Trying the untrieds: Vice

Considering this was taken in the car, this picture is amazingly well-lighted:

I had actually painted my nails in the car, so I'm not going to apologize for the lack of clean-up. This is the kind of thing that happens when you live in one town and work in another - you end up grabbing the nail polish on the way out the door and doing your nails in a convenient parking lot. Totally unglamourous, but it works.

So this is Urban Decay Vice, which I've had since Christmas and never got around until trying until now. And it's lovely, but did I really need another violet-ish dark purple? No, not so much, obviously, or I wouldn't have taken six months to get around to wearing it.

Playing with polish: Ultimate Fandom part 1

Well, so I am in possession of an awful lot of Dollish minis, and I decided to start my experimentation with Look At The Flowers, Lizzie, which is the Walking Dead polish. I did a bit of dabbing onto one hand and I just couldn't get the level of green background color that Mishka got with two coats (scroll down toward the bottom of that entry for her swatches), so I decided it needed an undercoat. And I wanted it to be pale green, which was a problem in that I don't have much in the way of pale greens that aren't bright lime green. So what I ended up using was Mermaid's Dream. It's kind of an unconventional combination but I like it.

I put this on late last night and then I got up and washed my hair and went to work without ever stopping to clean this up at ALL, and it shows, but I'm going to let you see anyway:

This is Butter London base coat, 1 coat of Mermaid's Dream, two coats of Look At The Flowers Lizzie, and two coats of HK girl (which is presumably what I flooded my cuticles with so abominably). I did not stop to do much in the way of dabbing with this glitter, and you can tell that, too. I didn't end up getting much of the pink glitter out of the bottle and onto my nails, but I really don't care, I like the mottled green look that I ended up with. It doesn't look all that great in close-up, but from a distance it's very nice. I gather it's supposed to look like a meadow, and it's really a pretty good approximation of that.

Since this is a multi-fandom collection with a whopping 11 fandoms in question, I thought I would do a bit of a geek-cred test on myself with these. Do I get the reference? For this one, it's a no, or at least a "not exactly." I have not seen the Walking Dead episode in question, because I quit watching after Season 2. But I did watch for two seasons until the gore level got above my tolerance - plus my husband still watches, and he favored me with a fairly detailed recounting of the whole "Lizzie" business. It wasn't hard to figure out from those meadow pictures where the thing was headed, anyway.

Stash: neutral purples

I dumped all of my purples out on the bed, and sorted into a spectrum by what leaned red and what leaned blue, and these are the ones that were in the center. That's not to say they're entirely neutral, truly, but they seemed the most neutral, anyway.

• Essence Snow White Evil Queen (that is, there was a Snow White polish line and Evil Queen is the name of this polish)
• Orchid Island Couture, which desperately needed shaking up a little
• Ulta Celebutante
• Colorstay Amethyst
• Zoya Daul (which I think actually has a red-violet base but doesn't read that way)
• Zoya Savita, from the Matte Velvet collection
• Zoya Suri
• WnW Fastdry Buffy the Violet Slayer (here's a gratuitous Buffy/Angel gifset to go with it)
• Xtreme Wear Purple Potion
• Nfu Oh 51 (which is more neutral or more red-violet depending on the light, and I didn't really know where to put it, quite frankly)
• Julie G Holiday Gumdrops Sugar Plum Fairy
• Lippmann Let's Go Crazy
• Sinful Colors I Love You
• (upside-down) China Glaze Rendezvous With You
• Sinful Colors Winterberry

I really think some of that bottom row could and maybe should have gone in the blue-violet/gray-violet post from yesterday - especially Sugar Plum Fairy (more blue) and Rendezvous With You and Winterberry (both more gray). But oh well. And Nfu Oh 51 is just wacky. I think maybe it has a more neutral purple base and the flakes are more red, but honestly, I'm not completely sure I'm right about that, and I don't have the energy to look it up right now.

