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.)