Echarpe de Seda

I have never gotten anything before that I thought was a halfway decent picture of Echarpe de Seda, but this one is probably as good as I'm likely to get:

I don't usually do pictures with flash, because most of the time I don't have good luck with them, but I used a macro setting this time and it apparently made a lot of difference. (Surely I've tried that before, but who knows? I'm not exactly scientific about my picture-taking.)

You can see there's a little bit of tipwear, but then I've had it on since Friday. If you're not familiar with this brand, it's Brazilian and it's available from Llarowe in the U.S. I have two bottles of it - the other one is Stiletto, a green creme, and I really love both of them. If you're looking at them for the first time, though, note that they're not as much of a bargain as their $5-8 price-tags make them sound, because the bottles are quite small. As you can see in the picture, they're 8ml, which is just slightly over half the size of a "standard" half-ounce bottle size (which is more or less equivalent to 15ml). So they're minis, for practical purposes - but so are a lot of brands these days. These "special glitz" jellies with scattered holo bits are $6, and I've been enjoying this one so much I actually went back to Llarowe's website this afternoon and ordered a couple more. (I ordered V.I.P., which is orange, and Vestido de Gala, which is burgundy. Near as I can figure out, that last name loosely translates to "ball gown" or maybe it's more like "formalwear" - and Echarpe de Seda is "silk scarf" so I guess there's sort of a clothing theme there.)

This is three coats. I believe I put Nail Nutrition and Chick basecoat underneath, and Hardwear topcoat on top. -- It occurred to me that I forget to use Hardwear, because it tends to be shuffled toward the back of my treatment-products box, and yet I like it and really ought to be using it more. Partly I think this is because it's Butter London so it's in a nicely squared-off bottle and fits in well with everything else, where the larger round bottles like HK Girl and Seche tend to pop out toward the front!

Polish for fall

Miss Holly Berries made a video of her favorite polishes for fall, and while I am certainly not going to follow suit (videos? me? I don't think so), it did remind me that there are always things that I think I ought to wear in any given season that I forget about. So the idea is that I am going to go back through blog posts and tweets and such and find the polishes that I need to wear in the next couple of months. (I made lists for the holidays and for Halloween, while I was at it, but I'll save those for later!)

Note 1: This is just what I have in my personal collection. These are not colors that you can still get hold of easily, in some cases.
Note 2: I wrote color descriptions off the top of my head without consulting other sources, even though in some cases I haven't seen these polishes for, well, nearly a year, so the accuracy of those descriptions may not be 100%.

Fall Metallics/Glitters:
Pumpkin Spice (Xtreme Wear - coppery brown glitter)
Cougar Attack (WnW Fast Dry - fairly similar to the one above, copper/brown)
Traffic Stopper Copper (Sephora By OPI - copper glitter topper)
Seared Bronze (Cover Girl - dark bronze microglitter)
I Only Shop Vintage (Sephora By OPI - bronze)
Two Cent (Sonia Kashiuk - copper-penny metallic)
Crush On Lava (Hard Candy - coppery pink)
Rage (Orly - rose-gold)
Intergalactic Space (Orly - mixed glitters)
Rockin' Renaissance (Finger Paints - golden-brown texture)

Earth-Tones
Forbidden Fudge (SH Nailgrowth Miracle)
Rich In Heart (Sinful - warm brown)
Cinna-man Of My Dreams (Nicole By OPI Gumdrops - textured cinnamon brown)
Flagstone Rush (Orly - slightly metallic brown)
Decades of Shades (OPI - medium brown)
Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal (Dollish - medium brown with shimmer)
I Knead Sour-Dough (OPI - reddish-brown creme)
Crushed (Xtreme Wear - bright orange)
Honey You Should See Me In A Crown (Dollish - orange glitter)
The Fires Of Gallifrey (LynB - orange chunky glitter)
Glitter Matters (Funky Fingers - orange/yellow matte glitter)
Sunset Flare (Serum No 5 - orange/pink duochrome)
I Volunteer As Tribute (Dollish - earthtone glitter in dark jelly base)

