Traffic Stopper Copper

This is Sephora by OPI Traffic Stopper Copper over Forbidden Fudge:

I got lucky when the Sephora by OPI closeout started - back in 2013, I think this was - and got in on it while there was still a lot of stock left. This is probably my favorite of those polishes (I think I bought nine in all, three of them top coats like this one). I especially like this over the dark brown because it shows up so well. It's pretty straightforward - just a bright copper glitter in various sizes. I have a bunch of copper polishes, but this is the only bright-as-a-penny copper glitter, I think. Since this one is discontinued, I think somebody needs to pick up on that and make another one of those.

Added: Here's what it looks like with nothing under it:

The base is more or less clear (the solid coppery-looking nail is a different polish, this is the one above that) so it would look odd alone, but you could probably find a number of different things that it would look good with. My favorite is still the brown undercoat above, though.

This Is Halloween

Life's no fun without a good scare...
This is LynB This Is Halloween over Square Hue Y2K, which is a very dark charcoal gray:

This was mixed in with the browns even though it's not actually a brown - so it seemed like a real good thing to show today of all days. I imagine it didn't get in with the browns and the oranges by accident, I'm sure I put it in here because it's seasonally appropriate.

Here it is (on the right) alone. It's got a slightly purplish base and then lots of small glitter in purple and red-violet and orange. (Accio Lacquer has some good close-up shots.) I like it a lot over the dark base, but it looks good with a purple base, too. And you can wear it on its own, but it takes 3 coats to be opaque enough to suit me. It really is perfect for Halloween, but it's not something you need to limit to Halloween, either.

It Rubs The Lotion On Its Skin

This is Different Dimension It Rubs The Lotion On Its Skin over Forbidden Fudge:

This is the only Silence-of-the-Lambs-themed polish I ever remember seeing, so I felt like I almost had to buy it just because of that - but luckily I also really like it a lot. It's basically a texture, in brown and copper. I like it over the dark-brown base especially well. I can't say that the name really has much to do with the actual polish, but it's entertaining anyway.

When U Say My Name

I've already talked about Briarwood, so here we're just talking about Misa When U Say My Name:

It's just another nice, shimmery dark brown. That said, I think Misa is an underrated brand - or at least, it doesn't get talked about as much as other brands. All of the Misa polishes I have have really awesome formulas, but I guess they're not as cool as indies and they don't throw a bunch of repetitive new collections out there like OPI etc. They're not super-cheap - last I looked I think they were $7.50 each, but well worth the price.

Forbidden Fudge, Rich In Heart

This is SH Nailgrowth Miracle Forbidden Fudge and Sinful Colors Rich In Heart:

(You could still get Rich In Heart the last I checked, but the whole Nailgrowth Miracle line is discontinued, I'm pretty sure.) (And another parenthetical thing: I've seen a couple of people online say that Forbidden Fudge is a hilarious and/or awful name, although I'm not 100% sure why - I guess because it sounds like some kind of poo joke?? It never occurred to me before I saw it mentioned, but I could see that being possible.) OK, so, these are two very dark browns which actually look pretty alike in this bad nail-wheel picture, but I don't think are really as much alike as they seem. Forbidden Fudge is pretty much a straight-up dark brown, but it's a nice dark brown which doesn't look black. You can kind of see the difference in the bottle shot of Rich In Heart, though - it has wine-tones in it which FF does not. It's sort of a very dark marsala brown. Makeupwithdrawal has a good picture where you can see the red tones (and some very nice stamping to boot.)

Insta-Dri mini-haul

I wrote some stuff about how I came to buy these polishes, and also there's a couple of interesting links, but first I think I'll show you what I bought:

This is Jet Set Jade and Plummet. Let me say now that all of these except Jet Set Jade covered in 1 coat - JSJade took two - and all of them except Jet Set Jade are current colors, according to Insta-Dri's page on the Sally Hansen website. Jet Set Jade was an LE color, but I was able to find it on Amazon - more on that below. Here are ALU's pics from that LE collection - I also have Chop Chop Copper and Quick Jeanius from that collection, all of which are pretty awesome. Anyway, Jet Set Jade is basically a lovely shimmery teal. Plummet (which is not LE) is a pretty blurple creme.

