nail Plate Health and Care

Well, when last heard from I was wearing Julie G Blueberry Fizz, and I wore that for a couple of days. Here it is from yesterday with a bit of not-terribly-noticeable tipwear:

It probably really doesn't read as blue as what you're seeing there, but it doesn't read as completely silver as I initially thought, either - it's somewhere in the middle. A very icy blue, I'd call it.


I didn't get home until really late last night, but by then it was looking much more chipped, and so I took that off and put cuticle oil on, and left my nails bare overnight, hoping it'd have extra time to soak in since I've been changing nail polish so much lately and it's bound to be a little harder on my nails. And then this morning I put on two coats of Cabo Cruise, and topped that off with the blue Cocktail Colour, which is named Apple Berry Smoothie. (I don't think of apple-berry smoothies as being something that would be bright blue, but whatever. Actually it reminds me of those blues they use in blueberry-flavored candy, a bit. Like SweetTarts and stuff like that.) I wasn't sure how opaque the Cocktail Colours were so I figured I should have something underneath.

Here's a really bad picture:

It's out of focus, and I would try to take a better one, but the color is misleading, anyway, and I suspect that's the light, so I figure it wouldn't really be too much of an improvement. It's not really this blue - maybe the light in here shifts things blue, because both of these pictures were taken in the same spot. It's a bit brighter and a bit greener (but not much) - it basically looks like a cyan-blue foil. That's the good part. The bad thing is that it didn't want to dry, and it's a big mess because of that. I don't know if that's something to do with all the layers, or our general humidity - which is even higher than normal, right now - or what. So I will probably have something new at some point this weekend. But I do really like this a lot, in any case.

In which I find that base coat really does help

(Tuesday)

Since I put Alegra on with no base coat last night, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when the polish on the top quarter or so of my index finger sheered right off this morning. Interestingly, the rest of the polish survived fine for well over an hour in the bathtub while I finished The Cuckoo's Calling (it was really interesting, what can I say? - and actually the worst thing about that is that I was reading on my Kindle, which is really stupid because sooner or later I'm going to drop it in the tub, if I keep doing it). So I guess I'm going to just patch this manicure up, at least for the rest of today, and worry about it later. I like it enough that it's possible I might take it off and put it right back on again, though.

Here's Zoya's description of Alegra (disclaimer: that's an affiliate link): "Zoya Nail Polish in Alegra can be best described as: fuchsia pink sparkling metallic. An expensive-looking metallic shade for summer." What I want to know about that is, what makes it expensive-looking? Are they implying it looks like a Chanel, or something? I'm undoubtedly overthinking this, and I love this color; I'm just slightly baffled by that phrase. I guess I don't think this polish looks any more expensive than anything else. Is there something I'm overlooking here?

(Tuesday night)
Well, I tried patching Alegra, but it didn't last long (as in, an hour, and it was badly chipped again) so I gave up on that, and rather than doing it over again I went on to something else. I imagine we will see it again before long, though. With base coat this time, for sure.

I decided instead to give the Gumdrops another try, only in a different color this time. So far, so good. This time I tried Blueberry Fizz. The interesting thing is that it doesn't actually look very blue, at least in the light in this room (which is fluorescent and often misleading) - it looks silver. Or at least sort of a blue-leaning silver-gray. But it's really pretty, in any case, so it's good with me! (I said that Crushed Candy would be a good winter color, and actually Blueberry Fizz would be really stunning as a holiday polish. Which is not to say I don't like it now!)

It looked opaque after 2 coats, so I stopped. Maybe it would look even better with a third, but I didn't try it to find out.

In which I am ever-so-slightly obsessive

(Monday)
I am so ridiculously picky about polishes sometimes - as I noted last time, I'm wearing Crushed Candy, which is somewhere between purple and pink, and glittery, and I like the color but the glitter part is bugging me a bit. I've noticed that anything pink AND glittery tends to elicit this reaction in me in particular. It's pretty but sort of annoying. I may be wearing something else soon just because of this. If I'm not enjoying it, why not start over? It's not as if I don't have several dozen other things on hand to try! I haven't worn anything fuchsia lately, maybe I should try a fuchsia. And maybe put Chloe or e.l.f. Fairy Dust on top of it. That would be a good summer mani.

