Honey You Should See Me In A Crown

This is a terrible picture even by my undemanding standards - all kinds of wear, dry cuticles, etc. - but it seems to be a fairly accurate on the polish itself, so I'm posting it anyway. This was the manicure before the pumpkin one, I think (unless it's the one before that) but the picture disappeared for a while. Usually I take my iPhone pictures within Evernote so that they automatically show up on my computer also - which is the beauty of Evernote - but I finally located this one on my iPhone but not in Evernote, for some reason. Maybe I accidentally deleted the note? I don't know.

Honey You Should See Me In A Crown - hereafter HYSSMIAC - is one of the Dollish Fandom polishes. I did not get the reference on this polish name because I haven't seen enough Sherlock, although I gather it's Moriarty, right? - Anyway, the polish is orange with orange and gold glitter in it. (You can see it in this picture if you enlarge it, although do so at your own risk, because like I said, it's not a good picture. If you want to see the glitter enough to put up with seeing my dry cuticles etc as well, then go for it.) (As an alternative, here's Accio Lacquer's much-better pictures.)  HYSSMIAC is really pretty, even several days in with all the wear. It really reads as orange, but then you get up closer and you get the glitter effect, which I like. It's more subtle than I expected it to be. I do wish I remembered exactly how long I'd had this on when this picture was taken. I don't think I was terribly unhappy with the wear so it must have been several days at least. As I'm always saying, I'm hard on my nails, but I still expect at least a day or two out of a manicure.

In I did end up liking This Is Halloween quite a lot. I had had some wear problems with the big LynB glitters but this one was fine - I know I didn't get a picture of it, though. (I just poked around and Mishka's pictures seem to be the most accurate I could find - no, Google, I do not mean lynn b, thanks! grr)

Nailthins

I have never used decals on my nails before, but I saw a picture someplace of some Halloween decals, and I got it in my head that I wanted some. I poked around in several different stores and didn't find any, so I started looking online. Sara Lyons has some adorable Halloween ones up now, but I didn't see those at the time, so I poked around and ended up at NailThins - I bought mine on Etsy but they also sell from their own website so you might check both if you're wanting to buy, and see if they have any specials running. There was a package deal on Etsy so I just went with that. (Added: note that there's a difference between Sara Lyons' decals, which are water decals, and NailThins, which are just straight-up sticker-type decals. But the name is because they are extremely thin compared to most stickers.)

As you can see, I took the picture below after I'd already used most of the first set. I ordered "pumpkin faces" and then I also got sugar skulls and snowflakes. I started with pumpkin faces and I will probably do the sugar skulls later in the week. (As you might guess, I'm saving the snowflakes til winter.) The pumpkin faces had 4 different designs in staggered sizes, and the snowflakes are also various sizes, but the skulls are all one size. Maybe that's just because they're tall and thin - thin enough to fit on my pinky just fine, it looks like - so there was no need to stagger the sizes.

There is a tutorial on YouTube for these and it was very helpful - it's a pretty simple process but still it was good to watch the owner doing it! I still messed up a couple but I got the hang of it pretty fast. On the pumpkin faces, I tried to stagger the various designs so that like ones weren't next to each other. (I'm still trying to decide on a plan with the skulls as far as what color to put under them. I was thinking of doing fiesta-colored skittles, but I also want to make sure they're a light enough color for the skulls to show up. And I don't have much in the way of light-colored nail polishes, so that's an issue.)

Anyway, I experimented around a lot, but this is what I ended up with. (The pictures look much redder than the actual manicure does. It is on the red-orange side, but it definitely looks more orange in real life.)

I ended up doing a lot of layers - the picture below is just part of what I used. I started with Orly Retro Red (which despite the name is more orange than red, and matte) and then I used NYC Times Square Tangerine, which is a really similar color but is a creme. I wasn't actually intending to do faces on every nail, originally, so I put a coat of Honey, You Should See Me In A Crown (one of the Dollish Fandom polishes) on some nails - one coat of it is quite sheer - although come to think of it, its base is reddish so that might be one reason these look a bit more red. But then I didn't think that showed up well enough, so I started playing with Jade VIP. It shows up clearly in these pictures - it's the wash of shimmer on top of the faces. (Actually, in some cases it's under the decal and in some cases it's on top - I was not being at all methodical. It was late.)

