NOTD: Expresso (aka "What color is this?")

This is not by any means a great picture - I grab the Insta-Dri when I want to slap something on in a hurry, and it shows - but I hadn't worn this polish before and I wasn't super clear on what color this was when I swatched it before, so I wanted to update about that. This is Insta-Dri Expresso:

(This is just one coat, no top-coat, and obviously not cleaned up much, either.)

What I wanted to comment on was that in the bottle it looks like a very dusty pink. But I've always worked under the assumption that "Expresso" is not a typo (but rather a pun of the type that quick-dry polishes like Insta-Dri and Top Speed and Jet Set have always been terribly fond of) - and really when I ordered it I was thinking it was going to be something more brown. It still looks pink-ish in this picture, but on my hands what I thought this looked like was a brick red. Which in a sense is not actually far off from what I was thinking - a combination of brown tones and pink/red tones. You don't think of "dusty rose" as being anything like the same thing as "brick red" but I guess really they are not as different as I tend to think.

(I've been using "what color is this" as a tag - or a "label" as Blogger calls it - for a while now, but it finally occurred to me that it's not a bad thing to put in the title, too. I love to nitpick about colors & names so maybe it can be a new series!)

NOTD: Good Girl Gone Bad

I finally wore Lippmann Good Girl Gone Bad, which I think I've had for about a year. It's really pretty and I wore it both matte and shiny and for once I have pictures of both, although I don't think they do it justice.

It's plummy and dark and glittery, that's about all I have to say about the color. I did it matte first:

This is two coats, I think? with probably Superfood base-coat and Matte Me Crazy on top, and as you can see it was wanting to chip a little, but I had had this on for a day or more before this, so nothing too awful. Come to think of it, I think I put a different top-coat under the matte top-coat, too, which was maybe the old Revlon Colorstay one - because this polish is very textured and I ran out of Glitter Food.

So I patched it up, as I often do, and this time I put shiny top-coat on - although quite honestly I'm not sure at all which one that was, possibly Revlon again:

You can see that it's wanting to chip a bit at the tips there but on the whole this lasted pretty well. And you really can't see that original chip here, so I call this a win. I like it both ways.

Added: I notice that I was talking about the "is it a plum or a red?" issue when I swatched this last year. But it's pretty definitely plum-leaning, even though I'm sure you can find people calling it a red. Here's the swatch that I did a couple of weeks ago, for more evidence:

Put A Bow On It

Yesterday I only found one of the three China Glaze glitters from the Holiglaze collection - I did eventually find a second one. I'm still missing the third one, though. Anyway, here is the pink one, Put A Bow On It:

This is a lovely sort of blackened fuchsia color, very unusual. Kind of a pain to get off but not unmanageable. (This is the kind of thing that I get out the Dip-It for.)

All Wrapped Up (and other China Glaze microglitters)

I showed swatches of these three before (in my China Glaze favorites) but I thought I'd talk a little more about them - this is Put A Bow On It, All Wrapped Up, and This Is Tree-mendous:

They seem to be exactly the same formula in three different colors. They're almost like super-sparkly textures, although I think in this case they're meant to be worn with top-coat. You could certainly wear them without if you wanted to.

If I'd been more organized, I would have gotten the swatches in the same order as the bottles, or vice versa, but that's just not how I roll. Anyway, they are respectively a blurple, a sort of a blackened berry pink, and a medium green. The green is lighter than most holiday glitters you see around. All Lacquered Up says it has a clear base where the other two don't, and that makes sense because it's quite a bit more sheer.

Speaking of disorganized, I still am having trouble finding all the pictures I took, but here's All Wrapped Up:

It's very much balanced on the knife-edge of blue and violet. I carried it around my house looking at it in different lights, and I still couldn't decide if it was blue or purple. Sometimes it looks like one, sometimes the other. (Added: note that while it looks pretty purple here - at least on my monitor - I had done a previous swatch on this where it looks much more blue.)

