Ultra Violet

This is Milani Color Statement Ultra Violet:

This is a really pretty heavy shimmer - it's a fairly neutral purple, a little red-leaning but not all that much. I like this one a lot. Unfortunately it does not seem to be a current color.

Added: For the record, here's the link to the first (fuzzy) try at showing this polish.

Ichi Hanami

This is Pretty Serious Ichi Hanami:

It's a really pretty cherry-blossom pink microglitter, almost a metallic. This is from the Museum of Naileontology collection, which is supposedly based on old polishes (Kaz, who owns Pretty Serious, is also a serious collector of old polishes) - but I have no idea what this might be based on - something 90s, maybe? Anyway, this is sold out on PS's website right now but hopefully might be restocked at some point!

I usually go into pink-and-berry overdrive for the first half of February so this would be a good one. Who knows if I'll get around to it, though. (I think my new Femme Fatale polish may be up next.)

Added: here's the post I wrote when I bought this polish, which includes Kaz's description for the Museum of Naileontology collection. Also note that this was in my 2015 favorites.

NOTD: I Wanna Be A Part Of It, No Rest For The Wicked

I was thinking today that I really should have given my blog some name that reflects my, um, tolerance of imperfection, instead of this very vague name (derived from an earlier jewelry and crafting blog) that tells you nothing much. Imperfectly Painted comes to mind, only of course that one's taken. I usually feel compelled to apologize for the messy manicures I post, but then I also eventually just give up, most of the time, and post the things anyway. Because it's generally the only way I'm ever going to post anything. I imagine the people who can't tolerate that ran away shrieking ages ago.

All that is my lead-in to posting not one but two messy manicures. (And possibly the one where one of them is falling apart. I haven't quite worked up to that one yet, but I'll probably say "the hell with it" and post it anyway, as usual, by the time I get down to the bottom of this entry.)

This is I Wanna Be A Part Of It, from Ever After. I had not tried this indie brand before. And this polish is LE and you might (or might not) be able to find it at PolishCon later this spring, but other than that, probably not. I just happened to stumble on this - they are selling LE polishes on sort of a rotating schedule at a Big Cartel website. They rotate them out weekly, I think it's on Sundays that they change out.

Anyway, this tends to look grayish but it's actually a very pale purple with darker purple flakes in it. It's really pretty and I'm still wearing it as I write this and it's wearing well.

And here is No Rest For The Wicked:

I talked about this over here and I mentioned that I had wear problems, particularly what you see below.

It was already chipping (particularly on the other hand) before this happened, but this one was disconcerting. It's a really pretty polish, as you can see, so I hope this was just one of those things where it's a one-time problem.

Seared Bronze

This is Cover Girl Outlast Seared Bronze:

This one is a mini (aka Glosstini), but this was also available in the larger bottle as part of the core Outlast collection for a couple of years. I believe I liked it enough that I went and bought myself a backup in the big size. I'm pretty sure it's discontinued now but I would think the big bottles, as least, are still findable. (I haven't checked to see, though.) This was originally a Catching Fire tie-in, and it's sort of a glass-fleck in several shades of copper and bronze. It's said to be a near-dupe for OPI Warm & Fozzie, but I never got around to buying that so I can't confirm or deny. (I picked it up and looked at it more than once, I remember, but never quite talked myself into it.)

I had several from this line and I really wore them a ton when they first came out - but nowadays I have so many more polishes than I did a few years ago, and I can't say I've gotten around to wearing any of these in a good while. But it's a lovely color, just the same.

Baby Baby Baby

This is Square Hue Baby Baby Baby:

This polish is currently a resident of my destash box - although it's entirely possible I'll relent and fish it out again - because I got aggravated with it while doing this wheel. It was doing that balky skippy thing, although I don't remember having had that problem with it before. (I expect that with pale cremes, but not so much with purple shimmers. And there are so many purple shimmers out there without problems like that - thus the trip to the destash box.)

