2016 favorites - the "honorable mention" category

I already showed the list of everything I've worn for the first time this year, which is the pool that I choose my favorites from. A lot of people limit themselves to polishes that were released in the current year, and I don't - but an upshot of that is that I'm more likely to have some polishes on my list that are discontinued. To a large degree, I feel like your favorites are your favorites, and it's more of a personal-preference thing - certainly giving readers new polishes to buy is secondary. But on the other hand, I know I go out and buy things that I saw on other people's favorites lists all the time, so I gave in a little on that point, and decided to separate the discontinued ones out and call this set Honorable Mentions. It's a good way to whittle down the list a little, if nothing else!

My shortlist was 19 polishes. (I took a couple off and then ended up putting a couple more back on again, and the list ultimately ended up a little bigger than I first thought it was going to be.) I did a wheel with all 19 - the 20th spot is the nail that looks like it has a stripe down the middle. It's the two sheerest polishes over black.

I know that I'm a cool-colors person, but even I kind of blinked when I looked closely at this picture. There are only maybe two polishes here that lean even the slightest bit warm. It's nearly all blues, greens, and purples. I shouldn't be surprised by that, but I was, a little bit. There's only a couple that even lean red at all. Anyway, I'll go over all of these in the next few days, but here's the first installment.

As I said above, I decided to separate out the discontinued ones, so I went and looked at each brand's website for all 19 polishes, to determine if the polishes were officially still current or not, and I ended up with seven polishes from five different brands that were unavailable. That's not to say you may not be able to find some of these somewhere. But it's going to be a crapshoot: maybe, maybe not.

R-L and top to bottom:

• Formula X: State Of The Art (discontinued)
• KBShimmer: Excuse Me I Blurpled (discontinued)
• Rescue Beauty Lounge: Small Dim Summer Stars, Locavore (company is out of business)
• Salon Perfect: Who Ya Gonna Call? (Halloween polish)
• Square Hue: Vogue, Lake Louise (all Square Hue polishes are limited edition)

I actually feel like this weeded out the right polishes, for the most part: not that I don't like these, but only a couple of these were remotely in contention to be in the top 5. (The ones that might are Lake Louise, Excuse Me I Blurpled, and maybe Who Ya Gonna Call? But I don't really think I would have put those that high, ultimately.)

(I took new bottle-and-wheel pictures, with each individual bottle next to its swatch, but I'll probably put those up separately later.)