Anyway, there are some awesome polishes here. Two words: EVIL QUEEN. Plus the Lippmann and Oh 51 and the matte velvet - and I also adore both of those Sinful Colors on the bottom row, as it happens. (You can't tell it, but I Love You is actually pretty close to getting empty.)

Next up: red-violet.

Stash: blue-violet and blue-gray

The bluest and/or grayest out of my purple stash. Some of these look a little RV next to the BVs, but trust me, if you put them in with the red-violets and/or look at them in other lighting, you'll see they're not. The bluest ones are mostly at the bottom, here, but as is customary, I'm going top to bottom and left to right:

• Layla CE 39 ("Southern Lights")
• Butter London Lillibet's Jubilee*
• Insta-Dri Grape Going, a duochrome
• Zoya Mira
• Dollish Polish Deadly Nightshade mini
• BL No More Waity, Katie
• Zoya Lotus
• Megalast On a Trip
• RBL Purple Haze
• Revlon Not So Blueberry (scented)
• Sinful Colors Fiji
• S-OPI  I Don't Bite
• Diamond Strength Royal Invite
• Color Club - this is unlabeled, but I'm pretty sure it's Eternal Beauty

*In case somebody hasn't heard this story before: "Lillibet's Jubilee" refers to the Queen's Jubilee - Lillibet is a nickname of Elizabeth's. This, No More Waity, Katie, and Pitter Patter - which was in the previous entry - were released last summer as a set called "The Royals," and I bought them when BL was having a F&F sale - which should be coming up pretty soon, actually, if it's a regular thing. (I think that Pitter Patter was a genuine one-manufacturing-run LE - at least so far, to my knowledge - while Lillibet is an LE that's been re-released at least once or twice, and NMWK has been around for several years but I believe is now discontinued.) (And actually I checked BL's website and Lillibet's Jubilee is listed as a current color, but the other two are not.)

Man, I've got an awful lot of acronyms in that paragraph - do I need to put in a guide to my own acronyms? Some of them are more-or-less standard and some not so much. For the confused:
BL = Butter London
F&F = friends and family
LE = limited edition
NMWK = No More Waity, Katie (which was in honor of the royal engagement back several years ago now!)
and from the paragraph before:
RBL = Rescue Beauty Lounge
S-OPI = Sephora by OPI (you may see this elsewhere as just SOPI or sometimes $OPI)

(So. Back to topic.) Every time I talk about Layla, I wonder about their numbering/naming system - they don't put names on the bottles but apparently there ARE names, every time I've looked, I've found one. I think you can buy Layla at Target now in the US, right? so this will presumably come up more than it used to. Anyway, this one is a pretty unusual color - a dark blue-leaning, grayed-out purple. I can't think of anything else like it, at least. Then next we have Lillibet, which is also somewhat unusual, a very silvery pale purple (BL calls it lavender but I don't really see much in the way of blue tones to it. (Actually, maybe I need to stop saying these colors are unusual - this is just a range where a lot of these colors are going to be pretty unusual, especially the grayed-out ones, I think.) Next we have Grape Going, a blue/purple duochrome. I've had mine for a while, but I believe this one is still in the current collection. Zoya Mira is a medium, blue-toned purple creme. And rounding out the top row, we have Deadly Nightshade, a purple & blue glitter which was a Halloween color last year and possibly the year before too - seems like I read that somewhere at some point, anyway - so if you like it, look for it to maybe roll around again this fall. On the other hand, this is one where there are other polishes fairly similar, so I wouldn't go poisoning anybody to get hold of it (so to speak). (And yes, this was a Nightmare Before Christmas themed collection, that it was from, if there are any fans out there who are wondering. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw that name, myself.)

No More Waity, Katie may be discontinued but it still has a page on BL's website. They call it a greige with lilac glitter. I've always thought it read as a very greyed-out lavender, but anyway, it's a fabulous color, much better than it sounds. Zoya Lotus is another very subtle color - a dusty blue-violet with a lot of pinkish shimmer. On A Trip is sort of a traditional lavender, a creme. And Purple Haze is in that same sort of range, but a bit dustier.