This came out in the last set from Square Hues Decades collection - and I went and double-checked to make sure this actually was a Justin Bieber song, and ugh, boy am I sorry. Also he looks about 12 in the video for this song, which is kinda creepy. (I'm sure he probably wasn't quite that young but I just don't care enough to go check. Middle-aged grouchy person here, what can I say.)

(Added: picture where you can see the bottle color much better, here.)

I'm Not Really A Waitress

This is OPI I'm Not Really A Waitress (aka INRAW):

It's what I would categorize as a funky metallic red, just mostly because it's really a difficult polish to categorize more specifically than "metallic red." See here, where I compare it with Essie Life Of The Party. (There are also some links to other sources there.) They're not dupes, quite, but they're both in that same category - whatever that is, exactly. Google INRAW and you will find wildly varying descriptions, or at least I did when I tried it. It's in OPI's core collection, though, and has been for years.

Crush On Lava

This is Hard Candy Crush On Lava:

You can see that this is a duochrome with gold and pink. (This is pretty sheer and I imagine that this needs three coats to really show up to best advantage, but you can see there on the wheel that I only used two.) I think that this is supposed to be a dupe for MAC Bad Fairy. I don't have that polish - it's long discontinued as I understand it - but this is really pretty. (It's still listed on Walmart's website so I guess it's still a current polish.)

Locavore

This is RBL Locavore, the last of my 2016 favorites to get its own post:

It's a mixed glitter, primarily green and gold with some other stuff mixed in. I have found I especially love this over a green base. I did it with Zoya Rikki a couple of times last year, but a darker green would work as well, I'm pretty sure. (For the record, no longer available, since Rescue Beauty is out of business.)

(Here's where I originally talked about Locavore, and here's the manicure mentioned above, Locavore over Rikki.)

NOTD: St George over Olivera

This is A England Saint George layered over Zoya Olivera:

I started out with Olivera by itself for a couple of days - I didn't get a picture of that part, unfortunately, and then my Live Love Polish order arrived, including St George, and I couldn't resist trying it out. I did like Olivera - I had fun watching it shift between blue and green (Zoya says it has purple in it, too, but I didn't see the purple shift nearly as much). St George, as you can see, is a teal-green scattered holo. (At least, I think the holo-ness of it is showing up a little in this picture.)

No Rest For The Wicked

This is Superchic No Rest For The Wicked:

You can compare it here to St. George (from A England), which is above it on the wheel. No Rest For The Wicked is a linear holo and St. George is a scattered one (what I think of as a more "traditional" holo, although really both kinds have been around just as long, as far as I know). St. George is also more of a teal, so a bit blue-toned, and a little darker, as well, where NRftW is more of a straight dark green. Linear holo means it's flashier, of course. It picks up the light really well; it doesn't have to be in bright sunlight to show up. (Which, even for us down in the land of 300-sunny-days-a-year, is still good this time of year.)

I have to say for the record that I've just been wearing this and I had chipping problems. I put on base-coat (NailsInc Superfood) and top-coat (Butter London Hardwear), which is what I've been wearing with everything lately, and it was fine for the first 24 hours or so, but then it started chipping pretty bad. And tonight (at about the 48-hour mark now) the polish on the whole top half of a nail suddenly sheered right off. I may try it with different undies next time and see if it helps. It's a really pretty polish so I'm not going to give up on it that easily.

Live Love Polish!

I finally got around to using my "welcome" 10% off code for Live Love Polish, and I decided I might as well go for it and get free shipping while I was at it (which takes a $40 purchase) so I ended up with four polishes. They arrived very promptly in this very cute box:

(although I did have to peel a shipping label off of it to see the full cuteness of it. But that's no big deal.) And inside:

Two Superchics, a Femme Fatale, and an A England. The last one is the only brand I'd tried before, of these.

