Sephora Play for November

First of all, I updated my running list of items in all my past Sephora boxes, which is here. I'm not going to repeat the exact line-up of items here.

I always feel this compulsion to put up the pictures of my box online before the end of the month - although I don't know what difference it makes, really. To my knowledge there's no way to go back and order a box later on; you have to be subscribed before the beginning of the month anyway - so it's not like if you act fast, you can still get this box. You can't - you can order individual items, of course,  and you can subscribe to future boxes, but as far as I know, there's no way to get this box. But hey, I'm making my end of the month mental deadline - by an hour or two, at least!

Anyway... the bags for these keep getting cuter and cuter:

And here are the items:

I do have a gripe with Caudalie that I have to get out of my system. I've gotten two Caudalie items in the past few months and both of them have been in a container that wasn't nearly full. Presumably that's deliberate, but I don't like it and I can't imagine that I'm the only person who feels this way. It makes you (a) think you're getting more product than you actually are and/or (b) think you've gotten a defective package. I know you're actually not paying much for these samples (at $10 including shipping for six items, it's well under $2 each) and I know Caudalie stuff is expensive, but I feel like they need to use packaging that fits the amount of product that's inside. It seems... amateurish, not to. That aside, Caudalie products seem awesome and I would consider buying them if they seemed to be a little more in my price-range. (This product is $39 for 1.3 ounces, Sephora's website informs me, which is borderline, to me. I've paid $40 for moisturizers, before, but they all were at least somewhat larger than that.)

I'll try all of this. I've already tried the Caudalie (which is why I paid enough attention to gripe about it), the Replica scent (it smells nice, in a very vintage way, which I assume is deliberate given that powdery scent), and I swatched the lipgloss gel on my wrist and it seemed interesting. (I don't like lipgloss - too sticky! - but I'm assuming that this being "gel" rather than gloss is meant to tell you this isn't just a lipgloss.) I'm not sure about the Glamglow mask because it has the word "mud" in the name and I don't like the mud masks I've tried in the past - but I'll look at it and see what I think.

Crystal Glitter

This is Jordana Crystal Glitter, over black:

This is just your basic small glitter in a slightly milky base. It looks very white in the bottle, but you can see over black (it's the nail pointing straight at the bottle) it looks like it has some blue in it. There's definitely a good bit of holo glitter in there and maybe some fine-milled flakies as well. It's hard to tell. I've never remembered to wear this much, but I like it when I do. It's a good way to give a little bit of spice to a boring creme.

Re availability: current color

Gilded

Here's Sinful Colors Gilded:

This is holiday-ish, but not so much that you can't wear it other times of the year. I tend to wear things like this a lot in January, because it's gloomy (I live in Texas, remember - January's not usually all that cold, necessarily, but we don't always get a lot of sun) and I figure glitters are cheery. Anyway, this is a sort of rose-gold microglitter with larger bits of red. (I notice SC's link below just says gold and red, but I think the gold is definitely pink-leaning.) It reminds me of the formula of Lippmann Mermaid's Dream, although the glitter sizes aren't the same and of course the colors aren't. But it's basically that same glitter-in-a-foil-base idea. (I don't imagine that's any coincidence. Those were everywhere for a while.)

Here's a nice close-up of the bottle from Daily Varnish. (Note, added much later: I happened to click on that link and it now goes somewhere that tried to download something, so I deleted it. Apparently that website is no more!)

Re availability: not a current color, although it still has a page on SC's website. (On Amazon it's anywhere from $4 to $40, at the moment.) It was a holiday polish so it may have been LE in the first place.

(Added: this is in my top 5 Sinful Colors polishes, and I swatched it there over red, which it turns out I quite like. This was also in my 2014 favorites.)

Ruby Queen

This is NYC Ruby Queen, from the Crystal Couture collection:

This was a holiday collection maybe two years ago - it's pretty atypical for NYC and it got them a lot of attention at the time. I remember being kind of unconvinced, but I gradually snagged a couple of them anyway. But it is really pretty. It's a red jelly base and it has some purple glitter in it. Overall, it leans more pink than your average red glitter, although I guess if you put it over a red base it wouldn't be so obvious. My tick-marks run into the lettering and are a bit hard to decipher, but I think this is three coats on its own.

Here's Polish Insomniac's swatches of more of the collection. (I remember wanting the green one, I'm sorry I didn't ever get my hands on it. The only other one I have is the blue.)