On the bottom row, there's Not So Blueberry, which is, well, not blue at all, but a shimmery, slightly blue-leaning violet. Then we have three blue-violets with shimmer, but none of them are dupes at all: Fiji is darker and more sheer. I Don't Bite is lighter and even more shimmer-packed. And Royal Invite is also really packed, but with multicolor shimmer, in this case. And then last of all, we have Eternal Beauty, one of Color Club's line of strong linear holos. It's stunning, and I'm not even really a fan of holos.

Orchid of the Year

Remember when I did a whole post about Radiant Orchid, and what color was that anyway? Well, here is Lynderella's answer, and man, it's really beautiful.

(Note that this first picture seems to lean more blue than the one below. I think it's the one below that's probably the more accurate rendering of the color.)

I even got halfway decent pictures. This is over Zoya Mira, which was just what was handy and seemed reasonably close to the right color.* It's actually one coat of glitter on most nails and two on a couple - I did a second coat on like one nail on each hand and then I couldn't tell the difference anyway, so I stopped. Bonus points if you can figure out which is which, because I'm not even sure.

This is now the most expensive polish I own, but I don't even care, because I love it.

Added: Here is the link to Lynnderella but I think I literally bought the last bottle of this. (At least, so eBay told me.)

*I wouldn't want you to think I plan things. Because anybody who knows me very well at all can tell you I don't.

Stash: dark purples

It's so hard to tell one dark purple from another that I reswatched everything, using the other half of that wheel I showed yesterday.

Here are the bottles:

• OPI Who Are You Wearing? (which was originally from the 2007 Holiday in Hollywood collection) (one coat)
• Revlon Moon Candy Orbit (one coat plus a bit of the glitter)
• SH Salon Plum It (two coats)
• OPI Lincoln Park After Dark (the mini in the center - from a Chicago collection several years ago now, I believe) (one coat)
• Color Show Amethyst Couture, from the LE Brocades collection
• Sephora By OPI Just A Little Dangerous (two coats)
• Butter London Pitter Patter, which was an LE release in honor of the baby prince last year
• Jet Set Nightlife (one coat)
• Hard Candy Vinyl, a mini (one coat) (this is the long-gone "old" Hard Candy incarnation)
• Urban Decay Vice (one coat)
• Ulta Empty Stocking, from a "Wicked Wonderland" set some years ago (one coat)

If anything, they look somewhat lighter in this picture than they do most of the time, but that's probably a good thing, since you can tell more about the colors than if they looked darker.

Not too many of these colors are widely available; either they were limited edition in the first place (the Color Show Brocades, Pitter Patter, Vice, Empty Stocking), they're older colors that are now retired (Who Are You Wearing? and Orbit) or they're from entire lines that are retired (SH Salon, Sephora by OPI, the old versions of Hard Candy and Jet Set). Actually now that I look at them, I think the only one of these that's a current, widely available color is Lincoln Park After Dark, which is popular and a classic and probably isn't going anywhere any time soon. Vice is not terribly old and might still be obtainable even though it was LE, as are all of Urban Decay's polishes these days. (The Brocades came out around the same time, last fall, but I haven't seen hide nor hair of them since they were first released; they seem to have been snapped up and disappeared completely. Still, it's a drugstore polish and it's possible there are bottles of those floating around, too. I haven't poked around on the internet to see.)