This is the two Superchics, Realm Of Erotica and No Rest For The Wicked. (They look rather holiday-ish in tandem here but in reality RoE is pink, not red. No Rest is pretty close to a Christmas green, though, if you wanted to look at it that way. It will be a good St. Patrick's Day polish, too, when that time rolls around.)

And then the A England is also greenish, although I'd call it more of a teal, really:

(Not that you can see it too well here. But this is one I've wanted for ages.)

I didn't get a label picture on the Femme Fatale, really, but I do have this:

Cute box. And the polish is Necromancer. I did swatches of them all but I might as well put those up separately, later, since that seems to be how I prefer to have them.

(I think I was pretty clear about having paid for these, but for the record: no disclosures required.)

Purple Fiction

This is China Glaze Purple Fiction, which was on my 2016 favorites list:

(I'm going to run out of favorites soon - I think there's only one left after this.) This is sort of a grape purple metallic. It's very pretty but I notice that when I wore it I complained about it being a bit difficult to apply. I bought this along with Pearl Jammin' from the fall Rebel collection, and although I had issues of one sort or another with both of them (I thought Pearl Jammin' clashed with my skin-tone), I also think I chose pretty well.

(Because I don't seem to have mentioned this before, I'm pretty sure I bought both of those from Amazon - I think it was from the same beauty supply company, although I couldn't tell you which one that was without looking.)

Excuse Me I Blurpled

This is KBShimmer Excuse Me I Blurpled, which was on my 2016 favorites list:

It's a dark blue-violet (or blurple) jelly with various blue and purple glitters. It's been around for several years, and I've always heard people talk about how much they love it, but until I actually tried it for myself I didn't see what all the fuss was about. (I had to poke around to see where I bought this - I was thinking it was straight from KBS but no, apparently it was in with a bunch of Lynnderellas in a blog sale purchase.) I think this polish was still available until fairly recently but apparently it is no longer.

(Added: here's the previous swatch post, for completeness' sake, but it doesn't really say much.)

Dream

This is Zoya Dream, which was in my 2016 favorites:

It's a blue scattered holo, just like Zoya Aurora and others. What I particularly liked about this was that it isn't as pure-blue as it looks - it seems to have just a tiny bit of green to it. It's maybe more indigo than straight cobalt, does that make sense?

I've talked about this polish pretty recently but it didn't have a post by itself so I thought it'd be nice to have for future reference. (I've been making indexes for all this here.) I talked about this here when it first came and here when I first wore it. It's several years old but it is still a current polish.

Concealer & more from Sephora

My first Sephora order of 2017 is Nars concealer and some other assorted items:

(Is it properly NARS rather than Nars? You always seem to see it in all-caps. But I'm going to be contrary and capitalize it normally instead. I just paid $30 for their concealer so I can capitalize it how I want, I figure.)

I had bought a small size of this concealer before, and was hoping it would last forever and I wouldn't need to buy another one. But I really like it, and while it's not gone yet, it doesn't actually seem like it will last forever so I decided to go ahead and buy a full-size one. The travel size only comes in two colors, Vanilla and Custard. I had Vanilla before and it worked fine, but it's actually quite pale, so I decided to get one shade darker this time. One shade darker here is apparently Creme Brulee, and it's pink-toned rather than peachy (which is presumably the same thing that most brands call being cool-toned rather than warm), so that's what I wanted. Actually when I tried to do a swatch it disappeared almost completely on the side of my wrist, so I guess that means it matches my skin almost exactly, right? They usually say you should get a concealer that's slightly lighter than your skin, but unless it proves to be a problem, I'll probably just stick with it. (It's reassuring to know that Sephora would let me change it out if it turned out to be necessary, though.)

The other thing I bought was the Well-Kept towelettes, which are meant to clean your phone with and so forth. This is supposed to help with your skin, although quite honestly, I talk on my phone so little that I wasn't terribly interested in that aspect of it. I figured it would be nice to have them to use just on a basis of general hygiene, though. I don't talk on my phone but I do use it a great deal and since I drop it pretty regularly, it (or rather the Otterbox that regularly saves it from my clumsiness) could undoubtedly stand to be cleaned a bit more often.