Burgundy, Dark Red 
Dark Side of The Moon (Lippmann - vampy dark burgundy)
Jem (Zoya - burgundy-ish)
Kierra (Zoya - purplish  burgundy)
Karina (Zoya - darker red)
Vixen (Revlon - vampy red)
Ruby Without A Cause (Sephora By OPI - wine)
Bold Sangria (Colorstay - wine)
Elle's Spell (Barielle - dark red flakie)

Purple
Suri (Zoya)
Pitter Patter (Butter London)
Deep Purple (Xtreme Wear)
Purple Rush (Milani)
Vice (Urban Decay - dark purple shimmer)
Savita (Zoya Matte Velvet - dark purple)
Just A Little Dangerous (Sephora By OPI - metallic purple)
Carter (Zoya Pixie Dust - red-violet)
Private I (SH Diamond Strength - dark RV?)
Mira (Zoya - slightly grayed purple)
Daul (Zoya - purple topper)
#51 (Nfu Oh - purple flakie)
Rendezvous With You (China Glaze - purple shimmer)

Neutrals & Grayed-out Colors
Grey Area (Xtreme Wear - grey/taupe) (greige? I dunno)
Wet Cement (Xtreme Wear - cement gray)
London (Zoya Pixie Dust - gray)
The Symbiote (Chirality - gray holo)
Slate (RGB - dark gray shimmer)
Gray By Gray (Complete Salon Manicure - gray with hints of blue)
Cynthia (Zoya - blue-gray)
Lotus (Zoya - purple)
Gray's Anatomy (WnW Fastdry - sheer oil-slick gray)
Slick Black (SH Triple Shine - black microglitter)

Other Darker Colors
Montana Sky (Colors By Llarowe - dark blue w/glitter)
Midnight Cami (Essie - dark blue)
NailRobi (Color Club - royal blue with a hint of violet)
Quick Jeanius (SH InstaDri - dark cornflower)
Wavy Blue (SH Triple Shine - navy microglitter)
Blue Whale (LynB - blue chunky glitter)
Alcatraz Rocks (OPI Liquid Sand - dark blue texture)
Mesmerize (Essie - med blue)
Miss Universe (Essence - indigo blue)
Kale (Chirality - dark green holo
Enchanted Forest (Nyx Professional - green glitter)
Rain Forest (Revlon Colorstay - dark green w/glitter)
Deeper Dive (Spoiled - teal glitter)
Shake Your Money Maker (Lippmann - green & gold glitter)
Stiletto (Jade - green creme)

(This is one of my stash pictures from a few months back - most of these are in this list but not necessarily all!)

Walmart beauty box

I rarely set foot in Walmart these days, so a beauty box from them is frankly not something I would normally think about buying, But I read about it on Nouveau Cheap, and hey, it's almost-free (they call it free + $5 shipping) so I figured, why not? It's quarterly, so it's $20 for the whole year. For that price, if you get a couple of useful things out of it, then you've gotten your money's worth.

Here's my pictures, but you should probably know right off the bat that there are at least two versions of this box - one for older subscribers and one for younger. I am just to the age where giving me generous samples of moisturizers to try out is exactly what I want, so this worked out perfectly as far as I'm concerned.

There's nothing really fancy about this box, inside or out:

The contents were wrapped in tissue, for what that's worth - I figured you could live without a picture of tissue paper, though.

This is the inside, with the products propped up a little so you can see more of them.

Here's a different angle with a little better shot of the products:

This was the full contents:
Revitalift Deep-Acting Moisturizer - .5 oz.
Olay Regenerist Micro-Sculpting Cream - .5 oz.
Cover Girl Continuous Color Lipstick, full-size (3g) in Iced Mauve
Secret Clinical Strength Invisible Solid - 1.6 oz.
Clear Scalp & Hair shampoo and conditioner samples, single-use packets (.28 oz each)
Couture Couture perfume sample (by, guess who, Juicy Couture) - .5 oz spray tube

I might never get around to using the perfume sample much - I did try it once, it smells good but it's very strong, and I like my scents very light - but the rest of this I'll almost certainly use. The lipstick is a good color for me, and neither one of these moisturizers are ones I've tried before. Half an ounce doesn't sound like that much, but with moisturizer it's a pretty fair amount of product - I would think it would last me a couple of months, at least. Definitely enough to figure out whether I'm interested in buying more.