Re availability: I was pretty sure these were LE, and when I looked on Amazon I didn't see any of these at all, which leads me to think they're pretty hard to find. You might have to go to eBay to have any hope of finding this one. (And I'm not sure it'd be worth paying a premium price for - at least, you'd have to be much more in love with it than I am!)



Added: I didn't notice when I was writing this that Ruby Queen looks awfully similar to what's supposed to be Poppy Fields, down at the bottom of the wheel in this picture. And... well, that caused me to realize that I screwed up. I posted an entry for Poppy Fields a day or two ago, and I'm wondering if I did that entry very late at night, actually, because now that I've looked at it, it's definitely not Poppy Fields. -- Note that this whole paragraph has no direct bearing on this entry. It's not that this is not Ruby Queen, it's only that that's not Poppy Fields at the bottom. I'm only mentioning it here because it's only just now that that I snapped to the screw-up. So if you happen to have noticed that the Poppy Fields entry has disappeared, that's why. It will reappear at some later time when it's fixed!

Challenge Red-y

This is Nicole by OPI Challenge Red-y:

This is a pretty basic neutral red creme. (If anything it leans a little to the blue side.) It's hard to read my writing on this wheel, but this is the polish that is pointing right at the join between the bottle and the cap. It seems to be just a hair darker than Chinoise, above it, and awfully similar to Big Apple Red, right below it. Now that I look at it again, it looks darker in the bottle than it does on the nail, doesn't it? But it's pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of these bright reds, really.

This was apparently only ever released as a limited edition promotional item, one of those deals where you save proofs of purchase from Special K cereal - which my husband used to love, and that's why I have this one. There were also a couple of other colors that you could get with extra proofs, but I only got enough saved to get this one. (The others were a bright blue and a bright pink. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, either.)

Alexa Lace

NailsInc Alexa Lace is meant to actually look like lace:

It's matte glitter an an unusual shape. I guess it looks sort of lacy on the wheel, here, but I have yet to get it onto my nails in a way that satisfies me. (I see that this is two coats on the wheel, I'll have to remember that when I try it again.) I've tried it over darker and lighter colors - NailsInc recommended lighter and I have to say they are right about that, according to my experiments. Maybe I'll just try it over bare nails next time and see how that goes.

The only Alexa product I found still on NailsInc's website was this set with Alexa Hearts. (Given the prices I found on Amazon for the heart polish alone, that's a deal.) This was a collab with Alexa Chung, and the polishes were meant to mimic various fabrics. As with most all collabs, I would assume this one was LE - and the one box set is just the last remnant.

Katherine

Here's Zoya Katherine:

I showed Paloma a few days ago and Frida way back in early May; these three are the whole "Gloss" collection of three jellies. I suppose as a trend jellies came and went pretty fast. (I still love them, though.) Anyway, this one is obviously sort of a raisin color, or a dark plum. This would probably make a nice jelly sandwich for the holidays over something bright and silver, like Luna.

Re availability: I'm not checking because I've already looked at this lately - all three of these were still available as of a few days ago.

Patricia

This is Nostalgic Lacquer Patricia:

This is one of my favorite polishes, so I'd love to be able to say it's available, but as far as I know this indie is out of business. I think this one was released as a St. Patrick's Day polish - it's green microglitter with scattered violet glitter. It's really beautiful, although I think it shows to advantage best with a green base underneath it.

Out Of Space Convertible

This is Different Dimension Out Of Space Convertible:

(I did a whole lot of wondering about the name of this polish back when I first got it in 2014, and what I came up with is that it's evidently an alternate lyric to "Santa Baby" - which is also the name of the collection it was from or I never would have figured that out.) It's sort of a similar polish to Holiday Spirit, but it has a darker base and somewhat brighter glitter. It's a cool polish but it doesn't scream "Christmas" at you.

Re availability: probably not available. I poked around on Different Dimension's website, and while she has a ton of stuff I'd love to buy, none of it was this. Knowing me, I bought it on clearance in the first place.

Topaz

This is Revlon Chroma Chameleon Topaz:

This was a limited edition set that Revlon put out a couple of years ago, trying to cash in (presumably) on the duochrome trend. Personally, I think this was kind of a half-assed effort. I only bought this one polish from the line because they were on the expensive side (for Revlon) and I was unconvinced, and I think I was basically right on that. You can see by the differences in these two pictures (taken in basically the same light) that they do shift around some, but it's not a great difference. Also this is pretty sheer, as I remember it, although I don't seem to have made good notes (again!) about number of coats here.