And then the other two things I didn't pay extra for - they are both deluxe samples. One was a weekly special thing and the other was a 100-point bonus. I'm not entirely sure which is which, to be quite honest. They are both from Fresh:

The one on top, the Vitamin Nectar (which is a mask) was the 100-point bonus, I think, and the other one was the freebie for spending over $25. That one is Rose Deep Hydration Face Cream, which sounds like it would be rose-scented but if it is it's not noticeable to me. (Possibly it's very-faintly scented, so faintly that it doesn't penetrate my stopped-up nose.) It seems to work more than adequately as a moisturizer, though.

The Vitamin Nectar is rather alarming when you open it:

It's the one on the left. It looks to me like you're putting marmalade on your face or something like that. But I've tried it and it feels just fine. It has a vaguely-fruity smell but nothing repulsive. The rose creme is just your standard white moisturizer like every other one I have. (When I stuck my nose right into it, it proved to have that very faint rose scent that I suspected.)

I actually considered buying another moisturizer too - this one, which I had a sample of and quite liked. But honestly, I have about a dozen deluxe-sample sized moisturizers of various kinds around here - very possibly more than a dozen - and a couple of full-sized ones too, and I really need to just use all those up before I go paying for more. So I quashed myself on that one. Sephora will have to wait 'til later for more of my money. I'm sure it won't be long.

We'll Never Be Royals

Here is Color Club We'll Never Be Royals, which was in my 2016 favorites:

I bought this polish back in the early fall, along with another Color Club polish from the same line (which is Oil Slick, and last I checked they were still available). It's a multichrome - you can see the halo effect in the bottle here. The base color seems to be a dark blue-leaning purple, but then it shifts around toward more of a red-violet or fuchsia, and also has hints of orange. It's beautiful. Beautygeeks has swatches of the whole collection in case (like me!) you missed it when it first came along.

NOTD: Pearl Jammin'

This is not a great picture, by any means, but it's what I've got and I'm going with it:

I had cut all my nails short to (approximately) match the very shortest one in the middle there - that one is very short because it broke, so I didn't cut the rest of them quite short enough to match. I keep them pretty short these days anyway, but not ideally quite this short. (I finally started taking biotin, a month or more ago now, so it's going to be interesting to see whether it actually helps with breakage, which has been a big problem for me. There's a visible line across my nails when they're bare, that's made it about halfway up now. I'm hoping that's a good sign.) (Also, this picture annoys me because it looks like I cut a couple of nails really crooked, but I swear it's just the angle!)

Anyway,  I think this was three coats of Pearl Jammin' - I don't honestly think this is my color, but it is really pretty. It almost seems to actively clash with my skin-tone. I probably should have known better than to buy it in the first place, it's so pale. But I do like it - maybe I should try layering it over something and see if that helps.

Verismo

This is Jin Soon Verismo, which was on my 2016 favorites list:

It's a really gorgeous blackened gold. I talked about it back in October, but I have a new picture, so eh, here we are again. It's from Jin Soon's Operetta collection - the colors were taken from old Erté designs for opera costumes. It's still a current color, and I'll refer you to the link above for a couple more references. I really don't know of anything else that's remotely like it.

Small Dim Summer Stars

This is Rescue Beauty Lounge Small Dim Summer Stars, which was in my 2016 favorites:

This is basically a black or really dark charcoal - it's hard to be sure about that - with a lot of microglitter stuff going on. This was from the RBL "A Poem" collection, and to my knowledge the only descriptions Ji ever released about them were in a sort of poem form. Scrangie helpfully provided that quote (which is good since RBL's website is no more):

Lost in the woods on a moonless, un-illuminated night, they stumble through the darkness. Looking up at the sky amid the fragrant forest, the weeping willow tree branches recite a monologue in the distance. A whippoorwill sopranos—its cadenza joins to compete. Then they appeared, countless tiny stars embedded in the dark sky, it was always there to be found in every gentle, trusting heart. This sweltering silvery black base hammered with multifaceted and spectacular green, blue, pink, shimmery, glittery twinkling stars will bring you back to that summer night long ago, full of wonder and beauty.