Destash: China Glaze glitters

I didn't start out intending to destash all the big glitter out of the Holiglaze collection, but I think that's what I am going to end up doing. The smaller glitters are another matter, but I'm pretty sure all three of the big ones are going away.

This is Your Present Required:

The name of it has always bothered me, for one thing - it's a very labored pun, at best. And this combination of rose-pink and blue just isn't that fabulous. I think I liked it at the time I first got these polishes, but I was in the mood to be pleased, then. Now, it doesn't grab me. I don't like it enough to put up with the pain of removing it, if I was actually to wear it again. So that's one down.

Bells Will Be Blinging is one I was thinking I might keep.

But looking at it on the wheel, I feel pretty meh about it. It's pretty but it's not that exciting. Also I think it has bar glitter in it, which is always a strike against. I have other blue-and-silver things that are less of a pain than this. So that's two down.

(added: I also talked about this polish here.)

#3 is Be Merry, Be Bright - although so far I haven't found the actual bottle-and-wheel picture. If I find it I'll put it in, but in the meantime, I think you can get the general idea without it. On the wheel above, it's the polish above Bells Will Be Blinging. It looks similar to Your Present Required on the wheel but it's really not. I think I wore it with a matching undercoat when I first got it, and it looked really pretty.

And I really thought this one would survive, but no. Like I said, I think all three of them are going away. (added: here's the bottle-and-wheel picture)

There's one more out of this bunch that had already been in the destash box - that's There's Snow One Like You, the white texture. And I think there's one more that's going there, that I'll talk about later. But hey, I'm still keeping eight out of the original 13, that's not a bad percentage.

The reason I don't normally buy full collections is because I know my own taste, and I usually get a pretty good idea from looking at pictures of what I will and won't wear. So I don't see any point in wasting money on what I won't! In this case I didn't buy these in the first place, which is partly why I still have the full set. But there's still no point in keeping the ones I've worn once in over three years and don't think I'm likely to wear again.

Daphne's Birthday Party (with a comparison)

Daphne is Pretty Serious' mascot (the girl with the curlers in her hair, if you've been around Pretty Serious enough to remember - she is on the boxes and the website, etc.) and she has a whole group of polishes named after her. Daphne is clearly a party girl because the polishes are all called "Daphne's ____ Party" - I know there's a disco party and a garden party - it's possible there have been more parties and polishes in Daphne's past, I'm not sure about that part. Anyway, here is Pretty Serious Daphne's Birthday Party:

So this is just a nice mixed glitter in a smaller size - it has 15 colors of glitter, all the same size. There are a lot of glitters around in this vein, most notably Lippmann Happy Birthday - however, that polish has mixed sizes as well as colors and this is clearly not meant to be its dupe. I don't especially like the way that the Lippmann version looks in people's swatches and I've never really felt like that seemed worth paying the money for. But this seems like a mix that I might enjoy having from time to time. It's entirely possible I won't wear it until December but I'm sure I will wear it eventually. Maybe sooner, if I get in a festive mood sometime. (Also, note that this is another polish that's currently on PS' clearance page.)

As I mentioned yesterday, I wanted to take a look at this next to the holiday glitter I was showing yesterday, Yuletide Treasure:

They are both mixed glitters with a lot of different colors but Yuletide Treasure, since it's meant to be holiday-themed, is much heavier on the green and the magenta and red. I also see gold and cyan blue, I think. (Maybe some silver? not sure.) And the pieces are a larger size. So on the whole they're not really all that alike. I think you could substitute Daphne's Birthday Party for a holiday glitter if you wanted, but it's certainly not limited to that.

TBT: Pahlish Trim the Tree duo

I have declared today Christmas in May, so that I have an excuse to show you this polish duo:

(And since the 25th happened to be a Thursday, I made this a Throwback Thursday as well. But really that was just a coincidence. Here are some old pictures from 2013 if you really want a throwback.)