(I also remember getting really indignant about this not having a name that's legible to my middle-aged eyes. But y'know, that's a relatively minor point. The name is on the bottle in little tiny print, but it's there.) Here's Vampy Varnish's pictures of some of the other colors. Here's my picture of it from 2013, complete with the little rant at the bottom about the illegible name. It is pretty, but note that I also say that that's four coats, in the picture.

Holiday Spirit

This is Sation Holiday Spirit:

I've got a bunch of holiday-ish polishes coming - like bright reds - but since it's still a month til Christmas I thought I would start the barrage with some polishes that are holiday-themed but not really that holiday-like, if you see what I mean. This is called "Holiday Spirit" but I think it's the most subdued holiday polish I own. It's a glitter, yes, but it's not obviously in holiday colors and it's got a gray base. It looks kind of vaguely silvery on the wheel here but in real life I'm not sure that even shows up that much. It seems like the kind of polish you might be able to get away with (at least during the holidays) even if you worked somewhere pretty conservative. (But it's been years since I worked anywhere that cared in the least about that so you probably shouldn't entirely trust me on that subject.)

Sation is a pretty obscure brand and this is the only one I own, but the last time I checked you could still find Sation polishes, including this one, around. When I googled I found a bunch of beauty supply links, so that's probably your best bet. (I'm not sure if they're even making Sation any more. They don't appear to have a website, at least.)


In other news, I rarely set foot in an actual store on Black Friday any more - I haven't for years - but boy, I have already caved on some early online Black Friday sales, including Zoya (70% off!) and Kiko (buy 3 get 3 free!) and possibly also KBShimmer. (It was late, and regulars here can probably tell you that I'm dangerous late at night. I know I was poking around on their website but I'm not 100% sure if I hit the "place order" button or not. I suspect that I did.)

Elderberry

Here is Nail Pattern Boldness Elderberry:

This is totally one of my favorite polishes, especially for the holidays: a mixed glitter in cool colors. It's very textured-looking without top-coat, so it's a top-coat eater. I usually feed it a couple of coats of Glitter Food.

Here's an old manicure from 2013 here (over purple). It's pretty without anything under it but I do think an undercoat gives it more pop. This is still available from NPB - and they're the makers of Glitter Food, too, so you can stock up on that in one stop, too. (This is not sponsored in any way - I didn't even think about the Glitter Food connection til I went to the website. Glitter Food is definitely a useful thing for this kind of glitter-eating polish, though. It's not cheap but it works very well.)

Added: this is one of those entries where I hit "publish" before I really meant to - or rather, I meant to set it to be posted later, and I forgot I hadn't done that. (I am incurable when it comes to stuff like that.) Anyway, here's an extra picture, just because I have it:

Empties & replacements

Some of these are actual "empties" - but I still haven't gotten my head 100% around this concept of taking pictures of what you're throwing away, and so I sometimes don't remember in time, and I actually throw things away without taking pictures of them first. Oops, bad blogger! - So a couple of these are the (mostly more or less identical) things I bought to replace the empty ones, instead.

This one, for example - I still have my old bottle of this Bumble and Bumble hair primer (basically a leave-in conditioner). I stretched out the life of the old one by mixing Infusium in with the remaining B&B primer. I love the Bumble and Bumble stuff but it's very expensive. I finally gave in and bought a new one when Sephora had their VIB sale lately. And then I'm replacing old konjac sponges with these new ones.

I had an old Ecotools one that was several months old, and a Boscia one that I use on my face. These two are infused - the gray one with charcoal, like the Boscia one was, and the other one with clay.

This one is a replacement, because I love this stuff:

I think there are a couple of different formulas. As long as it's EverPure and it's a color care formula, I'm basically good.

This one is really old and I wouldn't mind having more of it but I don't think they make this stuff any more:

Or, huh, maybe they do. I'm pretty sure that this originally was a set just like the one in that link. I used up the perfume years ago - I bet this tube is ten years old or close to it. Until my skin got less oily in recent years I just didn't use much body lotion, but I did eventually use this up because it smells so awesome. If you've never heard of it, this is Clinique's holiday scent. I couldn't have told you what exactly it smelled of but the Nordstrom's page says mandarin, jasmine, and "deep woods" - I think I might have said it smelled like a Christmas tree with some other unidentified scents thrown in. I'm never good at figuring out what all the notes of scents are, but green scents and citrus scents are usually my very favorites so that does make sense. (I do love it but I'm not sure I want more enough to pay $57 for it.) Added: the Nordstrom link didn't work when I tried it just now, so here's a Clinique one. (And only $47 instead of $57! For the moment there's still a Black Friday special with an additional 25% off, as well. If shipping is reasonable I may cave in on that one, although I shouldn't.) This set was probably produced in pretty limited quantities so this might not be around too long at any price!