So I'm happy with what I got. I should say that I've heard about some issues other people have had. For one thing, there was some mention of possible issues with the security of the website - which Walmart says is groundless, I'm told - but I had bought mine by the time I heard about that, so it was a little late for me, in any case. I've also seen some complaints about shipping time & lack of shipping notices, but I got notices and my box came quite promptly. Maybe I just got lucky.

(Added: here's an update from Nouveau Cheap concerning some of the issues mentioned above, and here's the actual link to Walmart's page for this.)

NOTDs etc

Man, I'm three manis behind...

Right now I have on Alcatraz Rocks, mattified. I always forget how much I like this polish but otherwise I don't really have all that much to say about it!

Before that, Briarwood (A England) which was really pretty, but chipped rather quickly. Maybe holos and my body chemistry just don't mesh, because I always seem to have problems with them chipping.

Before that I had on Once Upon A Time, one of my latest round of Chick Polishes. It was really pretty and shimmery - it reminds me of a flaky, actually, although it's not. I think that's because I keep seeing an orangey flash to it like a lot of flakies have. I made a big mess when I was putting it on - I was going to put black under it, and then I couldn't lay my hands on my bottle of Black Creme when I was ready to do that, so I grabbed a gray instead - Hard As Nails Steely Gaze, which is a, well, steel-gray, more or less. I ended up doing two coats of OUAT, and then somewhere along the line something didn't set properly, and I managed to take all the polish off an entire nail, more or less, on the way to work. Luckily I had brought OUAT with me, so I put three coats of OUAT on that nail, and honestly, the difference wasn't all that noticeable. I had seen some pictures over black and without that looked very different, but actually there was somewhat less of a difference than I expected. The difference may well be in the number of coats you use, though. By three coats it's pretty opaque.

I don't know if it's a pronounced enough theme in those three manis to be noticeable, but I pulled out a whole shoebox-sized box of stuff from my stash that I consider "fall colors" - the obvious stuff like oranges and browns but also burgundies and darker blues and greens and so forth. I'm pretty sure there's enough stuff there to do a mani a day from now til Christmas if I wanted to, and I haven't even pulled out the most specifically Halloween things yet. (You may see an entry about this. Also one about my Walmart Beauty Box, even though the one I got had no nail polish in it.)

It was the first day of fall today, I hear, and the temperature was a balmy 84 degrees. I'm not kidding about the "balmy" part because we'd been hanging around in the 90s, still, before that. It totally felt like fall to me today.


Part of my new stash additions:

I Want To Believe, Sugar Sugar (and now I have The Archies stuck in my head), and Ice Dream. I was thinking of the two Sinfuls as being Christmas kind of colors, but actually suddenly red has started looking very attractive to me so it's possible you might see this on my nails sooner. Or maybe I'll start with something more oxblood.

New purchases: Dollish, Chick, and more

I'm in between manicures right now, all I have on my nails is treatment stuff - Nail Nutrition to be exact. I meant to get a picture of the last manicure to show you guys and I never did. That was Megalast Careful, It's Vine-tage (which seems to me to be an awfully labored pun) for a day or so, and then I put Travel in Colour on top of it, as I keep doing lately. In fact I love TinC so much that I went and bought more bottles of it on eBay - since it only comes in a mini size I knew that one wouldn't last too long! (I bought it from this seller and it has already arrived and looks to be fine.) Anyway, Travel in Colour shifted the dark grape to a lighter and maybe slightly redder and very shimmery grape. I really liked it that way.

I have other new stuff besides that, but no pictures yet because we haven't seen the sun for days, it's been raining all the time. Let's see, I got stuff from Dollish and stuff from Llarowe (that was the Chick polishes) and then I bought some Sinful Colors since Walgreen's was having a 99-cent sale. Here's the full list of stuff I've bought lately:

