Colors for Valentine's Day: a nail wheel

Pinks and reds, the classic colors this time of year. Obviously I'm not suggesting that everybody has to wear pink and red from now til Valentine's Day, because (a) you would tell me to go stuff myself and you'd be right to, and (b) I'd hate it if everybody did it, and it's not something I do myself consistently. I do it when I feel like it, but this year, I've been out of the pink mood and haven't worn it much in months, or red either, and now they're both starting to sound appealing again.

Now I have to admit that I like pink and red partly because they look good on me. I wear pink and red tops a lot, and I have a ton of pink and red nail polish because of that, too. But red looks good on almost everybody, and everybody can probably wear some shade of pink, too. So I did a nail wheel with some representative polishes from my stash. I only did a few reds, because even though it's not actually true that all reds look alike, still, there's not as much variety of reds as there are pinks. Also, I found out the hard way that very pale pinks just don't show up well on a nail wheel, so I just skipped them this time around except for the one confetti polish. But I tried to hit a range of colors in between there!

I know putting the little heart on the wheel is corny, but it was mostly so I wouldn't have to write VALENTINE'S DAY across it. (You may can see that I drew it in green Sharpie first, like the numbers, then I went and doodled around it with a fine-tip Sharpie, because, well, I was bored. All this pink is giving me flashbacks to junior high or something.) -- Maybe my own defensiveness about this is something we should discuss, actually, because sometimes my reaction to pink is weird. As I've already said, I really like pink, I wear pink clothes with great regularity and pink nail polish even more, but I seem to react oddly to an excess of pink. I usually won't wear Strobe Light because it trips that "too much pink" trigger in me every time, and that's maybe partly why I look at my own wheel with the silly heart on it and roll my eyes. Maybe I think pink is best in small doses.

So my issues aside, these are all polishes that came out of my own stash. Obviously, one at a time (or two, if I'm layering), I like them just fine!

1. Purple Poodle (Orly)
2. Santa Red My List (China Glaze)
3. Lilith (Zoya)
4. Alegra (Zoya)
5. Juicy (Zoya)
6. She Loves Me, I Love Him Not (Orchid)
7. Peru-B-Ruby (OPI)
8. Riley (Zoya)
9. Red Carpet (Xtreme Wear)
10. EmpoweRED (Rococo) with its matching toner on tip
11. Dita (Zoya)
12. Japanese Tea Garden with Aphrodite's Pink Nightie on tip (both OPI)
13. Japanese Tea Garden (OPI) with Pink Pineapple (Revlon Parfumerie) on tip
14. Status Symbol (Essie)
15. Redrum (Dollish Polish)
16. Rory (Zoya)
17. Shelby (Zoya)
18. Lara (Zoya)
19. Girls On Film (Nostalgic)
20. English Rose (Rimmel) with Hard Candy Jailbait on tip (I misidentified it earlier as Shy)

A ton of Zoyas here, but I had a good range of Zoya pinks to choose from, and Zoya hardly ever discontinues anything, so they're all still available, far as I know. Not all of these polishes are still in production, though, and I'll note what I know about that as we go down the list. I tried to concentrate on ones that are at least still possible to find. I should note that I did get the one China Glaze free (as I end up saying at least twice a week), but everything else here I paid for.

We're starting with 19, because that's how I took the pictures, I don't remember why!

(19) is Girls On Film - which says "temporarily unavailable" on Nostalgic's website, so its availability is unclear. But there are tons of these confetti polishes around so it's possible that there's a substitute for it from another brand, if not. (Ooh, here's a really pretty candidate!) This is the only one of these confettis in a creamy base that I own, and I wasn't sure about it at first, but it keeps growing on me. (20) is Rimmel English Rose, which is sort of a slightly-boring rose pink that I think of as somewhat old-fashioned, but it's still pretty. I wanted to try Jailbait, the Hard Candy, over something, so I picked the Rimmel, and it looked pretty cute, I think. ShyJailbait is an old Hard Candy color (as you can see, it has a completely different bottle from the ones that are currently available) so if it's still available from HC at all, it probably has a different name. But again, there are lots of topper sort of things like this around. And then coming around to (1) we have Purple Poodle, which is not really purple but magenta, with purple microglitter. This is a current color, as far as I know - I bought mine at Sally Beauty just last week.

Closeup of the wheel:

This is 2 to 5:

(2) is Santa Red My List, which despite its name is pink. (Purple Poodle is not purple and Santa Red is not red. I think there's a trend here.) It has a nice foil-ish finish on it that I like, and this is from the holiday collection, which I have seen around in recent weeks, so it's possibly still findable. (3) Lilith is a duochrome, and actually is not showing up on the Zoya website, now that I said that Zoya rarely discontinues things. It has a blue flash that's interesting, but other than that it's similar to a million other fuchsias. (...and for the rest of this entry I'm going to stop talking about alternatives unless I know something more definite, or this is going to get really repetitive.) (4) Alegra has a similar finish to the China Glaze - it's a packed microglitter - but it reads more as a red-violet on the wheel. Then (5) is Juicy, which is different because it's a sheer. They don't call it a jelly, but that doesn't mean you couldn't play around with it and do the kind of things you can do with a jelly. (Hmm, I might try a jelly fade!)