Here's Boughs Of Holly with a wheel swatch; it's a nice glowy dark green with what looks like bits of gold glitter scattered in the mix. (Actually, if you follow the link above it says it's a flakie in a jelly base, which I had completely forgotten!)

And I didn't reswatch Yuletide Treasures, but it's just mixed "holiday" glitters in a clear base:

(Tomorrow I have a comparison of this with another mixed glitter. So stay tuned.)

Ruby Pumps

Here is China Glaze Ruby Pumps, which was in my China Glaze favorites:

It was originally from the Wizard of Ooh Ahz collection, which was released in 2001 and re-released later on. It's just a glitter in a red jelly base, but that doesn't do it justice and neither does this picture - but I hadn't done a post for it before so I thought I'd throw it out there anyway.

(Google it. There are a zillion pictures out there. And I'm 99.99% sure this is still a current color.)

China Glaze favorites

As I mentioned yesterday, I had a great deal of trouble deciding what my favorite China Glaze polishes were. I finally came up with four of them (this picture is not great but it's all I have):

L-R: Travel In Colour, Ruby Pumps, Put A Bow On It, Glitter All The Way

Two of these are kinda gimmes: Ruby Pumps is on pretty much everybody's favorites list everywhere, and Travel In Colour, which I love so much I had four bottles of it, at one point. (I think I'm down to three now. It only comes as a mini, though, which is partly why four bottles seemed reasonable.)

Actually Travel In Colour is the only one that stayed firmly on the list the whole time. Ruby Pumps got axed at one point on the "I really haven't worn it that much" point that I was talking about the other day, but then I put it back again, because it's so awesome I just don't care that I haven't worn it. Other polishes that didn't make the final cut: Bat My Eyes, All Wrapped Up, Are You Jelly? and Dorothy Who? - I guess we can consider those honorable mentions.

I did some swatching on these and I'll put some of those pictures up separately later on, but there are a few I wanted to go ahead and talk about.

I guess one thing I should say is that I have 24 China Glaze polishes, and the only reason I have that many is because I won a whole baker's dozen of them several years ago in a blog giveaway. It wasn't PR and so I guess it doesn't really require a disclaimer in that sense, but still, I did get them for free. So there's your disclosure. (Although this isn't even the original bottle of Travel In Colour, which means the only actual freebie bottle in these four is Put A Bow On It. See below for more on that.)

Travel In Colour was my immediate favorite of the bunch - which was called Happy Holiglaze, and this is the blog post from Polish Insomniac that resulted in my getting these polishes. It was just your basic random drawing.

There were three microglitters out of the remaining dozen polishes in the that collection which were my particular favorites. One made my favorites list (Put A Bow On It), another one got Honorable Mention aka runners-up (that was All Wrapped Up) and there's also a third one, This Is Tree-mendous. Basically, I hesitated between them, and eventually I put Put A Bow On It there as a representative of the group. They're almost exactly alike except for the color. Like so:

Pick your favorite. (L-R: All Wrapped Up, Put A Bow On It, This Is Tree-mendous)

(I hope this is reasonably coherent, because I am totally falling asleep right now. Good night - or good morning, to people with more run-of-the-mill schedules than mine. I'm going to bed now.)

Lotus

Here is Zoya Lotus, which was in my top 10 Zoya polishes:

This is a very grayed out purple, with some brighter purple shimmer that you can see in the bottle but not so much on the wheel, or at least not so strongly. It's a beautiful polish, which is of course why I put it in my top 10. But I've been thinking ever since that that was a weird pick given that I've never worn it much. There are favorites that you love academically speaking, but not so much in real life, you know what I mean? This is one of those where I look at it and say, "Oh, I ought to wear this more," but somehow it rarely happens. My spreadsheet says I've had this since 2012, so five years or nearly so (longer than I've had this blog, probably) and I've worn it maybe three times. Maybe.