I suspect Crushed Candy is is one of those colors that I will like better in the winter. I always seem to enjoy the really glittery glitters when the weather is gloomy. It'd be a great Valentine's color, for that matter! I think all of the Julie G Gumdrops in cool colors are like this - they have small hexes in them that are the same color as the matte part. The overall effect is very glittery, although I wonder if putting topcoat on it made it more so. I un-matte-d the matte part, so to speak, when I put topcoat on (and multiple coats of top coat, at that). I'm hoping that with other colors I will react differently to this combination, anyway.


(very late on Monday)
I did go with fuchsia and I have so many of them that I hummed and hawwed (is that how you spell that?) around with which one to use. I finally went with Zoya Alegra, which is so shiny and foil-y (I'm not at all sure that's a word, but when has that ever bothered me?**) that it didn't need any flakies to finish it off.

(**Completely off-topic: now I'm sitting here thinking, is there an adjective for "foil-like"? I guess foil-like itself would be the most obvious one, but that's kind of boring. I think I watched so much Buffy the Vampire Slayer that the Buffy solution to vocabulary has become second nature: if you don't like the commonly-used suffixes for a word, make up your own. I still say things like "here's some linkage" to mean "here's a bunch of links" - I think that's a very Buffy word usage, although I don't think that's a word that ever actually got used on that show.)

Note: Alegra is not completely opaque right off the bat, even though Zoya calls it a 5 on their 1-5 scale. It took 2 coats to look at all right, and 3 made it look even better. I did something I never, ever do, and put it on without basecoat. My brain was somewhere else, I guess, and by the time I started paying attention to what I was doing half my hand was done and I just went with it. So who knows how it will wear. I did try out the Seche Vite on top, so maybe that will compensate a little!

Bright green and textured purple

(Saturday night)
Interestingly, I got a ton of compliments on the Cutie Colada/Ipanema Girl combo today - FAR more than I got on Ipanema Girl alone. I like it better, too, but I don't always think that translates to what other people like.

There is the cutest little old lady - and I mean that literally, she's a tiny thing - who has always come in where I worked and always stopped and asked me what I was wearing on my nails that day and admired it, whatever it was. She hasn't been around as much lately, but she was in not long ago and we discussed nail polish, and then today she called on the phone (asking about something else), and after a minute she said, "Well, what have you got on your nails today?" and I said bright green, and she said, "I'm sorry I can't be there to see it, I'll just have to imagine it." Aw.


(Sunday night)
The green was chipping, so I think I'm about to go back to purple - the texture, Julie G Crushed Candy. At least that's the plan. Up until it actually goes on my nails, my plans are usually subject to change. But I've gotten as far as getting the bottle out, so it's a fairly definite plan.

Yuck, I just put CSM base coat on and it's all goopy, I got a full coat on but then I threw the bottle away, clearly it's at the end of its useful life. It's pretty good basecoat, though, although not that cheap so at that price point there's a number of equally good competitors, I think.

Also, I went to Walmart earlier (I am trying to remember to leave the hyphen out of their name since they don't use it themselves any more) and managed not to buy any polish, assuming that by polish you mean the kind with coloring in it. I did leave with a bottle of Seche Vite, though - my first. (Come to think of it, I left that out of the entry yesterday where I was talking about major brands I'd never bought.) When I said I was going on no-buy, though, I specifically (at least in my own head) made an exception for base coat and top coat and other such "maintenance" type items. It was color polish I was thinking of. I need base coat more than I really need top coat, though, I should've bought that instead. Although I do still have an almost-full bottle of Sinful Color base coat.

Also - speaking of should have's - I should have taken a picture of the green nail polish before I took it off. Too late now, though. I was too interested in the other things I bought at Walmart - strawberries and pizza - and wasn't really thinking about my nails. For once.