This is Expresso and Cherry Fast. Obviously Expresso is a much more muted pink, a grayed-out or almost browned-out pink - the name would tend to suggest it's the latter, wouldn't it? - while Cherry Fast is a fuchsia-to-berry color (definitely not what I'd call cherry, though).

And last but not least, because I'm obsessed with browns lately, here's Cocoa A Go Go, a lovely shimmery brown.


Before I lose the link again, there's this: The Science Behind Quick-Dry Nail Products. I stumbled across this and it's very appropriate to the Insta-Dri line. (It also has a quick primer about how nail polish works generally, which honestly I wasn't completely up on, I'm a little embarrassed to say. I did know a little bit about it, but this is more than I already knew.)

So Insta-Dri, as you might guess even if you don't know already, is Sally Hansen's quick-dry line. I've had a few polishes from this line for a long time, but I tend to forget about them. What brought this line to my attention again was all those "most underrated" videos that everybody has been making on YouTube, here's Jess as a semi-random example (actually I think I missed this one before, somehow):

It was a collab, where a group of people put up videos on this subject at the same time, and then (as usually happens) a bunch of other people made their own videos after that. And somewhere in watching of those, I remembered how awesome a lot of Insta-Dri polishes are. Somebody mentioned them in there but I'm not entirely sure who. So as a result of that, I got on Amazon earlier this week and bought a bunch of Insta-Dri polishes. I really didn't even look them up like I usually do when I buy more expensive polishes, I just bought a bunch. Jet Set Jade was more expensive, since it was LE, but even so I only spent a little over $25 including shipping, which is about normal retail price for these, I think. (There was at least one seller pushing something like 10 bottles for $30 - I'm going from memory here because I don't want to risk falling down another Amazon rabbit-hole - but I didn't want that because you don't get to pick your colors - I don't want yellows, for one, and I don't want the colors I already own,) Aside from Jet Set Jade, I just picked colors that I thought looked pretty, and I think I picked pretty well, on the whole. They're the sort of colors I always pick - a bright berry, a blurple, a dark brown - but hey, that's why I own a lot of those colors, because I like them.

(I don't think Jess talks about Insta-Dri, that was just the first one of those videos I saw when I went to YouTube. I think it was actually this one that talked about that, although there may have been others.)

I almost forgot to say that all or most of these are what Amazon calls "add-on" products, which means they don't ship for free by themselves but if you add them onto a $25 purchase (thus the name) then they do ship for free. I checked the fine print, and it turns out that if you have $25 of add-ons that counts, they don't actually have to be "added" to a larger purchase. So that's what most of these are. (I think you have to have Amazon Prime for that all to kick in, though.) Oh, and the other caveat to that is that it has to all be shipped by Amazon even if it's not sold by Amazon, but that seems to be the case for about 3/4 of the stuff on Amazon's website nowadays anyway. At least for the stuff I've been looking at lately.

Play! box for October

I thought the design on the little Sephora Play bags was pretty forgettable for the first couple of months they used them, but they've been getting better, and I think this one is adorable:

The brochure has type to match the bag; the theme for October is The Cool Cut.

And here's the items that go with it:

• Farmacy Skin Dew (a mist/setting spray)
• Estee Edit Flash Photo Gloss (a clear lip gloss with blue "micropearls" that's supposed to make your teeth look whiter)
• Erborian Bamboo Creme Frappee (a moisturizer)
• Smashbox Always On Matte Liquid Lipstick in Driver's Seat
• Christophe Robin Regenerating Mask (for hair)
• Mon Paris by YSL fragrance sample

For me, this is a pretty good set. The Smashbox liquid lip is a "warm pink" and that's not really my kind of color so I suspect that I will end up giving it away. I've got more good lip colors than I can possibly use right now anyway. But other than that I will probably at least try everything. I'm curious about the Photo Gloss and the rest of it is right up my alley.