This was the first set of favorites I picked and since then I've used actually wearing a polish as one of the criteria. This is undeniably a beautiful polish, as I said above - and yet if I ever do another top 10 Zoyas, don't expect to see this there - unless I've changed my past pattern and actually worn it more in the mean time.

(If you think you'll wear it more than I have, it is still available.)

Note: if anybody had noticed that my pattern the last few weeks has been to do a favorites post on Mondays, well, it's not going to be up today. I'm shooting for tomorrow. It's China Glaze and I'm being extremely indecisive about it.

Mermaid's Dream

This is my favorite Lippmann polish, Mermaid's Dream:

It's hardly a revolutionary choice, since a lot of people are crazy about this polish. This polish was incredibly successful and this finish has been duped a ton of times - I've seen it in other colors, too. But for me this is a bit of a surprising choice because it's very pale by my standards. It's also very cool-tones, though, and I imagine that's a lot of the secret of why it works for me.


(added: some previous discussion of Mermaid's Dream here)

A Christmas Time Paradox, compared

This is Pretty Serious A Christmas Time Paradox, which I believe was from last year's holiday collection:

As you see, this is blue metallic with heavy silver shimmer. (In case you love it enough to think you might want it, let me tell you right now that it's currently on the final clearance page. So I'm thinking you might should act relatively fast. I don't think it's been in the clearance group for long so there might still be enough stock to last for a while, but who knows.)

It doesn't seem to be too far off from some of the other blue metallics I have - buuut I pulled up the picture below, which are the two polishes I was primarily thinking about, and the difference is pretty clear - Sweet Peacock and So Blue Without You are near-dupes to each other but not to A Christmas Time Paradox, which is more straight blue, while these two lean a bit more blue-green.

Mimi NOTD + swatch

Here is Zoya Mimi - which wasn't in my Zoya favorites because I didn't have it yet when I did my favorites back in March but might now be a contender if I did it over!

Zoya calls it "a royal purple sparkling metallic with cool undertones." This is from the original sparkle collection, which means it's what most people would call a glass-fleck polish, even if Zoya chooses not to call it that. I did it first as two coats + matte top-coat (like I do with everything lately) but after a day it was chipping a bit and I slapped a third coat on without any topcoat, which means it's basically back to its natural finish here.

I don't know quite why it looks darker above than it does on the wheel swatch:

According to my chicken-scratches there, this is three coats as well. It is different lighting, though - I took the NOTD picture at work, and I always do the wheel swatches at home. (I can't quite see schlepping bottles of nail polish to work to take pictures!)

The Singing Seed

This is Pretty Serious The Singing Seed, which is from the Museum of Naileontology collection:

I like this collection - she's been releasing these gradually over the last several years - because not only are they really lovely polishes but they come with these funny little blurbs that usually amount to little miniature sci-fi stories. This is a green and I was thinking I could have put this polish in the "funky green" category that I was showing yesterday, but actually I don't think it belongs there. It's green and gold glitter, with some bar glitter (which I don't usually like but doesn't seem to show up much here). Except for the bar glitter, it's actually a pretty conventional small glitter. But really pretty.

(I was watching destash videos again - I think this time it was Queen Jessika's - and she was talking about destashing all her glitters. So far I am not willing to go that far. I've certainly gotten a lot more selective about what glitters I buy, and I'm destashing things that I just don't wear and certainly that's going to involve some glitters. I'm finding that it's the big glitters that I'm not willing to deal with, rather than the smaller ones. But she makes a good point that unless you're willing to do peel-off basecoat - which I have not had good luck with - glitters can be an awful pain.)

Funky greens: Swatch And Learn, Irene, & more

I have a lot of greens that fall into the category that I usually call "funky greens" - usually yellow-toned or brown-toned or in some cases both. (Often they shift.) Often they're colors that sometimes get called ugly - in fact I think that that may be what defines the category, really - but somehow I like them anyway. I had several of these in my "retakes" file on the computer so I thought I would show a group of them in one go. (Note that I have a tag for this, if you want to see more examples.)