My cousin gave me a little gift bag of this brand, which I had never heard of:

This stuff smells heavenly - the scent is lemongrass & mint (I said I liked green smells, remember?) - I guess I should look and see if they have a Black Friday sale or something because the regular price ($10 for 8 oz.)  is a bit steep for my tastes.

Oh one more - I'd forgotten I had this until I found it stuck in with some of my other beauty stuff the other night. I have pretty serious claustrophobia issues and I don't love having a mask covering my face, but I don't completely freak out or anything, either. I was thinking I could cut it in half next time I have one and do upper and lower halves at different times, or something. But anyway, I did use it and I liked the formula of this one better than whatever I had last time - I want to say that was honey? I wanted something with moisturizing properties so this was perfect. And it did make my face feel really good.

Unicorn Farts

This is Funky Fingers Unicorn Farts:

Given the things that people tend to say about unicorns these days - rainbows and glitter for all occasions, etc. - it seems like a logical extension of that that unicorns would fart glitter hexes in rainbow colors, right? Makes sense to me (at least for certain values of "sense"). Anyway, you can see the swatch with the sparse large hexes pointing down at the bottle. It's very bright and festive. When I first got this a couple of years ago, I remember having trouble with the hexes curling - or tacoing - but I dunno, maybe they've flattened out over time? Because I don't really notice that any more. I haven't worn this much, but I think it would be really pretty over the right base.

(I showed a bunch of holiday glitters back in January, with this one thrown in for good measure. The original pictures weren't great so I'm gradually going to be working new entries for those in during the next few weeks. This project may end up extending into 2017 but I'm really wanting to get as much of it in as I can in the remaining bit of 2016!)


Also, this is what I previously wrote about this (from here, because I'm trying to link up these things):
Unicorn Farts (Funky Fingers) - big bright-colored hexes - honestly I doubt I'll ever wear this but it was cheap - 3-for-$5, so that's, what, $1.66? - and it's pretty to look at (and the name is funny, which I have to admit was a factor). The reviews tend to bear me out on its basic unwearability, although the colors are really pretty..

(Ha - "the whole Unicorn secretion thing" - that's a quote from the review linked just above. Just poke around in the indie polish world, particularly; it really is a thing.)

(And I stuck a "fandom" tag on this because while it's not a fandom in the normal sense, I figured the whole unicorn thing taken as a whole amounts to a fandom.)

NOTD: Orly Vintage

This is just after I put on the 3rd coat of this and before I'd cleaned it up at all (because I had all the lights set up and I wanted to take the picture while I was thinking about it!):

Like so many pale cremes like this, Orly Vintage (which is from the Melrose collection, from this past spring) is kind of balky to apply. Even with the 3rd coat you can see where it was wanting to pull down at the bottom of the nail. The first coat was very streaky but it evened out for the most part after the second coat. If it hadn't been for the pulling, two coats would have been enough. I was hoping for a true jade green but this is something more like a mint green. Still, for a lighter color it looks pretty good on me.

(I think I mentioned the other day that I'm kind of on the hunt for what I've started calling "semi-pastels." True pastels, the really pale ones, are not flattering on me, but I've come to realize that there are polishes like this one that are slightly darker than those, that I can wear.)

Crushed Candy

This is Julie G Crushed Candy, part of the Gumdrops line:

I don't think it's a coincidence that several of the names in this set recall the game Candy Crush Saga, which I and practically everybody else was playing like crazy back in 2013. (The other one that especially strikes me is Sugar Rush, which is a phrase that was repeated over and over in the game.) This one is a plummy red-violet, with tonal glitter and a textured formula like all of the Gumdrops polishes.

Availability: many of the Gumdrops polishes are still available, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. (Zoya's holiday line has a red-violet texture, Lorna, that looks fairly similar, although I'm sure they're not dupes.)

Paloma

This is Zoya Paloma:

This is one of the three colors in the Gloss collection, which so far as I know are the only jelly polishes Zoya ever made. (The other ones are Katherine, above it on this wheel, and Frida, a teal.) Paloma has always been my favorite of the three, a bright berry color. It makes really gorgeous jelly sandwiches over a silver glitter, although it does take several coats to get bright enough to suit me. I didn't put any tick-marks to show number of coats on the wheel, but I think this has to be at least two coats and maybe three. (I was also comparing other jellies that are similar, so that's Houston We Have a Purple further above and also Are You Jelly? at the top, I believe - but those are only one coat of each.)