Verismo, Cinnamon

This is Zoya Cinnamon and Jin Soon Verismo:

I really probably should have put Verismo with the golds, because that's what it really is: a blackened gold. However, it sort of reads as a darker-color metallic - due to the black, I suppose - so I swatched it with the browns. (It almost looks greenish here, but I think that's misleading.) Anyway, it is so gorgeous.

That said, Cinnamon is seriously the Best. Brown. Ever. Or it's my favorite, anyway. Zoya actually calls it a bronze, I noticed. Anyway, I know that I kept on wearing it in preference to any of my other browns, last fall.

Here's a NOTD picture of Verismo, from last spring when I first got it.
And one of Cinnamon.
Verismo on Jin Soon's website
Cinnamon on Zoya's

TBT: Chop Chop Copper/Y2K

For Throwback Thursday, this is Insta-Dri Chop Chop Copper (which I believe was one of their seasonal LE polishes) over Square Hue Y2K:

If I'm remembering right I did this deliberately messily because I wanted the dark base to show through in places. I don't know if you can really tell in this picture, but it came out really well.

NOTD: Bat My Eyes

This is the only Halloween polish that I've ever said this about: it's almost too elegant for Halloween.

I talked about this polish not long ago and said complimentary things about it then, as I recall. I really do love it. And it is Halloween-appropriate; don't get me wrong about that. It's something you might could imagine Morticia Addams wearing it if she was in an especially festive mood. It's a blackened gold glitter, but it also seems to have scattered flakes of something more orange or bronze.

Added: I forgot to say that this is two coats, no top-coat, in the picture. Late last night I added 2 coats of Gelous just mostly to smooth it out. It's quite textured on its own. Even after the two coats of Gelous it's not completely smooth, but it's close enough that it doesn't bother me. I was toying with the idea of mattifying it, but so far I haven't. I'll report back if I do.

As I said then, Bat My Eyes (from China Glaze) is apparently available for the Halloween season again this year. Go forth and get one of your own; you won't regret it.

Briarwood, I Knead Sour-dough

This is A England Briarwood and OPI I Knead Sour-dough:

Briarwood is a scattered holo; it's from the Burne-Jones Dream collection back a couple of years ago, and I think I Knead Sour-dough was from OPI's San Francisco collection. Both of these are sort of marsala-type colors - remember how marsala was the color of the year and nobody knew what it was, in 2015? Well, these are basically it, a red-brown. I am not the biggest fan of these kind of holos but this is a very pretty one and I need to wear it more. And then I Knead Sour-dough is a shimmer.

I think you can still get both of these:
A England (it's out of stock there, but as far as I know it's not actually discontinued)
OPI

Decades of Shades

This is OPI Decades of Shades:

(My writing is hard to read there, but this is the top one on the wheel, below the empty spots.) Decades of Shades is sort of a milk-chocolate color, not especially dark, and I liked the swatches I saw before I bought it, but in person it's, like, the most boring possible brown. That link below calls this a dark brown, which it's really not. Often when something is lighter than I thought I say "well, maybe mine has faded," but in this case the swatches all pretty much look just like my polish. I used to call it "baby-poop brown" and that may be unfair, but - well, clearly, I really don't like it. I'm probably not really capable of being fair about a polish I dislike this intensely. (The only reason I've hung onto it is because I use it for a layering polish from time to time.)

This polish apparently was from the 25th anniversary collection, 10 years ago, which kind of baffles me - this is not my idea of a classic color (although the brown in that swatch does look darker than most of the other swatches I found online). Looking at the whole set (at the link above), my only thought is that maybe they were trying for what might have been fashionable in 1981. Very warm colors - very 70s, really, and I never did like 70s colors even at the time.

The polish to the left of it in the picture is I Knead Sour-dough, which is coming up right away in another entry, but I left it where you can see it because they are sort of similar. I Knead Sour-dough has a lot of red shimmer in it, though, which is enough to keep me from getting snippy about it like I do about Decades of Shades.