• Chick Fairy Snot (as I have said before, I have a weakness for anything named "Unicorn ____" or "Fairy ____") - this one is small holo glitter in a clear base.
• Chick Once Upon A Time, which looks sort of like a glass fleck, very shimmery, and it's a rhubarb color, an almost-red. I may wear this next so I'll report back.
• Chick basecoat (Horsetail Strengthening Base Coat)
• Chick cuticle oil, my second bottle because it smells so good
• Dollish The Angels Have The Phone Box - also a second bottle (mini), because I like this color so much
• Dollish I Want To Believe, which is from the second Ultimate Fandom set - also a mini. It's blue-grey with what looks like blue and silver glitter.
• a glass file from Dollish, my first one
• the Megalast I mentioned above, Careful, It's Vine-tage, which is a dark-grape matte from the fall LE collection
• Sinful Colors Sugar Sugar, a ruby-red (as if I need another one of those)
• Sinful Colors Ice Dream, and icy blue-and-silver glitter
• and three mini-bottles of Travel in Colour, as mentioned above

I didn't need any of this, I really have to slow down!

Trying the untried: Azure

I knew I had tried some polish from my "untried" list, and I finally remembered what it was: Azure.

Pictures are so merciless - they show you not only the spot on my index finger where I messed the polish up somewhere along the way, but this also clearly shows the bald spots on other fingers, and this is after THREE coats. So apparently it really needed four. This is a Sally Hansen Lustre Shine color, and I'm pretty sure it's discontinued (although it still shows up on SH's website, so maybe not) but I can't say I recommend it in either case, even though it's really a glorious color. That part doesn't show up so well in the picture. It's sort of a dark cornflower blue - it has a touch of purple in it. Really a beautiful color, but streaky and didn't wear well, either. I hate it when that happens.

A bad but useful picture

I found this picture of Meow Meow, which is sort of useless except that you can see the color and you can see that there's an awful lot of glitter. Which is far better than nothing, right?

I just took off Hipster Chick so I'm contemplating what to do next. Meow Meow over black is a contender. We'll see. I might decide to do something other than green, what a concept.

(later)
In fact I am wearing a polish that I didn't own when I wrote the paragraph above - one of the WnW Megalast LE polishes, called Careful It's Vine-tage. It's very much a grape color, but in a dark vampy fall way. And I got the full matte glory of it in ONE coat. So I am impressed there. (I don't have a picture of it so far, and the only picture I found online yet is here - down towards the bottom - but it is much lighter-looking than my actual results.)

Let's talk fandoms

This got long. If you're not a big geek feel free to skip it.

I was poking around in old entries, looking for something-or-other, and I came across this entry, and realized I started something in that entry that was supposed to be a series (of sorts) but which I then never followed up on, with regard to the various fandoms in the Dollish Ultimate Fandom set. Here are the answers to go with the other polishes I have worn so far.

The question is: Do I get the reference in the polish name?

Live Long & Prosper (Star Trek): Of course. Star Trek fan from way back - from the beginning, really. Yeah, I'm that old.
The Angels Have The Phone Box (Doctor Who): Yup. I can't claim to go way way back on this one - I watched an episode or two on PBS in the 70s, I think, and thought it was cheesy. (Which it undeniably was, but I just couldn't get past that, at the time.) I only really became a fan with the reboot in recent years. Blink is still probably my favorite episode, even though I'm not a huge Ten fangirl - I was very partial to Nine, myself, although I have liked all of the recent Doctors. Even Twelve, I'm pretty sure, although three episodes is a very small sample.
The Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter): Yup. Read the books, watched the movies. Huge fan.
These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For (Star Wars): Absolutely. Just don't talk to me about the prequels. (But yes, I've seen them all. Mostly repeatedly, even for the prequels.)
You Know Nothing Jon Snow (Game of Thrones): Sure. I'm behind on the TV show, but I've read all the books - plus this was a big internet meme. I suspect that a fair number of people who know nothing themselves about GoT know that Jon Snow knows nothing, even if they don't know who Jon Snow IS. Anyway, I think I bogged down somewhere in season 3 on the HBO version. (I bog down on a lot of TV shows. This is not unusual for me. Probably in this case I will catch up eventually.)