Closeups, which overlap a bit with the last one:

2 and 4 look pretty similar in this picture, but looking at them in real life (2) the China Glaze reads more as a reddish-pink, while (4) Alegra reads much more towards purple.

 6 to 9:

(6) is Orchid She Loves Me, I Love Him Not, which is a very packed microglitter. It's very pretty and sort of violet-leaning, and if you like it you may need a swap-buddy in Texas, since Orchid is only sold at HEB and HEB is only in Texas. (Maybe they'll have a sale soon and I can stock up!) Anyway, (7) is OPI Peru-B-Ruby, which is an almost-red but leans pink, and it's nice and shiny and pretty and I think still available. (8) is Zoya Riley, which is a deep raspberry color that's a bit different - notice in the wheel pictures that Riley actually reads darker than either of the reds here. And (9) is the Xtreme Wear, Red Carpet, which is a nice, fairly sheer, glittery red, which looks like it has a hint of violet in it at 2 coats but turns more obviously red with more coats. I believe I'm on my second bottle of this one.

Here's 5-8 getting darker and darker.

10 and 11:

OK, so I wasn't sure about this Rococo duo and how well it worked - it's called Empowered or EmpoweRED, and it's a really pretty red along with a toner you use to darken it. I tried doing skittles, and it definitely does make it darker. I did my whole hand with the red and left my thumb plain and did 1, 2, 3, and 4 coats of toner on successive fingers, and you can tell the difference. It just isn't a dramatic difference. I've been on a quest for the perfect blackened red, and this isn't it, but still it's pretty. My pictures of the skittles didn't come out but let's see if you can see it on the closeups below. By itself it's on the light side of red; with a lot of toner, it's more on the dark side (*insert your own Star Wars joke*). (But you can't see much of this effect, at least on my monitor, so you'll have to take my word for it, but it's there.) Oh, and then as an afterthought to this picture, we have (11) Dita - which is actually a pretty awesome color, it's somehow the most tasteful bright pink you can imagine. Zoya calls it a "saturated purple-toned berry-red creme." In some ways, it is the perfect bright pink.

It annoys me that you can't see the toner effect here, because you could when I took the picture!

12 and 13:

12 and 13 have the same base: OPI Japanese Tea Garden, which I noticed was for sale on some fairly major website I was cruising lately, so it is still available. I'm not so sure about Aphrodite's Pink Nightie, which is what is on top of it on (12). (But again, frosty pale pink, there are probably a million of them.) I think I mentioned this a month or so ago when I was doing my original pink wheels - these two polishes were one of my very early experiments in layering, and I still think they go really well together. But Pink Pineapple looks pretty good over it in (13), too, so eh.

12 and 13 are visible both in the last close-up picture and in this one too. But I think you can see them a bit better here:

(14) is the aforementioned Strobe Light (mentioned wayyyy up at the top), in this case over another classic, Essie Status Symbol. Bottle picture coming up:

In my experience, you can stick pretty much any pink under Strobe Light; it's so flashy nobody's going to notice the difference. Strobe Light is actually over ONE coat of Status Symbol; then I went, "Oh wait, it needs another coat! and just put the second coat over the bottom half where there was no glitter. I wouldn't do this on a real mani, but on the nail wheel it looks surprisingly ok. Status Symbol was still an Essie core color the last time I looked, but they have other colors that are very close, too. (Watermelon springs to mind.) (15) is Dollish Redrum, which may not be findable - there are other pink holos around, but none with as fun of a name.

Next we have this very girly trio of Zoyas - if you're not already acquainted with Rory, Shelby, and Lara, and you like pale pinks, you should be:

Rory is a microglitter, and slightly more purple. Shelby is paler than Lara. Shelby is really too pale for my coloring; I mostly wear it for layering. (Rory looks great over it!)

I happened to go leafing through my spoons while I was taking pictures yesterday, or I would not have remembered that those three all came from the same collection:

Beach & Surf has to be one of Zoya's all time best-selling collections. I seem to recall almost buying the whole dozen at one point, but I settled for these six. (The other three are Reagan, Carly, and Kimber.)

Aaand that's actually it, because we started with 19. I can't imagine that anybody who hates pink has gotten this far, so I won't apologize again for the pink overload. If you do like pink, maybe this has given you some ideas!

I'd love to hear feedback! Tell me your theories about why pink is so polarizing. Tell me your favorite pinks. (Two that come to mind that I don't own that everybody seems to love: Xtreme Wear Rockstar Pink and Katy Perry's Teenage Dream. Both glitters, so that may be why I have resisted thus far.) Beat me up for subjecting you to all this pink, if you like...

(And to repeat my disclaimer: nobody's paying me anything to say all this. There is not so much as an affiliate link in this entire entry. I did get the one China Glaze for free, but it was a straight-up blog giveaway and not given to me for review, even!)