Decades of Shades is currently showing up on Amazon as a "rare color" (and it was apparently LE so that's fair) but their picture looks much more orange-leaning than I would say mine is. Still, maybe that's what I don't like about it. I'm a cool-colors person, so maybe this is just too warm a brown for me. That makes a certain amount of sense.

(I made a "least-favorite polishes" tag just for this entry - then I went back and found a few more polishes I don't like, so there's more than one thing there if you look. I didn't find too many, though - mostly if I dislike something this intensely, I get rid of it.)

Once Upon A Time, Today I Accomplished Zero

This is Chick Once Upon A Time and OPI Today I Accomplished Zero:

Once Upon A Time is a sheer pink with a hint of coral and a lot of shimmer - I really consider it a top-coat. And Today I Accomplished Zero (from, as you might guess, the Coca-Cola collection) is red glitter in a black base.

The last polishes I showed were coral-pink, so I found the picture above in my swatch files and I thought they would be a good transition between that and the brown polishes I am intending to show next. Neither of these looks at all brown in that picture, but Today I Accomplished Zero is a bit of a chameleon and I think does really look brown in this picture (even though it's actually not):

(If you're wondering about the Lippmann, I showed it back here.) Today I Accomplished Zero is still a current color, but Chick Polish is out of business.

Dr Jart + Sephora lips

My husband's starting to look pained when he sees a Sephora box, sort of like he used to do at all the packages of nail polish a year or two ago. I've slowed down on the nail polish (mostly) and replaced that expense with moisturizer and other skincare items, these days. Sephora is so good at reeling me in with this stuff, although I do mostly keep to the lower-priced items. It could be worse, right? (That's what I always tell myself, anyway, and at least compared to a lot of the hauls I see on YouTube, mine are pretty reasonable.)

I really liked the Dr Jart+ Water Drop moisturizer that came in last month's Sephora Play box, and when I saw this "K Beauty" gift set which included that and two more items, I was hooked.

The Cicapair cream was a bonus deluxe sample. It seems to be something fairly similar to the First Aid Beauty Ultra Repair Cream that I like so much. The gift set had another Water Drop sample, plus the BB cream that you can see in the picture, and the third item is "Micro Water" which I think is something like the "micellar" water that has been such a hot thing lately. (I have tried a couple of brands of micellar water, and it seems like they irritate my hypersensitive skin a bit, although it does take off makeup really well. I'll be interested to see if this one is any different.)

Then we have some Sephora-brand lip things that were marked down. I was interested in trying some more and I figured starting with the marked-down ones was a good way to go. Also pictured here is another 100-point bonus item, Tarte Drink of H20.

This is Luster Matte in Lilac Luster and Rouge Infusion (which is a stain) in Cherry Nectar. Both of these colors are gone from the website now, but there are still other colors available for both products.

I swatched them both on my wrist:

I think the lilac one is pretty but it doesn't really look good on me - I should have guessed that, really, since I rarely like very pale shades of lipstick any more than I do in nail polish. (It's not actually that pale a color but it's paler than my lips, and I thought it looked odd.) The formula is nice, though. And I do like the cherry stain. It was only the color I was uncertain about there, since I got a small size of the Rouge Infusion in a Play! box very early on (meaning probably a year or more ago) and so I knew the consistency of it was fine - but I like this color better than that one. I think the old one was Peony, which is also no longer on the website.

I ordered this all in two separate orders so I also have a ton of smaller samples:

I haven't tried out all of this yet but the Tokyomilk fragrance smells super-awesome and I like the Elizabeth and James one also (I always do like theirs). Altogether, I spent about $40 on all of the above, which isn't too terrible. I've been working extra the last couple of months anyway so I reckon I've earned it. (Added: I found one more fragrance sample, which was Louboutin. I didn't even remember that they had added perfumes.)