I put a coat of HK Girl on top of the decals immediately, because that's what the video says to do, and put topcoat on to seal it. Then this morning I added the coat of Gelous.

I was impressed with how easily these went on and also with the way the edge-lines of the decals just disappear on your nail once you get a topcoat on. I guess that's where the "thin" part comes in!

Burt's Bees "grab bags"

Burt's Bees doesn't do any kind of monthly program, to my knowledge, but they do release seasonal gift bags that I've heard people talk a lot about, and a week or so ago, Nouveau Cheap put up a picture of the new holiday one, which is available here.

Exactly a week after that came out, I am in possession of both the holiday grab bag and the summer grab bag, which NC noted was still available, and still is as of when I'm writing this. Between the two bags, it's a lot of stuff, and I figured I could keep part of it and give the rest away as gifts - I have very young female relatives who I usually give small gifts to, so most of those lip balms and glosses are probably going to them!

They say you are not guaranteed to get the exact products, but I think the holiday bag I got has almost exactly what was in the picture on Nouveau Cheap. I think the only difference was the shampoo I got was baobab rather than pomegranate.

Both sets came in identical gift bags, just like in the picture here, made of something sheer that looked somewhat like organza but is much heavier-weight (so it should be reasonably sturdy), tied with yellow ribbon.

Here's what I got in the holiday bag

• Very Volumizing Conditioner with pomegranate, 10 fl oz
• More Moisture Super Hydratant Shampoo with baobab, same
• Honey and Shea Conditioning Body Bar, 5 oz
• Facial Cleansing Towelettes, pack of 10 (and we're going on vacation soon, so anything in travel packs will come in handy!)
• two Cream Cleansers, sample size - 0.75 oz - with different formulas
• Intense Hydration Day Lotion, sample size - 0.25 oz
• Tinted Lip Balm in Sweet Violet, 4.25g (this one looks the most like "my color" so I may keep it)
• Refreshing Lip Balm with pink grapefruit, 4.25g
• 100% Natural Lip Gloss in Ocean Sunrise (paler pink) - 6g/0.2 oz on both of these
• 100% Natural Lip Gloss in Rosy Dawn (deeper pink)
• cute small makeup bag

(Most of these lip balms/glosses appear to be full-sized so I will probably quit giving the ounces every time before I get finished!)

The summer one was awfully close to what's shown, too:

• güd Natural Body Lotion in Red Ruby Groovy (grapefruit & thyme), 8 fl oz  (Note that I had to copy this brand-name from the website because I never can remember how to make an umlaut with html!)
• güd Natural Body Wash in Mango Moonbreeze (island mango & jasmine), 10 fl oz
• güd Natural Cleansing Wipes, also in Red Ruby Groovy, package of 10
• Radiance Lip Shimmer, 2.6g (0.09 oz) (which is not actually in the picture just above but in the top one, I had some stuff mixed up by the time I took the picture)
• Tinted Lip Balms in Pink Blossom and Rose
• Lip Gloss in Spring Splendor (another deeper shade)
• another day lotion sample, identical to the one above
• natural insect repellant which you can see in the picture but which I apparently didn't have when I was making this list, so I can't tell you the exact size
• another makeup bag, with a different pattern and slightly different shape than the one above but made of the same jute-like material

I am quite happy with these - I'm going to make up gift bags for various female relatives, which I think they'll be happy with, and keep a few items for myself too. I think these are a very good value, but you do have to have a use for a rather large quantity of lip balms and glosses. I would never use up the lip products out of one of these bags on my own, let alone both of them.

New: Milani, NYC, Chick + a wear update

I mentioned having bought some stuff on sale at CVS and here that is:

L-R: Sugar Plum, Ultra Violet, Ruby Queen
The Milanis are shimmers, the NYC is part of the holiday set, I think? and it's glittery. I've seen a number of people raving over this "Crystal Couture" set, I may wish I'd bought more.