Actually I guess the basic information is in there, isn't it? - silvery black base and green, blue, and pink sparkly stuff. It's just hidden by all the poetic stuff.

You might can find these on eBay or somewhere, but RBL is out of business. I bought mine when they were having their final sale; in retrospect, I wish I'd bought more. But then isn't that how it always goes?

Slate

This is RGB Slate:

This is the only RGB polish I have, and apparently it's discontinued. (There's a pretty similar shade, Gunmetal, on their sale page, currently.) Vampy Varnish says that RGB started out with ten colors and Slate is one of the original ten. I wore this recently under Butter London Knackered, and I think I've maybe worn it one other time. It's pretty but it's the kind of thing I tend to skip over in favor of something showier. I really should get over that.

Leia

This is Zoya Leia, which was on my 2016 favorites list:

Zoya describes this as "a sheer, opalescent white with flecks of fuchsia, green and gold" - it looks like a white shimmer when you put it on alone. When you layer it over a dark, as you can see in the (half-)swatch with the arrow pointing to it, it comes out more as a sort of pinky-purple shimmer.

I think this is pretty clearly a reference to Princess Leia's white dress, which is why I had to wait a couple of weeks after Carrie Fisher's death to even be able to talk about this polish. I was a teenager when the first Star Wars movie came out, so Carrie Fisher wasn't even a lot older than me. To a geeky teenage girl, seeing that role-model was just a revelation.

I had already decided that this polish was on my shortlist before the news about her heart attack hit, so it's not here because of that. It's here because it's a beautiful polish.

Metamorphic

This is Formula X Metamorphic:

It's a metallic gray microglitter, basically, to the point of reading as a dark silver - or I guess pewter, you might say. This is from the Liquid Crystals collection. Formula X apparently described it as "sheer" but it goes pretty opaque in two coats. (Temptalia has some comparison swatches.) (As with almost all of my Formula X polishes, I bought it marked down so it's almost certainly discontinued.)

State Of The Art (and the full favorites wheel)

This is Formula X State Of The Art, which was on my 2016 favorites list:

It's an odd slightly-bleached-looking green (that maybe leans a little blue). The bleached effect may or may not be my imagination, because after all, those bleached-out colors were a thing a couple of years ago, and this is not a new polish. In fact I'm pretty sure it's discontinued.

I think this may be the only creme out of the 19 polishes on my shortlist for 2016. Which probably tells you a lot about my taste in polishes. And in fact I'm pretty sure this is one of the ones I cut out at one point and then put back in again.

Here's my previous post, which pairs it with Glee.


(Here's a picture of the wheel with all these polishes, because I don't think I've actually written down the full list anywhere. Note that there's actually only 19 polishes, #2 below doesn't count!)

Let's see, let's make it easy - starting from the most easily identifiable polish on this wheel, the white one, and going clockwise:

1. Leia (Zoya)
2. (half Leia, half Sparkling Garbage, over black)
3. Sparkling Garbage (Orly)
4. Ivanka (Zoya)
5. Who Ya Gonna Call (Salon Perfect)
6. Locavore (Rescue Beauty Lounge)
7. State Of The Art (Formula X)
8. Starry Starry Night (Essie)
9. Dream (Zoya)
10. Lake Louise (Square Hue)
11. Excuse Me I Blurpled (KBShimmer)
12. Alice (Zoya)
13. Aster (Zoya)
14. Poltergeist Puddle (Pretty Serious)
15. Purple Fiction (China Glaze)
16. We'll Never Be Royals (Color Club)
17. Vogue (Square Hue)
18. Verismo (Jin Soon)
19. Hotel Particulier (Lancome)
20. Small Dim Summer Stars (Rescue Beauty Lounge)