Ali, F*ck and Run

This is Zoya Ali and Nostalgic Lacquer F*ck and Run:

These polishes both look pink up next to the corals and oranges, but they are both coral-leaning, really. And I'm not sure if you can really tell here, but Ali is a neon. I don't actually think Ali is flattering on me at all, but I've never quite brought myself to get rid of it. I doubt that F*ck and Run would be really flattering on me if I wore it by itself, either, but it's pretty sheer and I usually layer it over something more pink or red. It's got a ton of shimmer in it - that I think you can see here - and I like it a lot.

Ali is still available - I was surprised by this because I had it in my head that it was discontinued. Nostalgic Lacquer last updated their Facebook page in 2014, and their last Etsy feedback was in 2013, so I think it's pretty safe to say they're out of business.

This is actually the end of my trip around the color wheel, since pink is where I started. However, I've still got lots more polishes to show: grays, browns, top-coats. Brown will be next I think, since we're in the season for it.

Halloween (and Day of the Dead) miscellany

I rarely talk much here about anything outside the nails/makeup/skincare realm, but today I'm going to talk a bit about Halloween junk, because I keep on collecting it though I know I really ought to stop:

These were written up on Nerdist (at least I think so, I haven't actually been able to find the piece again) and so I bought a couple on Amazon (where they are still available as I write this). I have a banner that I was thinking this might be useful for, but that didn't work out. I currently am not using them for anything actually useful, but I did put them in places where we could see them, so at least we're enjoying their goofy charm. I mean, bat clothespins! How can you beat that?


Here is the banner in question. I didn't want to put another nail in the wall since this is just temporary, so I tied it to the calendar on one end and then held up the rest with washi tape:

I bought the sugar-skull banner at the grocery store for $3. The grocery store in question is H-E-B, which is San-Antonio-based and thus is always one of the best places around to buy assorted Day of the Dead stuff. (I also bought a couple more items on that page, which I had actually forgotten about already - a melamine plate and one of the pet-skeleton grocery bags. I actually have a whole collection of that melamine-ware in various designs.) Also you might recognize the sugar skulls, since I used them for backgrounds in several pictures before I got around to hanging up the banner.

Rob did manage to knock up against the calendar one night and halfway knock the whole banner down, but we got it all back up again and the washi tape actually seems to be holding fine. It's light.

Speaking of washi tape, I ordered a bunch from Etsy, not all of which is related to  holidays but you get to see all of it anyway:

The bottom three could be construed to be Halloween/DotD-related, right? - since purple seems to have become an unofficial Halloween color these days. There is purple tape holding up the banner above if you look close. (What I mean is that the "expanded" Halloween palette that you see around the most is black/orange/lime/purple. I would never come up with that combination on my own, but I quite like it.)

The reason I try to stop myself from buying Halloween stuff is because I tend to throw it in a box and forget about it the next year. It just doesn't seem to get reused as much as I think it ought to. Although I did remember to pull out the light-up eyeball wreath that I bought at Target last year.

Throwback Thursday: Orly R.I.P.

This is the very first picture that was ever on this blog, nearly four years ago:

(Man, look how long the nail on my ring-finger is. I haven't let them get that long in ages - mostly because the only way to get all my nails something resembling the same length is to keep them pretty short.)

Glitter Matters

We've talked about Retro Red already, so today we're here to talk about Funky Fingers Glitter Matters:

I probably swatched this somewhere without anything under it, but I can't find it and I can't think it's important for you to see that, anyway - for that matter, since it has white glitter in it, it wouldn't show up any better at all. I think I just picked this up because it was in a 3/$5 bin but it's actually kind of cute. This is pink, white, and yellow matte glitter in what seems to be a very slightly tinted base. Over the red-orange base, the pink glitter doesn't show up all that well and it ends up looking sort of like candy corn. I may try to wear this before Halloween, for that reason, but if I do I'll probably try to make it look more like a fade and not just spread it out all over like this.