But the availability question is not going to stop me from talking about these polishes just the same. Here's the wheel, in the same order:

Who Are You Wearing? is very much in the "blurple" camp. So is Orbit, although it's not quite as obvious. The glittery end of this polish "wand" is almost completely dried-up, but I smeared a little bit on the tip there on the wheel so you could get some idea what it looked like. I remember that back when I first tried this out I thought that by the time I got the whole thing on, base and glitter, that it looked completely blue and not purple at all. But the base on its own looks more purple than blue, I think. I tried to put these in order going from blue-violet to red-violet, and the next few are maybe more neutral purples, although Lincoln Park After Dark, in particular, goes on so dark even with one coat that it's hard to tell. Plum It, LPAD, Amethyst Couture, and Just a Little Dangerous all seem to be pretty neutral, though. And maybe Nightlife, too - at least in the lighting in this picture it looks like it - but I'm holding this wheel up in front of me as I write this, and in the light in this room I can't see that effect I see above, where Pitter Patter looks more red than the two on either side of it. I suspect that it's true, that it's a little redder, but I don't think you're going to be able to tell most of the time. And Vinyl almost looks like a dark-wine color in the light here. On the whole I don't think I did a terribly good job of ordering these, at least on the right-hand side. I think it's Pitter Patter and Vinyl that lean the most red - but I also think most normal (by which I mean non-color-obsessed) people are going to look at these and not see much difference, because they're all so dark.

Half a wheel

This is everything I bought on our recent trip up north, plus some layering that includes a polish I'd bought a while back and forgot about for a while. I didn't number these, so we'll just go left to right:

• Studio M Sexy Siren, 2 coats
• 1 coat of Jordana Crystal Glitter (which is the one I bought and promptly forgot I had) over 1 coat of Bonita Peonies Gone Wild
• 1 coat of Jesse's Girl Firefly over 1 coat of Peonies Gone Wild (this is much more subtle than Crystal Glitter, but very pretty - sort of a shimmer with some gold in it)
• Peonies Gone Wild on its own - I think this is 2 coats
• Julie G Butterflies and Rosebuds - I'm wearing this now and it's really pretty - I would call it sort of a blackened red-violet microglitter. I think this is also two coats but I'm wearing three, so that may be why it looks somewhat darker than in this picture
• Studio M Purple Medallion, which picked up a much more blue-toned sparkle in this picture than I've noticed it having in real life
• Wild Shine Deception, the LE jelly, 2 coats
• Bonita Royal Highness, 2 coats
• a layering combo of Deception over Purple Medallion over Royal Highness, as seen here

On that last one, I see that I didn't even remember to mention in the other entry that I had put Royal Highness on the bottom - it was just what I had handy to put on the bottom of all this, since I wasn't sure how opaque Purple Medallion was, exactly. I don't really think it made much difference with the final color.

So here's an iPhone picture that actually looks pretty decent, for once. This is Butterflies and Rosebuds:

I kinda hate that name (maybe she meant it ironically, do you think? I never watched "Julie G"s videos, I don't know what she's like) but anyway, I really do like this color. I spent the last year kind of avoiding all the bright-pink kind of colors, but apparently my love for them has come back, because, well, just look at that wheel picture above. I didn't even realize it, but practically everything I bought was in a berry/orchid sort of range, except for the one blue.

Playing with polish, and buying it, too

I am very broke since I had to take an unpaid week off to go on our trip. So I shouldn't be buying nail polish, and yet I have ordered two different expensive things in the last week. I ordered the Dollish Ultimate Fangirl Collection - for which see Accio Lacquer's swatches here and here, and also the Dollish website where they're still available, I believe, at least for now. I didn't completely lose my mind, though, I did at least order minis. Then yesterday I ordered my first-ever Lynnderella polish, too. (Apparently I have not bought anything on eBay in over three years. I had some doing to even log in.) It was the "Color of the Year" one, which I couldn't resist.

Now I'm looking at Pacifica - these haven't been reviewed a lot yet that I can find but here's one review. I hadn't paid attention to Pacifica previously, but apparently they are not new as a cosmetics company, only the polish is new. Here's their explanation of 7 free: "is formulated without parabens, phthalates (dibutyl phthalate), toluene, xylene, camphor, formaldehyde, resin, and animals." I think they needed to work on that wording a bit more, but I guess "without animals" means no animal products and presumably no animal testing, either. So vegan and cruelty-free, as well as without a number of harmful chemicals. One thing that's on my list to do someday is to look into the chemistry of  nail polish, and how they make it if they don't use the traditional methods. (Pacifica sent an e-mail about a free nail polish, which was why I was poking around, but I think I'm going to be good in this case and pass.)