Availability; the Gloss polishes are all still available, I think: Paloma, Katherine, Frida

Reva

This is Zoya Reva:

My notes say I bought this in 2011, which means that it was one of my earliest Zoyas, I think. It's a sort of strawberry color with gold microglitter. I've always worn it over Zoya Kimber, which is more of a middle-of-the-road fuchsia, because I realized early on that Reva was a bit more coral-toned than I liked, on its own, and Kimber by itself is kind of boring. Together, they're perfect.

Sparkling Wave

This is LASplash Sparkling Wave:

I always had it in my head that this was a dark red, but this actually looks more dark-pink-to-fuchsia to me, wouldn't you agree? I bought three of these on sale from Cherry Culture one time - they all have names that start with "Sparkling" and as I recall the other two have clear bases but this one seems to be pink to match the glitter. Actually this interests me more as a pink than it did when I thought it was red - I have so many reds, and so many of them seem almost identical. I have tons of pinks and fuchsias, but at least there are a lot of varieties of pink and fuchsia!

Added: I forgot to talk about availability. First of all I looked at Cherry Culture, since that's where I bought these, and their main page says "Reopening Fall 2017" - so they're not even in business at the moment. As far as these polishes, I was thinking was that these were probably discontinued, and I'm pretty sure I'm right. In fact it doesn't look like LASplash is making nail polish at all any more, they seem to be doing just mostly eyes and lips. (That's what's selling best these days, after all!)

Vintage

This is Orly Vintage:

This looks too blue in this picture. It's really a jade green. This is new to me and I haven't figured out yet if I'm going to like it. (Early trials - by which I mean sticking my finger under the wheel to try to see what it will look like on me - are promising.) I found this via somebody's "favorite greens" videos - I really shouldn't watch those videos, it always ends with me buying something. But I'm kind of on a mission to figure out where the line is between the true pastels which truly do look awful on me, and the just "almost-pastel" colors, some of which it turns out I can wear. This is the first time I've tried a color like this, so I'll have to remember to report back.

Added: the manicure picture came out greener-looking:

That entry is here.

I bought my bottle from Amazon, although it's also available through Orly. Probably at Sally Beauty stores everywhere, too, I'm guessing.

Big City Dazzle

This is NYC In a NYC Minute Big City Dazzle:

The light-colored swatch is three coats of Big City Dazzle by itself, although it says on the bottle it's meant to be a top-coat. It's not something that's ever likely to be truly opaque, that's for sure. Below that is two coats over Colorstay Rich Raspberry. This is just what it says on the bottle, really, a sparkle top-coat - it's basically multicolored, although pink seems to dominate if you look at the bottle.

There are a lot of polishes in this line, but I don't see Big City Dazzle listed. (Also, I said I wasn't sure where you bought NYC these days, but it's apparently available at both Walmart and Target - and Duane Reade, although that's not a store we have in these parts.)

Snow-flakes

This is Color Club Snow-flakes:

This has flakie-type bits in it, but they seem more finely-milled than your average flakie. This swatch picture is almost useless - if you click through and blow it up even larger, you can see more of the flashes of glitter, but that's about all you can see on the nail. I believe that this is small mylar bits with very little color to them, in a clear base. I will try to get some more swatch pictures, maybe over a dark base, but I really think that what you can see in the bottle here is pretty much what you get, iridescent glitter bits that read clear-to-white. It's well-named, really.

This shows up on their website as a gel only - I think that means a traditional gel, the kind that has to be cured. Apparently the "standard" formula, like I have, is discontinued. (That doesn't mean you can't find it on Amazon or at a beauty supply, though!)

Pink Sizzle, Rich Raspberry

This is L.A. Colors Pink Sizzle and Colorstay (Longwear) Rich Raspberry:

I notice that you can see an orange clearance sticker on the side of the Colorstay bottle - I think I probably bought this at Big Lots when they were closing them out. It's a very bright fuchsia (or berry) creme. Then we have Pink Sizzle, which is a slightly more muted berry color with shimmer. It's one of only a couple of L.A.Colors polishes I own - or rather only a couple unless you count all of those little unlabeled mini polishes I have, which I suspect are also L.A.Colors. (I have a matching mini for the other one - Jewel Tone is the label on the one that does have a label - but not for this one.)

I'm pretty sure I bought Pink Sizzle at Family Dollar for $1, but the Family Dollar by me closed so I don't know if they still carry these. I suspect that even if not you can find them around somewhere.