(Also this has serious label fail - I guess when a polish is that cheap you shouldn't gripe about the label likewise being cheap but it bothers me when the screenprinting is bad and the label starts wearing off like this. It's not like I've handled this bottle a ton. I've noticed a couple of other cheap polishes being the same way - some of the older Wet n Wild bottles come to mind. Surely it wouldn't be that much more expensive to get a label that's a bit more durable.)

Added, from here: matte glitters ("glitter matte-r's" get it?) in pink, white, and yellow - apparently there are a couple more in this line, in other color combinations. I like this so I wish I'd seen those!

Honey You Should See Me In A Crown

This is Dollish Polish Honey, You Should See Me In A Crown:

This is burnt-orange polish (that's the closest color-name I can think of for it) with scattered gold glitter. Here is my oft-used Accio Lacquer link for this set; you can't see it in my picture but the gold glitter is actually small hexes. A few years ago there was a big rage for hex glitters and I think this was part of that.

Apparently the name is a Sherlock quote; a search got me to this very short YouTube clip:

(It's from The Reichenbach Fall, which is not one of the Sherlock episodes I've seen.)

Falloween

Here we have a rare glitter fail, in my opinion - this is Glitzology Falloween:

I got this from somebody's blog sale, so I didn't pay a lot for it. To my knowledge Glitzology isn't around any more, so I feel slightly less bad than I would slamming a polish brand that was still out there trying to sell their stuff. (Note that I wouldn't hesitate to be honest about it if I thought a polish company had continuing problems, like bad service or a terrible formula or something, but that's not the case here. This is just one polish that I don't care for.) As far as I know Glitzology was a perfectly good indie polish company - I used to see their polishes around and thought they were cute, I know - but man, the more I look at it the more I realize that I really hate this polish. Hate, hate, hate (with a venom that surprises me). I thought it looked really cute in the bottle, but I've had it for a couple of years now and I kept not wearing it and then this year when I did the swatches I finally had to admit to myself that I just do not like this polish.

I piled up the two nail wheels on top of each other for this picture so that you could see the two swatches next to each other - over orange and over brown. I have to say the brown one looks better just because you can see a lot less of it. Overall, I'd say the main problem is the bar glitter - I am not a fan. But the glitter mix doesn't seem especially attractive, either. I usually like these kind of mixed holiday glitters, at least as a once-a-year novelty, but this one just does not do it for me.

Kobalt

This is Sinful Colors Kobalt:

This is (as you probably already noticed) from the Kylie "Denim and Bling" collection. It's matte and textured. I went in CVS one day lately and these were marked down, and I have trouble resisting markdowns, especially when they're something that's new to me. I had never bought a Kylie polish (nor have I succumbed to the Lip Kits etc. - at least so far) and I really don't have a blue that's exactly like this, as far as I can tell. So heck, at least I just bought one! Could've been much worse.

Witch and Famous, Who Ya Gonna Call? (+NOTD)

So here we have Pure Ice Witch and Famous and Salon Perfect Who Ya Gonna Call:

If they haven't sold out yet these can be found with the Halloween makeup etc. in your local Walmart for $1.99, and I like both of them. I didn't have the Who Ya Gonna Call bottle handy when I took the wheel picture but I already showed it recently anyway and I'll repeat that picture for your convenience:

Witch and Famous (which my brain just wants to call BAT GLITTER) has silver and copper and pale blue glitters in various sizes, and then there are the tiny bat glitter pieces, which frankly seem prone to stick to the inside surface of the bottle and are a bit difficult to fish out. But I got two on my sample nail without working at it that hard, so if you were determined you should be able to get more.

I am wearing Who Ya Gonna Call? right now and I really like it a lot. It does seem to be that Floam-ish formula, very textured, but of course the color-scheme is not the same - it seems to be various shades of green plus some scattered black bits. (As you can see if you follow the link, there are a variety of Floam colors but this one doesn't seem to match up exactly with any of those. Salon Perfect's Kaboom does seem to be a very close dupe of the original Floam, but apparently for this one they just used that type of formula with a different mix of colors.)