I commented when I first showed this about the lack of warm colors, and I talked above about the lack of cremes. I also notice that there's a complete lack of OPIs, which tend to have a big presence on other peoples' favorites lists. I do buy OPI polishes from time to time but I don't have near as many as a lot of polish people do. That also goes to some degree for Essie and China Glaze, of which I have one of each here. I think of those three and Zoya together to some degree - they're the big commercial salon brands, right? I think I just don't find most of their new releases terribly interesting and I don't find that their formulas are as magical (on me, anyway) as a lot of people seem to think. I definitely am partial to Zoyas, but I didn't buy a huge number of Zoyas this year, either, it's just that a lot of what I bought ended up here. (I think I bought ten Zoyas, six from the Earth Day promo and four on Black Friday. I think I bought two China Glazes and only the one Essie - oh, and also the set of four Essie minis, I forgot about that one. And offhand, the only OPIs I can remember buying in 2016 were the pair of Hello Kitty ones - I know I did think about putting Starry-Eyed For Dear Daniel on this list. It narrowly failed to make the cut.)

The Symbiote

This is Chirality The Symbiote (in mini size):

This is still available from Chirality, I checked. She calls it a black holo and I'm sure it has a black base but it reads more as a charcoal gray, I'd say. It's very pretty.

Destash: There's Snow One Like You

This is China Glaze There's Snow One Like You (a texture):

This polish does give a pretty nice "snow" effect. I kept thinking "maybe as an accent nail" but somehow I could never work up any enthusiasm about it. I finally gave up and put it in my destash box, meaning I might get rid of it eventually (although frankly some of the polishes currently in that box have been there for a year or so and haven't gone anywhere). This is one of the holiday set that I got free from China Glaze several years ago, although since I don't have all that much good to say about it, I don't think anybody's going to complain about disclosure one way or the other, do you? (And I think it's probably discontinued, anyway.) I got this polish in 2013 and kept saying, "Well, maybe I'll try it sometime" as mentioned above but never did. If you count it up it's been four holiday seasons ('13, 14, 15, and 16) and I have yet to actually put it on my nails. I think that it's time to face the fact that I'm just not likely to ever wear it. (I'm nicer about it that the people who called it "cottage cheese," though, you have to admit.)

NOTD: Cherry Fast + G-listen To Your Heart (matte)

I didn't have a great week. In fact I was so out of it that I went to work without any nail polish on, one day, which I never do. And the next day I had still only gotten as far as base-coat, but I did stop and to grab a bottle of polish on the way out the door. It was one of those Insta-Dri polishes that I bought a couple of months ago - Cherry Fast. Actually Insta-Dri is really good for the kind of day where you're still working on your nails in the car parked across the street from work, since it dries so fabulously fast. I know some of you more-organized people would probably never contemplate such a thing, and I actually have really cut down on doing that recently, but I did it this time. So here's Cherry Fast (actually taken in the car - sloppy mani, dry cuticles and all, sorry!):

I didn't even have time to put top-coat on, and now a day later, I can see that this manicure isn't going to hold up too well without it. It already had tipwear before I got off of my short Friday shift.

I was thinking that I had a glitter that would match this pretty well, and actually it matched much better than I thought - that was one of my old Sephora by OPI polishes, G-listen To Your Heart. I patched the tips up but they're already wearing again, and you can see all the flaws from the original manicure still under there, but I count this one a win, because it's a great combination. This is multiple coats of G-listen To Your Heart, I should mention - I think it was three. It goes on too light for me to be satisfied with one. (Cherry Fast is a total one-coater, though, so it averages out.)

This is with Matte Me Crazy on top, too. It still glimmers more definitely than you can see here, but it's muted down a good bit from how it would look with regular top-coat. That seems to be the only way I like glitters lately.

