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.)