OK, so, pictures, none of them especially good, but I think you all know by now not to come here looking for perfect pictures, right?

First of all, here is a layering thing I did on the way home using Wild Shine Deception (which is a jelly and thus did great for this) over Studio M Purple Medallion. (Purple Medallion is one of the two glitters I bought at Meijer in Kentucky - the other one was Sexy Siren, a bright cyan color. Purple Medallion really reads more reddish and not so much purple at all, although it definitely does have violet tones to it.)

Deception is very violet/orchid-toned, so you come out with a sort of bright-orchid with glitter which I really love. The only problem I had with it was that it didn't wear at all well - you can see on my middle finger there where it's got more than minor wear going. (I have other problems with this picture, having to do with the weird color that my skin came out and how fat my fingers look, but I won't go into that any further.)

Then I also finally got around to wearing Editorial, the Color Club Peridot-style duochrome. I did get flashes of green with it, but mostly it just read as sort of a cool brassy color in most lights I was in yesterday. Here are some pictures I snapped in the car, first partial shade and then sun:

I have fairly substantial ridges on my nails, but they're not too terribly evident here. I believe I used Zoya Get Even as a base, but even so the ridges were still showing pretty badly, so I used a technique I had seen on Pinterest, I think, where you use first matte topcoat and then regular. I won't say it worked miracles but it did seem to help. It also looked pretty cute matte. (The sequence here was, I believe, Nail Nutrition, Get Even, 2 coats of Editorial, NYC Matte topcoat, HK Girl topcoat.)

Next up may be Julie G Butterflies and Rosebuds - which is a disgustingly girly name, I think, so that tells you that I really liked the color!

Playing with polish: Peonies Gone Wild & Firefly

I seem to have been half-asleep when I did this manicure, and I tried to clean it up this morning but it's still kind of a mess:

I'm not sure how much you can tell there but it's actually really pretty (and not so noticeably messy) in real life. It's one of the Bonita polishes I bought yesterday, Peonies Gone Wild, with Jesse's Girl Firefly on top.

I was not familiar with Bonita other than a few pictures I think I've seen online; here's pictures of the whole spring collection. Apparently it's exclusive to Rite Aid. It's pretty and shimmery but I wanted more shimmer, so I put Firefly on top - and then I proceeded to spill about half the bottle (of Firefly, I mean) on my luggage and my mother-in-law's carpet. Yeah. Somebody remind me of this the next time I want to do my nails under the influence of sleeping pills.

Here's the whole lineup of what I bought at Rite Aid (RiteAid? apparently the name does not properly have a hyphen in it, but is it properly one word or two? I've seen it both ways): Julie G Butterflies & Rosebuds, a pinky-red glitter; Bonita Peonies Gone Wild, as above; Bonita Royal Highness, an orchid shimmer; WnW Wild Shine Deception, which I think is from the LE spring collection; and Firefly, also as mentioned above. Today in suburban Cincinnati (on the Kentucky side, in Florence, if you want to know), we made a foray into Meijer and I bought a couple of Studio M glitters. Just as I did yesterday, I failed to write down the names, but they were a very bright cyan blue and a sort of a red-violet, as I recall.

(Tomorrow we'll be in Tennessee and Arkansas, headed home. I don't know of any more interesting places to buy nail polish on the way, which is probably just as well, because it'll be a long haul even without stopping to shop.)

Another Rite-Aid visit

Well, first of all, Rite-Aid had Gel Envy, which I hadn't previously seen in person. I can't get the embed from Instagram to work so here's a link. However, the Gel Envy colors didn't grab me so I didn't even register what the price was. Instead, I bought several other things:

I don't have the names of these handy - I'm at McDonald's (using their wi-fi) and the bottles are still in the car - so I'll have to tell you those later. But it's a Jesse's Girl, a Wild Shine which might be LE, 2 Bonitas (a brand which I've never tried but shimmered in a way that really attracted me), and a Julie G glitter.