This is Pretty Serious Swatch And Learn, which was in my five PS favorites. It was a collab polish with the nail blog Swatch and Learn.

This one only shows its funkiness intermittently, but it's definitely there. It's sparkly, but it's also shifty. It's really cool. You can see the shiftiness just a bit here, but look at Mary's pictures on her blog to get a better idea of what's going on. This polish stayed available for a long time for a collab polish, so it must have been pretty popular. but Pretty Serious has been clearing out a lot of stock lately and this one is now gone. (Actually all of these in this entry may be discontinued.)

This is Zoya Irene:

Here's my previous swatch of this one - it is also a bit shifty. I was worried initially that it would be too yellow but it also shifts around towards brown, and I think that's why I like it.

Pretty Serious Nuke The Fridge:

Another shifty one. See here. It almost looks grayish here.

I showed this one a week or so ago but it certainly falls into this category so I thought I would show it again here too - SpaRitual Optical Illusion:

Fairy Lights (NOTD + swatch)

Here is Pretty Serious Fairy Lights:

This looks pretty good, considering that I had had this on for several days before this was taken - however, I have to tell you that my right hand* looked considerably more ragged. Still, with a pale polish like this, I doubt that anybody but me noticed. (Looking at that picture, now I'm wondering if anybody noticed my ridgy nails, but I doubt it.)

Here's the swatch of Fairy Lights:

I know you can't see a whole lot in the swatch, but you can see enough to get the idea, a bit. I believe when I bought this, I thought what I was getting was something a bit different than it turned out to be. It was on a page with some of the Cocktail Crush top-coats, and I got it in my head that this was part of that set - it was a fairly reasonable assumption, really, that since they looked alike in the pictures, they were really alike. I remember wondering why I bought this and Mojito too - but Mojito is a top-coat and Fairy Lights really isn't. It's a silvery-white with some pastel sparkle. I mentioned this in the haul entry. It's not 100% opaque even with three coats, so if you have issues with having any visible nail line at all you may not want this. But aside from that this is a really beautiful polish.


*Not long ago somebody asked me if my right hand was my dominant hand, and I was like, "Weeeelll..." because I am actually left-handed. But I've always been pretty ambidextrous and while I write left-handed, I do some things both ways (this used to be occasionally very useful for things like playing pool) and others right-handed. I learned to manipulate a mouse right-handed because I didn't know there was such a thing as a left-handed mouse, back when. So oddly, nowadays my right hand actually seems to be more dominant, mostly because I play computer games on a PC with a mouse, I think! And one of the ways this noticeably shows up is that the nails on my right hand generally get more wear than the left.

Deborah Lippmann stash - & a favorite

This is my (rather small) Deborah Lippmann stash:

L-R, this is All Night Long, Dark Side Of The Moon, Good Girl Gone Bad, Mermaid's Dream, Let's Go Crazy, Shake Your Money Maker.

Lippmann polishes are very expensive, of course, but I think the only one of these that I paid full price for was All Night Long. I got Dark Side Of The Moon in one of those promo things that beauty.com used to do, spend x amount of money and get a FREE LIPPMANN POLISH!! (They picked the polish, of course.) And then I got Good Girl Gone Bad from a blog sale. And the other three (the three on the right) I got as a gift, and I can pretty much guarantee that the purchaser didn't pay full price for those either, because she works at a department store, so she presumably got a hefty discount.

I'll do the same as I did for Pahlish since the numbers are similar - I get to pick a favorite and one honorable mention. This one is pretty easy - Mermaid's Dream is the favorite - I wouldn't have guessed it that the time I got it but it's been a clear winner ever since I saw it in person. And then for the runner up, I've gotta go with Good Girl Gone Bad.