I wanted to show the bottles and so I did a quick swatch while I was at it - this is what it looks like with only one coat of the glitter (and no top-coat, matte or otherwise):

Ivanka

This is Zoya Ivanka, which was in my 2016 favorites:

Zoya calls this polish "emerald" and then they go on and talk in the next sentence about it having a forest-green base and a "hint of emerald" and then they also talk about mermaid green. It seems to me that they're contradicting themselves somewhere in there, but to me, this is mermaid green. It's a little bit blue-green (which could come from the "forest" part, because forest greens often lean a little blue) and it's packed with gold glitter. It's really beautiful.

I also have to say that I thought about leaving this out of my favorites because I have so many feels about the name of it. And I'm just going to say that and not go on and discuss those feels, because this is a nail polish blog, not a place for politics - at least, that's how I've always looked at it. Let's just say I have trouble dissociating the name from the polish, and leave it at that.

So clearly I have mixed feelings about this polish in a couple of different ways. But there's no denying that (name issues aside, precise shade issues aside) it's a very, very beautiful polish which I wore for the first time in 2016, and thus it stayed in my favorites.

Lake Louise

This is Square Hue Lake Louise, which was in my 2016 favorites:

I like Lake Louise a lot - and it's quite pale so it's out of my usual comfort zone, a bit. With, as you can see, a ton of shimmer. Quite beautiful, overall.

(I showed Lake Louise back in July and called it "plain" - which it is, a bit, next to the glitter that's next to it there - but obviously this one made the favorites cut, so there. There are some glitters in this year's list but big glitters don't seem to be my thing these days.)

Added: here's a Lake Louise manicure from last January.

I think the theme that month was Hike Banff. Come to think of it, I took a picture of the labels for the two SH polishes that were in my favorites:

They were actually only a couple of months apart, 10/15 and 1/16. 2015 was Decades (you can see the year they had in mind on Vogue, there) and 2016 was something about adventure, I believe. (2017 is going to be dance-themed, if you haven't seen that - January was the tango, and February is going to be the samba or the salsa or something like that. (It's probably too late to get January but you should be able to get in on February.) (And no, they're not paying me.)

Poppy Fields

This is Serum No. 5 Poppy Fields (a mini):

This is Poppy Fields by itself - you can tell that it has a jelly base, and then over I'm Not Really A Waitress. It's three coats in each case. I really think it looks beautiful layered over INRAW. The picture doesn't really capture that effect the jelly gives of depth, especially with this many coats. It has several shapes and colors of glitter in there - there are some very small black bits, plus larger gold and red pieces.

I've had trouble remembering over the years if this was Poppy Field(s) singular or plural - somewhere along the line I got it in my head that it was singular. Actually I assume this is supposed to have that WWI connotation of the poppies in Flanders Fields, so yeah, plural. You can see it right on the bottom of the label in this picture if you look close.

Ooh, look at it over Chanel Taboo.

Re availability: not on S-No5's website. I think it may have been LE in the first place but I'm not sure of that. My guess is that it's not easily obtainable.

(If you're looking at the "fail" tag by any chance, and wondering if something is wrong with Poppy Fields, no, in this case it was MY fail. The first time I posted this it was with an entirely wrong swatch.)

Vogue

This is Square Hue Vogue, which was in my 2016 favorites:

I think this was from the 1990s part of the Decades collection, from 2015 (referring to the Madonna song, presumably, not the magazine). It's a nice, dark, slightly berry-leaning red shimmer, but it doesn't look all that outstanding here. The reason it was in my favorites was because I really loved it when I actually wore it - whatever I was seeing there I'm not really seeing here, as far as something extraordinary. Obviously I need to try it again and see if I still like it so much!

(Probably not an easily-available polish, since it was LE and is from over a year ago. For a while Square Hue was selling single bottles of some of these on its website but they seem to have discontinued that again now.)