Then I've had this set of Chick polishes and treatments for a month or so but never did get pictures of all of them:

This is cuticle oil (my second bottle because I loved the first one so!), basecoat, Fairy Snot (which is a sparkly topper, naturally!), and Once Upon A Time. I've worn OUAT and really liked it but I'm not sure there are pictures.

Also, I wrote about having to use five coats of Optical Illusion last week - that was Friday, I think, and this is what it looked like on Tuesday, which is not bad considering I never used a topcoat:

Now I have on multiple coats of This Is Halloween, and I really like the color but it's already chipping pretty badly, and I did use topcoat this time. (I may not get a picture of that because I'll probably take it off tonight and try something else.)

An Ipsy bag

I've been on a kick of trying out various ones of those monthly subscription things. I resisted a few years ago when everybody was doing Birchbox but I finally gave in. Ipsy is one that I know I've been hearing a lot of about, and it's only $10 a month including shipping, so that's nice.

I didn't really do a full set of "unboxing" pictures, but here's what it looked like - it came in this cute shiny pink mailer, so I was really like, "What IS this?" and inside was this little makeup bag, which you apparently get every month:

(I don't think you get this exact makeup bag every month, what I meant was that it always comes in some sort of little bag, as I understand it. I saw a picture of a different month which had a completely different bag.)

And here is most of what was inside - one item is MIA somewhere in my bathroom, I think:

• Starlooks Lip Gloss (can't read the label at all so don't know the color)
• Rose Berry Figs & Rouge Hand Creme, 20ml (apparently this is a UK brand)
• Indie Lee Brightening Cleanser
• Warm Love Pumpkin Exfoliating Mask
• and the missing item is an eyeliner, which I can't locate right now to tell you the brand - it was waterproof so I thought, hmm, maybe I can wear that, and I bore it off god knows where and never did get around to trying it so far!

If you look on the website, the picture of October's bag has partially different items and I'm not sure if it's random or what. I would like to have had the nail polish, of course, but that one also has more makeup items, and I wear very little makeup these days so that's mostly wasted on me! (If you're wondering about that, I do wear some makeup, usually: I wear base, blusher, and lipstick. But I'm hypersensitive to most eye products so mostly I don't even try that these days.)

I do like the Figs & Rouge hand-creme - I was unfamiliar with the brand, but here's their page on Dermstore. I did try out the lip-gloss also, but I tend to think lip-gloss is too sticky and this one was no exception. It's a pretty nice color though. I was looking at a review of Ipsy online somewhere (I wish I remembered where, but I've lost the link) and they were making a big deal about the stated retail value of the items. That really doesn't mean much to me, whether it's worth $40 or $50 or whatever - what matters to me is whether it's something I'll use, or something that's cute enough to give as a gift, at least! This has enough things that I like or I'll try that I'm satisfied.

This Is Halloween

This is my collection of Halloween polishes from previous years. Halloween polishes are usually put out in limited editions, so you probably can't get any of these, but I feel compelled to post the list anyway.

Falloween (Glitzology - mixed large glitters in fall colors)
R.I.P. (Orly - orange glitter in black jelly base)
This Is Halloween (LynB - purple & orange small glitter)
Redrum (Dollish - rusty red holo)
Chupacabra (Mod Polish - dark green chunky glitter)
Walker Bait (Dollish - green linear holo)
Deadly Nightshade (Dollish - purple and cyan glitter)
They're Heeeere! (Dollish - shimmery cyan jelly)

I have a couple more of those tombstone/coffin bottles of Halloween polish that aren't anything special, so I haven't bothered to list them. My favorite of those was called Creepy Pumpkin, and it was an orange jelly, but I've used that one up completely and haven't been able to find another one. They do have an orange one this year but it's got another name - although I don't remember what it was - and it doesn't appear to be a jelly, so darn. Anyway, both of those specialty brands - one is made by Wet N Wild, I know, and the other is not, and I never can remember which is which - but both of them have changed their bottles this year and I'm pretty sure the polishes are all different too. The coffin bottles aren't even coffins any more.