Gibson Girl

This is Square Hue Gibson Girl:

This is another polish that I missed the first time around, for some reason. It's from the Square Hue 1900s collection, so almost two years ago now. It's a slightly-dusty pink creme. Not really my kind of thing, worn alone, but it is the kind of thing I use pretty regularly for layering - for example, under Hot Couture.

Added: I got mixed up and swatched this again when I was doing retakes, so here's another look at it (showing the front side of the bottle this time):

The lighting should have been about the same, but it does actually look slightly different - just something about the angle, I guess.

(And since I didn't say this the first time, I'll note that all Square Hue polishes are limited edition, so this is not a polish that's likely to be easy to find.)

Apple Berry Smoothie

Here we have Rimmel Cocktail Colour Apple Berry Smoothie:

This is a weird little collection - I have three of them. One seems to clearly be a top-coat - I can't ever see it becoming opaque - but the other two, while still fairly sheer, can be gotten to opacity if you're patient. It took three coats with this one and only two with Baby Bellini. And I swear I read somewhere that these were meant to be one-coat colors, which is just laughable. It's the kind of thing that leads you to wonder if these formulas that got produced weren't quite what they intended them to be, or something. But anyway, that aside, I've always liked these. I think that Karen sent me one of them in a swap, and then liked it so much that I tracked down two more (at, y'know, CVS or someplace like that - they weren't hard to find, at the time). They have a pretty metallic sheen to them, in a slightly retro-looking way.

Wow, look at this - not only does it say "color each nail in just one stroke" but the color names don't match what I have. I've always wondered why "Apple Berry Smoothie" was blue - according to that it actually should be Hawaiian Punch. Weird. (But the names on other people's swatches seem to match mine, so apparently sometime between sending out promo material and actual production they switched all the color names around. -- Or, maybe they just mislabeled them all and decided to run with it!)

Anyway, despite these having been available at every drugstore in the US (and probably Canada and the UK too) at the time, they were actually a limited edition set - I did find a few of them in a quick Amazon search, but one of them was $40. (The other two were a much more reasonable $6 or so.) And this one was actually not among them at either price.

NOTD: Pumpkin Spice over Cinnamon

The most seasonally-appropriate pairing I can ever remember wearing (in that it sounds like the ingredients for some Thanksgiving recipe), Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice over Zoya Cinnamon:

Unfortunately you can't see Pumpkin Spice too well - you're mostly seeing Cinnamon, here - but in real life it shows up quite well as orange-coppery sparks. There's also another layer underneath that's virtually invisible, although it may contribute to the messiness of this manicure around the edges. I tried out Fossil of the Death Worm without putting it over anything and I didn't like it at all. I slapped Cinnamon on top because I was thinking it might show through and look interesting, but mostly it really didn't show up well at all. So I'll have to try that again some other time.

I've done a couple more manicures that I haven't gotten around to showing lately. I did Cougar Attack over brown, and mattified it, which I really liked. I thought I had taken a picture of that but if so I can't track it down. And back before that, back in October, I did another Candy Corn Cordial over Retro Red, which was really similar to one I'd done shortly before, so I wasn't too worried about getting a picture on that one.

Hotel Particulier

This is the first Lancôme polish I've ever owned, Hotel Particulier:

...and frankly, I can't say I'm in love. It looks much pinker in Lancôme's pictures (you can see it here) so this just wasn't what I was expecting. I like it but it's much more subdued than what I thought I was getting. It's sort of a dull pink microglitter - or grayed-out pink, like a very very dusty rose - and I didn't even realize until I saw this picture that it has some sort of gold-looking flakes in it, although they disappear again on the nail, as far as I can see.

I keep seesawing back and forth about this, can you tell? It's dull! But it's pretty! But... Well, luckily (sort of) it's better that I'm not too too attached to it because these bottles are only 6ml. Not too much love to go around, you might say.

It comes in a cute little box, as you'd expect for something in this price range. This seems to be part of a holiday collection with four shades. I got mine from Macy's - free shipping! I suspect that my flirtation with Lancôme polish will begin and end here, quite frankly. $15.50 for a tiny little bottle puts it very, very high on a per-ounce basis, and I really need to love it a lot more than I love this.

But who knows, maybe it'll grow on me.

R.I.P.

This is Orly R.I.P:

This is a stray Halloween glitter that I missed the first time through - it's orange hexes and some smaller bits that might be silver (it's hard to tell) in a black jelly base. I swatched it by itself and over the inevitable Forbidden Fudge as well. I used to wear this a lot back when I first got it and then the last couple of years - now that I have more Halloween polishes than I really know what to do with - I've tended to forget about it. It's too obviously Halloween-ish to wear much the rest of the year, although I think at least once I used it in a jelly sandwich and that toned it down. This was the first manicure I ever took a picture of for this blog.

