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.)