In any case, you can buy Halloween polishes from numerous places but they probably will not be the same ones I have. They're always cool, in any case, and both indie and commercial sellers love to put them out - partly because most people love Halloween and also undoubtedly partially because they sell really well. (This Is Halloween might still be available - I only got my bottle a couple of months ago - but I'm pretty sure most of the others are not.)

I do love Halloween, for various reasons, mostly because it's just plain FUN and doesn't involve big family dinners and quite so much stress, unlike certain other holidays I am not talking about right now! I've been sort of hoping in recent years that Halloween sort of does this big merge with Day of the Dead and becomes a multi-day celebration/extravaganza, and actually seems to be happening to some degree. (Not that I want them to merge, exactly, that's not what I mean, but they are all sort of related, anyway. I think hopefully you get what I mean there!)

There will probably be some Halloween manicures coming - for that matter I bought some decals, if I can get them to work properly. I think This Is Halloween may be the polish that's getting tried out next. (I'm still wearing Optical Illusion but it's probably coming off any minute now!)

From the Delicious Color Archives:

This is RIP and I think it was the first picture I ever posted here.

This picture has two of the Dollish Halloween-related polishes: Walker Bait on the top right, and Deadly Nightshade at bottom right.

(And that first picture reminds me that my blogiversary is coming up at the beginning of November. Two years of badly-lighted pictures and jumbled-together prose, woo!)

SpaRitual Optical Illusion

I talked towards the bottom of the last entry about how I bought Optical Illusion because I wanted a swampy green, and well, it is that. I'm wearing it now, and it's quite beautiful, but I'm wearing FIVE coats because it's so thin and streaky. I think when I wear it again I'm going to layer something underneath, because that's just crazy. I was talking about whether it was a yellow-green and how green it would appear on the nail, because it didn't appear at all yellowish in the bottle in my living room. This is what the base looks like at two coats, in the sun:

So you can see that it's very yellow-green, even at two coats. In the shade it looks much less drastic and you're starting to be able to see the glitter:

But it's still very streaky, and five coats is what it took to get to the bottle color. I wanted it as sort of a specialty color, anyway, so if I have to put on 5 coats a couple of times a year, I suppose I can live with that. But it's a bit frustrating.

I went to CVS to pick up a prescription earlier in the week, and of course I came home with a couple of things. There was a buy one, get one half-off on Milani, and NYC Color was 40% off, so I bought NYC Ruby Queen, a red glitter, and Milani Color Statement in Sugar Plum and Ultra Violet, which were both shimmery, bright pink and purple respectively. I might wait until after Halloween to wear those, or maybe not since there's still two weeks to go. I probably don't really want to wear orange for two whole weeks!

Jade V.I.P. & more

So, remember Ramblin' Red? The oxblood red I was wearing when last heard from? Well, maybe I should've been warned by the fact that there was wear visible in the photo I took even though all I'd done since I put it on was go to bed and wake up again. I suppose I need to give it another try later - maybe it's the base-coat or something, I dunno. I do know that I ended up at work yesterday with the polish flaked almost completely off of one nail, which is something I hate hate hate. So, probably not going to be running out to buy more of that brand. (The brand is Hedy's ma.nish.ma, which actually they don't seem to sell anywhere around here anyway. Basecoat, for the record, was Sinful Colors, I believe. This is why I should be more careful to note my basecoat etc. - so I can look for patterns when something goes badly.) (Note that I'm not blaming Sinful Colors for this. I have it on now and it's fine.)