(You may notice that this picture was actually taken IN Rite-Aid. This counter right next to the Gel Envy had lots of room and it was out of sight of the register, so I went for it. Bonus: the light was really good.)

Added: I managed to get the picture that's in the link above onto the laptop, so here it is:

(And the price seems to be $8-something, which is about what I would've guessed.)

Stash: bright pinks

Unless I find a ton of pinks I missed, this is the last of the what, 6 posts of pinks and reds. (Last for this round, anyway. When I find it's changed significantly or I have a lot of adds, I may do all this over again.)

I'm doing the thing again where I'm sort of stairstepping down and each little small row is by itself:
Top row: Orly Razzmatazz mini, Zoya Ali, Serum No 5 Sunset Flare (which I thought read pretty pink on the nail, although it's a coral pink to be sure!)
Second row: L'Oreal Jet Set Hasty, NYC Long-Wearing which is mislabeled but definitely fuchsia, Clinique Hi Sweetie mini
Third row:  Color Club Gimme A Great Big Kiss (which is scented), unnamed mini
Fourth row: Revlon Strawberry Electric, old Colorstay Continuous Cranberry, Zoya Juicy, Zoya Dita
Bottom row: China Glaze Santa Red My List, Zoya Kimber (upside down), SOPI Shopping Frenzy, Zoya Lilith (which has duochrome hints), Color Club Raspberry Red (which is another scented one)

(I always want to make that Clinique polish's name into "Hello Sweetie" - which must then be said in River Song's voice).

They've changed Colorstay bottles so many times I can't really tell you if the one above is the first or second iteration - or if there was some other version at some point that I don't even know about. There were at least two bottle designs before the one that is now in the clearance bins, I'm sure of that. Which makes the new Colorstay Gel Envy - which I haven't even seen in person yet - at least Colorstay version #4.

Still to come: purples. Man, I have a ton of purples, too.

Stash: Pale-to-medium pinks

To recap in case you weren't following along last week, I posted several stash pictures. I was rearranging my pinks, reds, and oranges all into one big box, and in the process I took pictures. Last week, I showed off reds, near-reds, and violet-leaning pinks, now we have the lighter ones here. It will undoubtedly be immediately obvious that I am not a big fan of very-pale pinks, because most of these are not in fact very pale at all. Only the bottom two rows are really what I would categorize as "very pale" and even a couple of those are iffy.

Top row: essence colour & go Ultimate Pink, Polished by KPT Naughty and Nice, piCture pOlish flirt, Zoya Lara, Essie Status Symbol (upside down), Rimmel Lasting Finish Pro English Rose
Middle row: Dollish Redrum, L'Oreal Departure, OPI Japanese Tea Garden, Nostalgic Girls On Film, Zoya Shelby
Bottom row: OPI Aphrodite's Pink Nightie, unlabeled pink glitter 1, unlabeled OPI (I think Bubble Bath?), unlabeled pink glitter 2, Revlon Parfumerie Pink Pineapple

The very-pale ones are mostly either really old (the two full-size OPIs, the L'Oreal) or came in a set (all of the minis, & the Parfumerie also). The exceptions are the Nostalgic - I think I just liked the name, because I don't normally do those creamy confetti polishes - and Shelby. Mostly I think they just don't look good on me, and I'm not sure why. I do know that I used to wear these two OPIs layered - I thought I liked that better than either alone. The only untrieds here are the 3 minis on the bottom row, plus the Parfumerie and I think Girls On Film.

I talked about Naughty and Nice not long ago - it's a thermal, and its "warm" color is paler than the bottle color. Of these medium pinks my favorites are probably Status Symbol and Redrum (which as I have speculated before, is probably meant to be a blood-color, but comes out more like a slightly-rusty rose color instead.) Flirt is almost a one-coater, which is great, but I've had chipping issues, so not so great overall.