(Added on Monday)
Crushed Candy is sort of a lilac, I guess, or violet - I never know what to call pale purples - and it looks pinkish in some lights, and sometimes almost bronze. It's nice, in any case. The texture was bugging me, though, so I decided to put top coat on it. I didn't want to waste my new bottle of Seche Vite pouring it into a texture, so I used that NYC clear polish that I got lately - three coats of it, in the end, and you can still feel some texture. Oddly, it doesn't look that much different.

nOOb

(Friday)
So when last heard from, I was in the middle of applying Ipanema Girl. Well, I said I wanted it to be bright green, and it was. By the time I got a third coat on, it was basically a kelly-green foil. Almost a Christmas green. It's pretty, but very flashy. I wore it today all day, and now I'm toning it down (sort of) by putting Rimmel Cutie Colada on top of it. It's still flashy, it's just a slightly lighter, glittery-foil kind of flashy now. I'm being flip, but it's actually a really nice combination. It's a shame I managed somehow to bruise my knuckles in the last day or so, which kind of ruins the effect, somehow. (Don't ask me how, I seriously have no idea.)

(Saturday)
I was thinking about how I am really a nail polish novice compared to a lot of nail-bloggers. It's one of several reasons I say from time to time that this is not a real nail blog - and it's not and probably never will be. There are plenty of people who do swatches and beautful pictures and all that kind of thing, I don't really think that niche is in need of filling these days, do you? I started this just to record what I was doing, especially with layering and such, and while I have expanded a good bit from that - especially with pictures, even if they're not usually very good ones - still, I'm not the norm and probably never will be. (If you know me that may make you laugh. I'm usually not the norm at anything.)

Chipping issues

(Wednesday)
I'm still wearing Waity Katie. For now. It has at least one little chip, so I'm probably either going to want to patch it up or start over, but I might just patch it, because I'm still enjoying it.

It occurs to me that No More Waity, Katie is a bit similar to that Hedy's color I bought in Ohio, Dusty Spring Fields. Or really it's the other way around, probably - I imagine the BL has been around longer. They both look very neutral in some lights and very purple in others. I guess you could say Dusty Spring Fields is rather like NMWK without the glitter. I still like it but NMWK is more fun.

I think I know what's likely to be next: I found swatches of Pitter Patter on Pinterest and followed them to their source here. My god that's beautiful. (However it's now almost bedtime on Wednesday so NMWK is probably staying for the moment. With or without patching.)

(Thursday)
I did go ahead and put Pitter Patter on very late last night, but I did kind of a bad job of it and it chipped today, and I went ahead and took it off just now. It's beautiful, but a bit darker than I wanted it to be. I've had terrible sinus headaches all week, and I stayed home feeling like crap again today, and never saw it in the sunlight, so I may not be giving it its full due. I'll have to try that one again later. And I started over and what I'm in the middle of putting on is Ipanema Girl aka Layla CE61. If it ends up being as green as it looks in the Ninja Polish swatches, I'll be pleased, because I was worried it was going to be more yellow-green than is flattering on me. It's not as dark as the picture yet, but I can tell (with a partial second coat on) that it's going to be dark enough to avoid that problem too much. Anyway, it's pretty and shimmery and I'm happy with what I'm seeing so far.

(See why I'm always chipping my polish? Because I'm in the middle of a coat of nail polish and I've stopped to type. Yeah, not a good habit.)

Overload

On my nails: No More Waity, Katie. And I wasn't sure if I would like it, but I do - a lot - and I see why everybody carries on about it. It's just... different. And cool. (I think I thought it was going to go on paler than it actually did, that's one reason I was unsure about it. I ended up doing three coats and two coats of top coat, too, and it's still a bit bumpy.)

Another thing: I am officially back on no-buy status. Karen's box came and I have so much new stuff that it took TWOthree pictures to get it all, and I have enough new polish to carry me into the fall - and probably into next year - even if I don't buy another thing. I know better than to think that's going to happen but I really gotta quit going out and LOOKING for more nail polish. I still have three Zoyas and a Colors by Llarowe coming in the mail, but after that I have got to stop for a while.

We'll start with the stray one, which is by itself because I accidentally left it out of the next picture. This is my first e.l.f. polish (or my first e.l.f. anything, for that matter), and apparently it is called Fairy Dust, although it doesn't seem to say that on the bottle. But I love flakies so I'm sure I will adore it whenever I get around to trying it.