I'm wearing Jade V.I.P. now (orange and sparkly), and I was intending to take a picture of it, but meanwhile I keep layering things on top of it, so even if I do it's not really going to look like the original color. I think I had the Sinful Colors Basecoat on again - I pulled it out of a pile of stuff a week or so ago and went, "I really ought to be using this" - especially since it's half-used already and thus is a good candidate to use up. I put three coats of V.I.P. on because there was still visible nail line at two, not surprising since it's a jelly. It's also sort of texture-like - by which I mean it has the same sort of bumpy textured surface as many "textured" polishes - and I remember wondering whether just to stop where I was and skip the top coat. If I did put topcoat on right off the bat I have no memory at all of what it was, but I know I still had the topcoat question on my brain a day later when I decided to layer Fairy Snot on top of it. Fairy Snot did make a noticeable difference, but not all that noticeable since V.I.P. is full of the same kind of small sparkles that Fairy Snot is. It mostly just made it sort of sparklier. And then last night I added a coat of Travel In Colour on top of it, because that's just what I do with everything lately - it still looks pretty and shimmery, but now it's a more sort of peachy-pink shimmery, with no discernable texture.

Back to V.I.P., though, and I do want to note that I was worried, as I always am with oranges, about whether it would look good on me. The issue is usually that I am very much a cool-colors person, so an orange that has too much yellow in it is going to be very unflattering to me. But this one apparently leans more red, because it looked fine.

I say that I'm a cool-colors person, but in fact I can wear red - in fact red is by far my best color, if you go by the reactions I get from other people when I wear it - but my best red is a blue-leaning one. Basically, the further you get from yellow on the color-spectrum, the better I look, usually. Red/purple/blue is my wheelhouse, and greens are fine until they get too yellow, again. No lime-colors for me!

In fact, I ordered a green the other day that I was worried might be too yellow - although I bought it because it was similar to some other yellow/brown-leaning greens that I've been coveting, and that was SpaRitual Optical Illusion, which I bought because it's similar to some of those China Glaze "zombie greens" like It's Alive and Zombie Zest that they've had in the Halloween collections the last few years. (See the picture here in which Zombie Zest looks much more yellow - so let's hope it's more like It's Alive!) I always have coveted those whenever people have posted pictures of them in past years, and I knew that CG's Halloween colors don't have a green like that this year (there is a green - this one - which is perfectly cute but not what I had in mind!) so when I saw Optical Illusion compared to them I perked my ears right up. And I went poking around and the cheapest I found it including shipping was at 6pm.com - which I think is related to Zappos, right? So I figured it'd be fine, and it was. It arrived today - and now I wish I hadn't looked back at the website because it's cheaper today than it was the other day when I ordered it! Anyway, in the bottle at least it doesn't look excessively yellow at all, so I'll report back on that question when I wear it. (On this one purchase, at least, 6pm.com was primo - shipping is free and fast and everything went perfectly smoothly.)

New

Here's the Square Hue October box (Milan Passport Collection):

They do lay flat in the box but I like this view because you can get a pretty good idea of the colors. I'm still not sure about whether that middle one is actually black or blue, though!

And here's the bottoms so that you can see the names. I like that they have the month and year on them, it's one of those things you tend to forget later, especially if you have a lot of them!

And here's everything that I have that's new - although at least one of these is a repeat, if you're playing really close attention:

• glass file from Dollish Polish
• Dollish I Want To Believe (which I showed before with the two Sinfuls here - but I apparently forgot about the glass file at that time!)
• Gelous
• Orly Fowl Play (which was $3.99, I think, so about half-price)
• Chick Fairy Snot (which I bought along with Once Upon A Time, which I don't think I ever photographed either)
• Square Hues in the same order as the pictures above, except from the back, this time
• Jade "Special Glitz" in VIP and Vestido de Gala
• Chick Moss

Ramblin' Red

I'm not sure what the white blobs are that appear to be on my nails here - they're not really on my nails at all, anyway, they're in the camera or they're reflections or something like that. For once I'm wearing a plain-old creme with no holo glitter or shifting top-coat. This is just plain Ma.nish.ma Ramblin' Red:

(That's the reflection of the camera in the polish bottle, but I truly don't know what the other stuff is.)

It's actually much darker looking in most lights than it is here. This is two coats plus basecoat/topcoat. I wasn't sure I had anything that qualified as an oxblood red, but this one definitely does.