It falls right into that "funky green" range which I tend to love so much. I wore this without topcoat for a day, but it had noticeable wear by the end of the day, so I patched it up and put a couple of coats of Glitter Food on to help with the wear. (That's one thing that's great about textured polishes, I've found - you can patch up a chip and if you do it carefully it's pretty much invisible.)

Cougar Attack

This is Spoiled Cougar Attack:

As I said before, I bought Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice (which is a discontinued polish) for something like $14 including shipping on eBay, and only after that did it occur to me that I might still be able to get hold of Cougar Attack - which is also discontinued - and I did in fact find it available on Amazon. I actually got two bottles for about what I paid for the one of P-spice. These polishes were both originally in the same price range ($2.99-ish) and were both originally released as LE polishes, I believe, but Cougar Attack was later a core color, thus it's not as rare. Anyway, I'm glad I now have lots of coppery glitter and I can feel free to waste it to my heart's content (more or less).

(And yes, I'm aware that "Cougar Attack" is a pretty dumb name for a polish, but the polish is awesome so I ignore the name issue.)

You can see in the picture above that Pumpkin Spice doesn't look much like Cougar Attack either in the bottle (which is the one partly visible on the left) or on the nail (which is the one above CA on the wheel) - however, they come out looking surprisingly alike on the nail, if you're willing to use up enough of the bottle of Pumpkin Spice putting on enough layers to get it tolerably opaque. This is basically how I went though the first bottle so fast, and I'm not going to make that mistake again.

This is my old bottle of Cougar Attack and one of my new ones:

The old one isn't quite as low as I was thinking it was, really, but obviously I've used quite a lot of it. It does take 2-3 coats to get opaque, but that's much better than P-spice's 4-5. This time I will be saving Pumpkin Spice for layering, as I showed back here, and Cougar Attack can become my go-to coppery glitter once again.

Added: Just because I have it, a picture of the label:

Indie Halloween options

It's probably kind of late to be ordering Halloween-themed nail polish, but I keep finding the cutest stuff and I can't resist talking about some of it. First of all, I think everybody in the nail-polish world pretty much knows about Simply Nailogical by now (ok, I didn't until relatively lately, but still I'm assuming you are ahead of me on this); she has a video in which she shows an adorable Starrily holo glitter which she collaborated on:

(I think of Christine of SN as kind of being the Bunny of the nail polish world - and yeah, Bunny herself does make occasional forays into talking about nail polish but it's not really her main thing. Christine is kind of goofy and irreverent like Bunny, not to mention is heavily followed like Bunny - so they seem sort of alike to me.) (2.8 million followers as opposed to 7.7 million for Bunny - I just checked - but still, we're talking millions for each of them!)

Enough about that, on to other Halloween polishes - I'm just going to provide links to some indie sellers that have Halloween collections and let you poke around for yourself, ok? If I could find a link that goes directly to a Halloween page I used that. (For the record, no affiliate links or other commercial ties to disclose here. I just love my Halloween polishes, that's all.)

• Nine Zero has some really cute ones - the shard glitters are especially different. I also like this one which is a re-release from last year.
• Painted Polish is on vacation til the 20th which makes the shipping window even tighter, but she has some cute stuff as usual: this trio and this one - Resting Witch Face has got to be one of the best names ever - and also a Stranger Things duo (which of course isn't strictly Halloween, but hey, close enough)
• Pahlish has more nice holos as well as a September LE which still seems to be available
• Release The Bats is another great name, and cute too
• I already mentioned Starrily but here's the link to her own website, where she does have a couple of Halloween polishes (the link up at the top goes to Live Love Polish which undoubtedly has other stuff I've missed as well)

And I could go on but I won't - I have a hella long list of indie polishes if you want more options. Have fun hunting!

Maya, Cajun Shrimp

This is Zoya Maya and OPI Cajun Shrimp (a mini, obviously):

I didn't realize how many coral-colored polishes I had until I started this. Here we have a really dark one and a really pale one. Maya is very sheer, and good for layering. Cajun Shrimp is a classic OPI color - this set of minis was from a set called (as I recall) Take Ten, and that's exactly what it was, OPI classics. I don't have a large OPI collection, to this day, and I didn't have any of these polishes at all, so this was a really good set for me.