You may notice that there's an actual lip gloss in this one:

It's unusual for me, but I had a CVS coupon for $3 off a lipstick or lip gloss, I think it was, and so I thought, well, I should use that to try out some brand I've never tried before. So I tried the Almay, because the color looked like the kind of thing I like. But it's actually lip gloss - that is, much too sheer for my taste. (I was hoping for something a little more substantial. But at least now I know.) That said, I imagine I'll use it some.

I also bought Fairy Dust and the NYC matte top coat on the same trip to CVS, I believe. The SH file I found at Target for 70 cents - and I bought a couple, but amazingly, got out the door without any nail polish, so a small victory there. The other two polishes on the top row are the ones I got from Llarowe, Pretty Serious Party by the Pool and Jade Echarpe de Seda (and I hope I'm spelling that right because I'm not stopping to check). The little Christmas box on the right is what the Pretty Serious bottle came in, and I thought it was cute so I put it in the picture. Then I put the Nicole box in the picture, too, even though there's not anything cute about it. The red polish upside-down on the bottom row came in it - it's the Special K promo one that I wrote about some time ago. (I think I remember thinking it would probably be here in July.) I think the color is called Challenge Red-y.

The other thing in the picture above is nail polish earrings, down at the bottom, and they're really adorable. They came from PrismNYC.

Alright, so this is really the main event, here: the swap box. I got a standard size (what I think of as VHS-tape size, although I suppose that's a very old-person name for it, huh?) but really heavy box from Karen of Frazzle and Aniploish - it was heavy because it had eleven polishes in it, as below.

The Julie G's were what started this, of course: all the Gumdrops except the two orange ones. And I knew she was sending something else, but I didn't quite expect this many somethings! The rest of these brands are actually all ones I've never had before, because I've never even bought a Fergie polish, now that I think about it. (It's Cabo Cruise, the Fergie.) Then we have two Rimmel Cocktail colors, on the left (Cutie Colada is the green one, and the blue one is Apple Berry Smoothie). The Layla is CE61, which the internet informs me is also called Ipanema Girl. The Pixi is Evening Emerald; the Finger Paints is Hypnotic, a magnetic, and last is the Sation glitter, which is Holiday Spirit. I am SO looking forward to trying out all this stuff!

Awash in purple

My god, I have a lot of purple nail polish. And the picture below was taken before the addition of the all-purple Butter London set (see last entry). This was every bottle of polish I could find that I could convince myself was purple. (And there is a list of names after the jump.)

L-R and top to bottom, and see here and here and here for more about brands and such, because I have talked about most if not all of these recently and I'm too lazy to go through it all again! (Note that I also have a purple label which will take you to every single entry about purple):

1. Eternal Beauty
2. Lotus
3. On a Trip
4. Daul
5. Purple Potion (Fantasy Makers)
6. Scandalous
7. Roxy
8. Plum Attraction
9. Carly
10. Winterberry
11. Jem
12. (starting the 2nd row) Perrie
13. Harmonie
14. Mira
15. Amethyst
16. Purple Potion (Xtreme Wear)
17. Celebutante
18. Purple Rush
19. I Love You
20. Fiji
21. (mini) unnamed Color Theory glitter
22. Dancer Is the Best Reindeer
23. Who Are You Wearing?
24. Plum It
25. Convergence (mini at beginning of 3rd row)
26. Purple Pizzazz
27. Ultraviolet (neon nail wand duo with white)
28. Kieko
29. Break Through
30. Domestic Goddess
31. Violet Femme
32. Purple Haze
33. Not So Blueberry
34. Orbit (nail art duo)
35. Goin' Grape
36. Empty Stocking
37. Nightlife

(I added links to some of these, and as usual, Zoya links are affiliate links, not because I'm actually getting anything out of it - thus far I really haven't - but because they're easy to do.)

Everything below is awfully tl;dr, but I wrote it and I'm posting it. Some of you who are nail junkies/color junkies enough might possibly be interested!