R.I.P. has been around for a number of years now, but it's still showing up on Orly's website and I imagine you can find it other places as well.

German-icure

This is OPI German-icure:

Mine is a mini, another one of those unlabeled ones from the Take Ten set some years ago. I was poking around to see if I had the punctuation right on this, and then I had to look two different places, because the first place I looked, PolishAholic's swatches look so different from mine that I wasn't sure I had it ID'd right! I thought it was brownish red, but her swatches look so much more red than mine that I was initially confused. But I guess it was just the lighting, because Scrangie's swatches do look more brown. It's definitely redder than Rich In Heart, which is above it on my wheel, but in my living room, anyway, it doesn't look completely red. (I've said in the past that the light in my living room is funky, but actually I've got daylight bulbs in here now and it's much improved.)

I believe that this is still an available polish, although I didn't go and check.

Bronze Foliage

This is Virago Varnish Bronze Foliage:

I love this polish on a brown background like you see it here (over Forbidden Fudge, again). It's various sizes of glitters including some really large hexes that seem to have a bit of multichrome shimmer to them. And there's some holo glitter scattered around in here as well. I really should try this over something like a purple sometimes and see how it does. There's no real reason it needs to be confined to browns, right?

I bought this on clearance and I haven't seen it on Virago's website again since then, unless she resurrects it for some future fall season. It's really lovely, though.

Two Cent

This is Sonia Kashuk Two Cent:

There's not really much to say about this - it's a pretty, coppery shimmer. It looks (from the arrows) like the swatch pointing at the bottle is Two Cent by itself, and the swatch above that is Two Cent over Forbidden Fudge, which naturally looks a good bit darker. (Forbidden Fudge is kind of my favorite layering polish of the moment, had you noticed?) Flagstone Rush, below Two Cent, looks more orange and Two Cent looks more brown, but it's still not a full-on brown, either.

The picture I posted earlier was the very last of the pictures like this that I had stored up. I've been gradually updating my nail polish spreadsheet with a column to show what date I did the entry for each polish - and now I'm to the point where the bulk of them are done and the ones that I missed the first time around show up very easily. Most of those are top-coats and I'll try to get to those gradually, but first I went back and looked for the regular polishes that I hadn't gotten in the first pass. Last night I put The Avengers (the movie, that is) on and sat with boxes and wheels at a table and looked for the polishes still on my list and tried to match them up to my existing wheels, or did new swatches if I couldn't easily find the old ones. (I actually watched the last 45 minutes, the Chitauri War part, twice, so I worked on this for at least three hours and probably more like four, altogether. And yeah, it probably would have gone faster without the movie to distract me, but then I would have been bored and would have quit much sooner.)

So anyway, that's what I'm posting now: retakes. I don't think there's many people watching my progress through this process with bated breath - but I also notice that some of these entries are getting a fair number of hits, gradually. I'm mostly doing this for my own benefit but still it makes me happy to think it's also possibly helpful to somebody else who's googling nail polishes!

Silver Glitter, Idol

This is Barry M Silver Glitter and Square Hue Idol:

First of all, if it matters to you (because frankly all these polishes look pretty similar) the polish that's pointing at the bottles is not one of these polishes. The Barry M polish is above that one and Idol is below. I'm going to have to go back and take another look at these wheels and see if they look more distinguishable in person. Maybe I was going in order of coverage, because the silver glitter at the top of the wheel (which I think is one of my unlabeled minis) looks the sparsest and the Barry M looks pretty sparse too, and Luna, at the bottom looks like maybe it vies with Idol for being the heaviest coverage. (I'm planning on taking some new pictures tonight, so I'll look while I'm doing this and if I decide I was wrong about this I'll edit this and add in the new information.) (I did find Silver Glitter while I was poking around, but I didn't come across Idol. I believe that I was right that Silver Glitter is sparser than Luna, for sure, and probably Idol as well, I'd think. But it's not what I would call sparse, in general - only that it's not quite as glitter-packed as these others.)

The Barry M Silver Glitter, as I understand it, was an LE polish only available at Boots stores in the UK several years ago. I bought mine from somebody's blog sale, but presumably this is genuinely a hard-to-find polish, particularly in the US. And Idol is LE, as always with Square Hue.