Sugar Rush, unlabeled

This is Julie G Sugar Rush, which is another of their Gumdrops polishes, plus an unlabeled mini:

I showed Hot Cinnamon from the same collection not long ago - it's more red, where this one is more like a dark coral-orange. (There is actually another orange polish in the collection, too, which is more of a yellow-orange, but as I've said, I don't wear yellowish colors, so I didn't buy that one.) Sugar Rush is really my favorite, though. It walks the red-orange line so nicely. And this mini is really a pretty similar color, only without the texture, of course. (I just looked, and Hot Cinnamon and Tangerine Dream, the yellow-orange one, are both still available, but Sugar Rush, apparently, is not. Go figure.)

Throwback Thursday: NailThins

I need to get some more of these, they're pretty adorable.

Here's my previous post which tells all about it. The polishes which are layered here are mostly ones that I've talked about in the last week or so.

Halloween polishes + orange NOTD

I went in Super Walmart looking for something else so of course I came out with nail polish:

They are Pure Ice Witch and Famous and Salon Perfect Who Ya Gonna Call? That label that says "BAT GLITTER" is apparently a highly-effective selling point because it certainly reeled me in despite the fact I'm not sure what I'm seeing in here. Looks like black and white and pale-blue and coppery-orange, and the black pieces look like they might be little tiny bats but I'm not entirely sure. But y'know, for $1.99 I shrugged and said "One way to find out..." and threw it in the cart. Then it was joined by this green Salon Perfect which was also just too tempting. It looks like it may be the same formula as Kaboom but I can't be certain (especially since I know I threw my bottle of Kaboom away). I'll report back on this. The link above for the Salon Perfect Polish does have swatches.

Meanwhile, I was playing around with my orange polishes:

This is Retro Red (which is actually red-orange) plus a couple of coats of Y'all Come Back Ya Hear (orange jelly) and then a coat of Zoya Leia, which made it too pink so I pulled it back to orange again with Candy Cane Cordial. The links here go to the posts about the various orange polishes that I've been doing lately. You can see hints of pink in this picture but it's still basically orange, which was what I wanted. Candy Cane Cordial is bumpy so I put on a coat of Gelous and that smoothed it out enough to suit me. With this many layers I didn't figure I needed a bunch of heavy top-coat.

Cauldron Drippings

This is Lynnderella Cauldron Drippings:

I don't have the wheel handy to check, but I think this is over brown, like the nail above it - not that you can really tell. A couple of coats of this is pretty close to opaque. I think if I wear this (and I intend to in the next few weeks!) it will be over something more orange, though.

I don't think this polish is available this year - Which Cauldron Is It is a similar polish, but it's sold out anyway. Basically, this was supposed to be a "no two are alike" polish, in any case. (The later version seems to generally lean more orange than this earlier one, though.)

V.I.P

This is Jade V.I.P:

I have several of these "Special Glitz" polishes; they're holo glitter in a jelly base. I used to buy these from Llarowe but of course Llarowe doesn't carry other brands of polish any more, and as far as I know these brand (which is Brazilian) doesn't have a U.S. distributor now. These are really cool polishes, though.

Pumpkin Spice

I mentioned somewhere back in the last week or so that I had ordered a bottle of Pumpkin Spice from eBay, and here it is:

Now it'd been a couple of years since I'd worn it, and at first I was like, am I remembering this wrong? I remembered that I used to wear multiple coats of it, though, which is why I went through a bottle quite fast. This is the sheer one on the wheel, you can see that it has a base that might be a very sheer black, and then glitter that's coppery-orange. I wasn't sure if I was going to love it as much as I used to, but then I decided to try layering it over Y2K, and I am newly in love:

Yeah, it's just as awesome as I remembered, once I figured out what to do with it.

(I've got other newly-arrived fall glitters, too, but I'll get to those in another entry.)

Added: Scrangie on P-Spice