(If you didn't follow the link up top, that one was Walking Dead, and in that case I didn't just bog down, I quit watching completely after the second season. The "who will they kill next" thing was getting to me. That wasn't the problem with GoT - I'd read the books there, so I knew, for example, about the Red Wedding. The series' continuity is a bit different than the books, but still I have some idea, so that doesn't bother me so much.)
(more under the break)

Hipster Chick

To go with the last entry, here is Hipster Chick, in indirect sunlight:

This doesn't show the glitter to advantage but it's resonably accurate on the color. It does show you pretty well how sheer it is, and this is three coats. I must not have gotten down to the bottom of my nail well on every coat, because it's noticeably lighter at the bottom.

You can see the glitter a bit better in this one, I think:

Or maybe not so much. Just imagine that those things that look like bumpy dots in the first picture are cute little pieces of holo glitter, and you'll have the idea. It's a subtle holo glitter, which is pretty hard to achieve.

It's part of a series: Biker Chick, Punk Chick, etc. I am about the least hipster-ish person you will ever meet, but I liked the color so I thought I'd try it. (Where is Geek Chick? cause that would be more me.)

It's a mystery

So, I'm wearing Hipster Chick and trying to figure out the mystery of Chick Nail Polish. Their website is down (and has been for some time), Llarowe has all their remaining stock on clearance, there hasn't been a tweet on their account in months... I'm trying to decide if that adds up to "out of business." Not necessarily, I guess, but it's not really encouraging, either. I bought a couple of things on Llarowe a month or six weeks ago, then last night when I figured out that it was all marked down to $3 and there was still stuff available, I bought some more. Here's a big swatch spam (from Fashion Polish) with a bunch of the colors - quite a few of those were still there on Llarowe yesterday. No telling how much is actually left, though, or how long it'll be there, so go check it out if you're interested!

I don't have a picture of Hipster Chick yet but I like it. It's a yellow-toned lime with some holo glitter in it; it shouldn't look good on me but to my surprise, it's fine. The other thing I bought on the first go-round was cuticle oil, and it smells so damn good that I ordered another one.


In unrelated news, I did finally get a picture of the two polishes that I got from Karen (of Frazzle and Aniploish):

This is Pahlish Electrique and Smitten Glacial Springs. And thank you again, Karen!

(Ooh, one more thing, I just looked at Fashion Polish's front page and saw Ultra PixieDust. Pretty!)

Playing with Polish: Electrique + Travel in Colour

I just took off the polish that I'm about to talk about, and put cuticle oil on. What I've noticed with cuticle oil is that when it's the liquid oil with a brush, I have trouble persuading myself to color outside of the lines, as it were - that is, I tend to put it on my nails like it was polish, and - at least if I'm not thinking about it - I forget to put it on my cuticles completely. I guess it's habit, mostly - that long-ingrained habit of putting my nail polish on neatly so I don't have too much cleanup to do afterwards. So about half the time with cuticle oil I have to remember to go back and slather it on my cuticles afterwards.

This manicure started because I asked my husband (as I do periodically when I'm feeling indecisive) what color I should paint my nails, and he went out into left field by his standards and came up with lavender. I had Pahlish Electrique still sitting out and it's sort of light(ish) purple and he allowed that that was pretty close so I decided to try that. I wasn't sure how opaque Electrique was, though, so I put Colorstay Amethyst on first. Then I put two coats of Electrique on, and I'm not at all sure how much of what I was seeing was which polish, but it was pretty dark. Pretty but hardly lavender, even assuming we're not worrying about lavender vs lilac and the fine points of paler purples. So I sat there and stared at it for a while, and then I put China Glaze Travel in Colour on top of it. And I'm not sure if it was really lavender, still, but it was much lighter, and really really pretty.

This was taken earlier today, and there's a good bit of visible tipwear, because this was the sixth day I'd had it on. I thought about putting topcoat over Travel in Colour, but I never did, so that's pretty good wear. Actually this picture does look pretty close to lavender, now that I look closely at it - meaning a blue-leaning purple rather than a red-leaning one - but I'm not sure that was actually so true in real life. But who cares, it was shiny and pretty (even shinier than it looks here, really), and that's what counts, right?

Oh, and for the record:
I have no idea what I had under this, but I always wear basecoat so you can be sure there was something - possibly it was Butter London Nail Foundation
1 coat Colorstay Amethyst
2 coats Pahlish Electrique
1 coat China Glaze Travel in Colour
no other topcoat