Layering that doesn't quite work

This is the first picture I've taken in a while under the fluorescent lights at work, and it has the usual lobster-hand sort of problems that I always complain about, but I've seen worse, so here you go:

This is blown up extra-large because I want you to be able to see what I'm talking about. This is a weird mani, but it photographed weirder than it really looks in person. I was experimenting, and I had that brown/tan-colored Square Hue polish, Via Sant'Andrea, sitting here on my desk, and I thought, I wonder what Travel in Colour would look like over brown. Well, here's the answer, sort of. Actually, if you look closely at this picture you can totally see the brown on the sides and at the bottom, but the thing is, it doesn't look like that in real life. You can maybe see it around the edges if you look really close, in real life, but it's not at all as noticeable as it looks in this picture. So it's weird.

Anyway, I wouldn't call Via Sant'Andrea a big win with TinC over it. It looks alright, but it just looks sort of shimmery and pinkish like TinC always seems to look to some degree, and it took 2 coats to get it to that. I wish I'd taken a picture after the first coat to see what it looked like, but I didn't - I just thought it looked kind of odd, and so I added another coat. So this is 2 coats of Travel in Colour over 2 coats of Via Sant'Andrea, plus the usual base and topcoats which I can't really even remember what I used. (I really should start writing these things down.) Added: I wasn't really worrying about the topcoat question because I don't usually think it makes much difference, but then I remembered what I used and it does make a difference, in this case, because I used matte topcoat. NYC, to be exact. I believe that after the second coat of TinC I decided it could do with toning down the shimmer a bit.


On a completely different subject, another thing I apparently forgot about when I was talking about that Llarowe order from a couple of weeks ago was that it included one more Chick Polish - Moss. At the time, there was another green on Llarowe's page (and I notice that the remaining colors are now $2!) which is now gone, but I decided I liked the look of Moss. (The other one was described as an "emerald matte neon" as I recall, and I found some reviews from people who really loved it, but I decided that I have emeralds out the wazoo already and I don't even like neons, so it didn't seem like it was meant for me.) And I think now I've probably ordered all the Chick Polishes I'm going to order. Maybe.

Square Hue, Fowl Play, & more

This was two manicures ago (I took this at lunch at Jason's Deli the other day, so it's the iPhone, but the color seems pretty true):

This is Travel In Colour over Essie It's Genius, which is sort of a raisin-plum color. TinC shifted it a little towards pink, as usual, but not hugely so.

The last manicure (which I just took off) was Fowl Play, which is a color that been around for several years but is new to me. I like it. It's more or less the same color scheme as Nfu Oh 51 but it's not a dupe - Fowl Play seems much more opaque, although I haven't tried to compare them. (Come to think of it I haven't seen my bottle of #51 in ages, and it's not like it blends in with the other bottles... It's gotta be here somewhere, though!)

Let's see, so I have half a dozen or more new polishes, but I don't have pictures of anything so far. One set was the Llarowe stuff I wrote about before. One was a Square Hue box that it seems like I signed up for ages ago - I had almost forgotten about it. They were having a promo of some sort so I thought I'd try it out. I found somebody's unboxing video that's up already on You Tube, so you can see the colors there. The month's theme is Milan and the three colors are Via Della Spiga (red), Via Sant'andrea (taupey tan), and Via Montenapoleone (which is dark and matte and might be super-dark blue but I can't be sure in this light). I will say one thing about Square Hue right now, and that's that I adore the perfectly-square bottles. I wish more companies would do this. I get tired of wrangling round bottles.

And the other thing I have that's new is Fowl Play, as mentioned above, and a bottle of Gelous, which I'd never tried before. Those came from Sally Beauty. Fowl Play was marked down and I knew it was something I'd always admired. And I saw somewhere - a pin, maybe? - where somebody was talking about using Gelous as both a base and a topcoat to mimic regular gel nails. I did try this with Fowl Play and it looked really pretty - you use Gelous on top of the polish and then put another topcoat on top of that - but I don't know that it lasted better than it would have anyway. I'll have to try it again with something else!

I don't know what I'm putting on next, but it might possibly be one of these new things - we'll see.