One interesting thing is that Gimme a Grape Big Kiss was not purple enough to make this group. You can see it in the box at the top left. It is a sort of red-violet, but I decided it looked more pink than purple next to the rest of these. (I saw at least two polishes on Zoya's purple page that they called purple and I didn't: Juicy, Alegra - those are both in the fuchsia/pink category as far as I'm concerned.) (Note that there are also a number of things missing; Zoya Kierra is one. The BL's are not the only things not in this picture.)

Another thing that surprised me was that I have more blue-violets than red-violets, although I have many of each. The first 3 on the top row, almost the whole first half of the 2nd row except for Perrie (plus Fiji, toward the other end), and four polishes on the bottom row toward the right all lean pretty blue. The redder ones are Roxy, Plum Attraction and Carly on the top row, Perrie on the 2nd row (in a very pastel way), and the whole first half of the bottom row. Violet Femme is fairly neutral (meaning neither red- or blue-leaning, for my purposes) and so is Purple Rush, above it, and the very dark ones at the middle and lower right. (Looking at the 3 new additions, the BL's, which I have in front of me: Pitter Patter is more or less one of the dark neutrals, although I would say it leans just a bit red, if anything. Lillibet's Jubilee is so silver it's hard to tell, but I would say it possibly inclines just a bit blue. Waity Katie is very neutral, but probably a bit blue, too. It's easier to tell these things why you have them all lined up like I did for the photo above!)

I don't think I've mentioned here that I have three more Zoyas on the way, including Suri - very blue-violet, Suri is. I resisted the Zoya promo where you got the 3 minis free with a $10 purchase, but I fell for the one where you buy Liberty and get 2 other polishes free - partly because I had decided in between there somewhere that I really, really wanted Suri. (The other freebie I ordered was Rikki.)

Also in my notes is stuff about which polishes are more greyed out and what's lighter/darker - I might type some of that up later but right now I just don't have the energy.

Now with 500% more Butter London

The two polishes I ordered from Llarowe came last night, and so of course I had to try one. One was Pretty Serious brand - a teal jelly - and the other one was Jade brand, called Echarpe de Seda, which Google Translate tells me means Silk Scarf. It's a scattered holo in red jelly. So since that coordinated reasonably well with Dita, which I already had on, I tried that. And it's - predictably - really beautiful, and also predictably, is hard to photograph. I tried and it just looked like a dark red, and the holo bits didn't show up at all. Which isn't even accurate, because over Dita, at least, it looks like just a bright red, color-wise. I don't know what it'd look like on its own. (Although actually it looks darn close to the pictures on Llarowe's website, so it might just look exactly the same.)

After the jump, the picture of my last round of new additions (not including the ones that just arrived!)

This is partly from CVS, partly from HEB, and then of course the Butter Londons from their 30% off sale. So (L-R across the top row and then the bottom) this is:

1. NYC Big City Dazzle, which I've already talked about
2. NYC Grand Central Station (clear)
3. NYC Fruit Punch - these last two were packaged together, and I picked this up because it looked like it might read as a foil, and because I'm a sucker for fuchsia/magenta shiny things
4. BL Knees Up, which I've been told looks like red foil wrapping paper (but I haven't tried ANY of the BL's yet, and I'm not sure how I've held out this long!)
5. Spoiled Deeper Dive - teal glitter
6. Revlon Scandalous, which I bought because somebody said it was a near-dupe for Bad Romance - as if I need another purple glitter!
7. BL "The Royals" collection - which I will say more about below
8. Khroma Fairy Dust (blending in with the background a bit on the far right)

So here's the description of the three Royals colors from the website:
Pitter Patter: Opaque, aubergine shimmer
No More Waity, Katie: Semi-sheer, greige lilac jelly glitter
Lillibet’s Jubilee: Opaque, silver lavender foil metallic

They came in the little bag which you can see in the picture, with a little gold keychain attached - you can see it draped over the Revlon bottle. It has a bird on it - a partridge with a crown, like on the website, maybe? Of the three colors, I think No More Waity, Katie and Lillibet's Jubilee were both LEs that were retired at some point, but have been unretired at least for the moment. Pitter Patter is in honor of the baby-to-come and is new. And of course I will be reporting back later on these as I try them!

(If you're wondering about my math up there in the title, I had one BL and now I have 5. Thus, 500%.)