Added: here's the previous swatch picture of Vogue. And here's the manicure picture that I was pretty sure existed but I couldn't find til now.

Boom

This is Formula X Boom:

I have two swatches of this, alone above and over a dark-blue polish below.

It's basically sort of a cornflower blue matte glitter, with big hexes and some smaller pieces. You can see above that I also bought a dark-blue version (which is called TNT) - but I think I like this one better. I especially like it over the dark blue, out of the various things I've tried.

I think this set was called Transformers Top Coats. I bought mine on sale a year or so ago, so I'm pretty certain they're discontinued.

Alice

This is Zoya Alice, which is a Pixie Dust and which was on my 2016 favorites list.

I didn't put it in the top 5 (of 2016), but I thought about it. But I already had Aster and Poltergeist Puddle (which are the two above it on the wheel) in the top 5, so I bumped this one out. Too many purples. But I think this one and Purple Fiction were effectively #6 and #7 (in which order probably depended on when you asked me).

I just got Alice recently; it was one of the ones I bought from the Black Friday sale. Here it is actually on my hand. This is an almost brand-new release, actually - it's from Zoya's 2016 holiday collection.

I noticed there is a newer Zoya collection now, another nude-colored set (Naturel 3, to be precise) but since nudes are not my thing I didn't stop to look too closely at that until just now. It's another 6 nudes, looks like. I bought one polish from the previous two Naturel collections and that was Odette, which I like but honestly haven't worn much. (And it's no coincidence that I picked one of the least-nude colors out of the nude collection.) Maybe it's because I don't like my stupid pasty-pale skin color much that I'm not interested in nudes. Why would I want to match it, of all things?

Who Ya Gonna Call?

This is Salon Perfect Who Ya Gonna Call? - which is another polish from my 2016 favorites list.

Honestly, I briefly considered this as a favorite of the year candidate, that's how much I liked it. (By which I mean, I considered it for #1 on the list.) It seems unlikely for that, and yet... I really liked it a lot. I'm always a sucker for anything with multiple shades of the same color, for one thing. And "mixed greens" especially, maybe, like a salad - or like a garden. It also occurred to me that it's rather similar to Greenery, the Color of the Year. While it's got darker bits in it, overall it's a slightly yellow-leaning green. I know that when I wore it, I just kept staring at my fingers, sort of mesmerized. (Go figure. I'm not sure why I found it so fascinating, but I definitely did.)

This is not a current polish, as far as I can tell. I found it in the Halloween section at Walmart, back in October. Here's my original post, where I compare it to the Floam-type formula. (But I never actually owned Floam, so take that with a grain of salt.)

Pillarbox

This is No7 Gel Finish Pillarbox:

This is a pretty. shiny. neutral red - I think it's maybe just a hair blue-leaning. You can see fuchsia glints in the bottle, that's what leads me to think that.

These are the first products I've owned from this brand. I've never noticed No7 nail polishes in the Walgreens store I go in the most regularly (which is the one near my work) even though I know No7 is Boots, the British drugstore chain, and Boots and Walgreen's merged, what, a couple of years ago now. One of the Walgreens near my home remodeled a year or so ago and it has a big No7 section, but for whatever reason I hardly ever go in that store. These polishes are on Walgreens' website and I'm pretty sure they must be in at least some stores, too.

I got the idea back before Christmas to order their moisturizer to try out (I actually ordered a serum and an eye cream, I'll show those below) from the website, and this little set ("Little Box of Beauty") was a gift with purchase. It had a lipstick and the nail polish, both of which are Pillarbox.

I actually ended up giving the lipstick away, because I just don't wear red lipstick much. I kept the nail polish despite the fact that I don't seem to wear red polish much these days either (although I have worn it a lot in the past).

Here are the other two products I bought. I can't tell you much about it yet, though, because I've been using up my old moisturizer. I'll report back on that later.