Unlabeled, Tiara

This is another one of those unlabeled minis that I have a bunch of, and then another mini, Orly Tiara:

I haven't swatched all of these unlabeled ones, but this one is particularly interesting because it's a glitter mix that I don't otherwise have, I believe - larger hexes and a lot of small silver pieces. That's the top swatch of the silvers. Tiara is two down from that - it is a very packed glitter, seemingly.

The unlabeled ones seem to correspond to LAColors polishes so there may be something similar out there if you look. But it's late and I'm not going to go do the homework of finding out for you!

London, These Are Not The Droids

This is Zoya London (a Pixie Dust) and Dollish These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For:

London is a medium-gray texture (with scattered silver glitter) and These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For (hereafter TANtDYLF) is a mixed glitter in a clear base - the way I figure it, it's silver and blue for R2-D2 and gold for C-3PO. Makes sense, right? (If I remember I'll have to wear this when we go see Rogue One in a month or so.) I think I've tried TANtDYLF over a couple of different colors and I haven't found anything I feel like is ideal just yet. Maybe I need to just try for opaqueness (which seems to be what they did here).

TANtDYLF is not available as far as I can tell. (See the link above; the fandom polishes still show up on Dollish's website but they all say Sold Out. Possibly there might be another run of them at some time in the future? - I'm guessing, but that seems to me like the most likely reason for leaving them on the website.) You can still get London, even though... didn't Zoya say they weren't producing any more Pixie Dusts, ages ago - like, a couple of years ago? They must have produced a lot of them, then, because they're still there. (I haven't poked around to check, but to my knowledge all of the Pixie Dusts are still available.)

Graffiti

This is a set from The New Black. The set as a whole is called Graffiti although the individual polishes don't seem to have separate names. I numbered them and stuck labels on them so that some day when they all get separated I'll have a hope of remembering what the heck these are!

I experimented around with combining them in different ways on the wheel. Basically, you've got a black, a dark gray glitter, a lighter gray, a metallic silver, and a glittery silver top-coat, so presumably the idea is that you might layer these.

I have to say I wouldn't have bought this if it hadn't been on sale, and it's one of those things that in retrospect might not have been that great a deal even on sale. As you've been seeing in recent days, I have things that are similar to most of these already. (Black - check. Metallic - check, Silver glitter - check. The two gray ones, the ones I numbered 2 and 3, are the only ones that might be much different from things I already have, and I'm not even sure about those.

Sand & Stilettos, Arsenic

This is Funky Fingers Sand & Stilettos and OCC Arsenic:

In case you can't read my writing on the wheel, Arsenic is the bright silver pointing right at the bottle (just below City Of Ashes, the darkest gray polish on the wheel), and Sand & Stilettos is below Arsenic. Arsenic is a straight-up bright silver glitter, where Sand & Stilettos is a silver holo with a lot of rainbow stuff going on. You can also see that S&S has a much more textured appearance on the wheel, where Arsenic comes out looking more like a metallic.

You know, the fact is, I don't love really bright silver glitters, for some reason. I've always liked silver jewelry (although I really don't wear a lot of jewelry these days) so it's not that I don't like silver. But these are just, I dunno, too flashy? (As I said with Celeb City the other day, maybe I need to try them with matte topcoats.) Sand & Stilettos in particular is already residing in the destash box, although I haven't actually gotten rid of it or anything yet.

I'm not seeing anything to indicate that either one of these polishes are still available - OCC nail polish, Five Below's "beauty" page. (As far as I know, Funky Fingers is only available at Five Below, although I could be wrong.)

Added: I was reading through a bunch of old polish swatch entries that I came across, and I realized that the polish in this entry that they call "Reject" has to be Sand & Stilettos. (Note: it's 2018 as I write this, and I still have this polish. I keep threatening to destash it, but it's still here.)

Is That Silva?

This is OPI Is That Silva? - which is a magnetic polish from the Skyfall collection. (The other polish in this picture is Trailer Trash, which has already been discussed.)

I don't know where my magnets for all my magnetic polishes are, but there's a picture of Is That Silva used with the magnet that actually came with it somewhere on this blog, and I'll try to track it down and add it here. Here we go:

(that was easy, it popped up right towards the top of all my old pictures when I looked). Honestly, of all the magnetics I've tried, this is the one I've had the best luck with - pretty much the only one I've really gotten to come out looking like it was meant to, I'd say. But this polish may be difficult to find since that movie was, what, four years ago, and this wasn't a really widely-distributed polish at the time, either. (I didn't see it on Amazon just now when I looked.)

Here's an entry where I was talking about the polish and how I applied it. This is the entry where the picture originally was, although I don't talk much more about it there, really.