Shopping frenzy

On my nails: Dita. Zoya calls it berry-toned; I would call it a very deep rose, myself; but either way it's one of those almost-reds that always intrigue me so much. (I toyed with the idea of keeping the remaining stripes one more day, but the blue was chipping a bit and really the stripes were starting to annoy me. I can only stand to be patriotic for a day or two a year, I guess!)

(Oh, yes: as usual, most Zoya links are affiliate links. Gotta get that disclaimer in there.)

Other linkyness:
Butter London's fall colors (pretty, but nothing's grabbing me as out-of-this-world)
A Zoya blog post about some reds I hadn't paid attention to (although I think Sarah may already be on my wish list) - I'm beginning to think I'm a bit obsessed with reds.

I got an e-mail about BL's fall colors because I ordered from them and then got on their mailing list in the process. I had no business ordering anything that expensive, much less four of them, even if they were having a 30% off sale. I have got to stop this. (Then I did a (small) Llarowe order after that and then yesterday I ordered some more Zoya because of their 4th of July deal. I did refrain from ordering from e.l.f. before their free shipping deal expired at midnight last night, but it was a close thing.)

(I did take a picture of the BL's and whatever else new I had around (that last bunch from the drugstore, I guess, which I have mentioned previously) but it doesn't seem to have made it onto Evernote so I'll have to post that later. I do have the picture I took last week of all my purples but it exhausts me just to look at it so that's going to have to be a post for later on as well.

However, here's some pictures I took in the big HEB at Victory Lakes the other day. It's a bit newer and a bit larger than the one I normally go to, and it has a couple of brands mine doesn't.

Nicka K (I'd never heard of this brand):

(I would have bought a bottle of this to try - it was only $3.99 - but none of these colors really grabbed me. There was a different display down at the bottom of another sidecap that was in too difficult a spot to try to photograph, but it was all pastels, and as we know, pastels are just not me.)

Jordana (maybe I'd vaguely heard of this one):

For some reason I didn't buy any of these either.

LA Girl nail art kits:

And last, for some reason they have a different Orchid display rack than the other location (mostly the same polishes, though):

Bloglovin'

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

(The link above is there because I was trying to figure out how to get the widget, which I have now gotten - see the sidebar! I have really been using Bloglovin myself lately to read other blogs, so I figured it was time to figure out how to make sure my blog was there too.)

(I sure do think they could have come up with a better name, though. Corny.)

Red (and also blue)

We'll start off with a list.
True reds in my collection, other than Knees Up:
Classic bright reds:
Chinoise (RBL)
Sooki (Zoya)
Red glitters:
Delilah (Zoya)
Red Carpet (SH Xtreme Wear)
Red foils:
An Affair in Red Square (OPI)
Bet On Red (Milani)
Karina (Zoya) (slightly darker than the other two)
Not-quite true reds:
Riley (Zoya) (darker and somewhat berry-toned)
Aurora (Zoya) (berry-toned scattered holo, but reads fairly red to my eye)

Shredded neon

When last heard from, on Sunday, I was wearing Black Illusion. I did like it (although I think I'll like it even better in the fall - it's just not a summer color!) but I went running off to work with no top coat on and inevitably, by the end of the day it was starting to chip. -- I had stuck a bottle of top coat in my purse, even, but never used it, so it didn't do me a bit of good by being there.

So I took that off Sunday night - and it came off extremely cleanly, as holos generally seem to do - and actually left my nails bare overnight, which I don't usually do. I was planning some sort of patriotic manicure for the 4th, but it seemed too early for that, so I decided to try that Maybelline ShatterShredded (it's a crackle, ok? but I keep forgetting what it is that Maybelline calls theirs) - Magenta Mirage. I don't really buy whites in the normal way of things, but there was a white mini in that Color Theory set from Christmas and I've been trying to remember to use those lately, so I used that. It was a normal white, in my limited experience of whites - that is, it was streaky. But it looked okay after two coats. So then I tried the crackle. I was trying to put it on very thin, and I probably need some more practice at it. Some nails came out really nice and some looked kinda crappy, and some didn't crack at all.