I haven't actually worn this one much, but I think I will eventually. I need to tell myself that it's more of a pinky-plum color than a red, which is true and I think will make me more likely to use it, if I can remember that and not just lump it in with the reds in the future.

Jet Set Jade

This is Insta-Dri Jet Set Jade:

This is a really pretty dark teal green. It was originally released in an LE collection, but I was able to get it on Amazon just a few months ago, so odds are this is still findable. I noted in my swatches back when I first bought this that it took two coats - many Insta-Dri colors are one coaters, but I have no objections to having to use two. Especially not for something this beautiful.

Stevie (swatch & NOTD)

Here is Zoya Stevie:

And here it is on my nails, below:

I believe I had put Seche Vite on top of it by the time I took this picture. You can see that it looks a little shinier and sparklier here. This was last week's manicure and I habitually forget to write any of this down, but I'm pretty sure that's right.

I do like this polish quite a lot. Along with Vespa, this is one of the Pixie Dusts that I had hesitated to buy earlier on because I thought they might be too light to be flattering on me, but this was fine.

Destash: Optical Illusion

I'm pretty sure SpaRitual Optical Illusion here is going in the destash collection:

As you can see, it's much yellower on the wheel than it is in the bottle - I think this is three coats on the wheel (and if you can read my writing there, it's #12). If you put on a whole bunch of coats - like, four or five, as I recall - it eventually gets close to the bottle color but the coats tend to go on thin so it takes a lot of them. This is a pretty polish in a way, but it's much too yellow for my taste. That was okay when I bought it because it's basically why I bought it - that is, I bought it as a substitute for some of those funky Halloween greens like It's Alive that I was having trouble finding. However, now that I actually own It's Alive (thanks to Amazon), this is really superfluous.

Incidentally, this is the one and only SpaRitual polish that I own. So this is also my SpaRitual stash, such as it is. I have single polishes of a number of brands, so what you're probably going to get later is one big post, or possibly several smaller ones, full of singles. But since I decided this one needed to go, I'm not going to show it again later.

Anaka

Here's Zoya Anaka:

I keep forgetting this name, so here's the label to make sure I'm getting it right:

I have this on now, and in the dim lights of the restaurant where we just went to dinner it looked red. But mostly it's a bright pink - Zoya calls it a "glam pink" - "a vibrant purple-toned deep fuchsia-pink with reflective hot pink shimmer and gold microglitter."

I checked and this is from the "Truth or Dare" collection way back in 2009 - which was a fall collection. This actually seems entirely appropriate as a fall pink, since it's a much deeper shade than most.

(I shouldn't have scrolled down on that link above - now I want to buy more. Isla has been on my wishlist before, I know, but I think I'd add Envy and Pinta, too. I know Isla was still available last I looked; it's entirely possible the other two are, too.)

Pretty Serious haul

I really really didn't intend to spend any significant amount of money on nail polish right now, but as I mentioned in the last entry, I went kind of overboard on Pretty Serious' website the other day, and that order has already arrived, so I have pictures.

This was what was on the box. As I mentioned before, I did this order on Friday night and it arrived on Monday, so bonus points to them for the mega-quick service. (They do have a US shipper, or that would have really been a miracle.)

I started out intending to look at the clearance polishes again, because there was a code over the weekend (now expired, of course) that knocked another 10% off the clearance prices. Then I put several things into my cart and the next step was that I started thinking about hitting their free shipping limit - which is $50, but that's 50 Australian dollars, not American dollars. I can't give you exact numbers, because exchange rates vary and all that, but I've done this several times and it seems to generally work out that $50 Australian is something under $40 in US dollars. So that's when I went a little berzerk. And I registered with a new e-mail address, because I wasn't at home at the time, and PS sent me an e-mail with more coupon codes. It didn't say anything like "new customers only" which would make me recuse myself from using the coupons. They were like "welcome10" and "welcome 20" and it said that each code would work once per customer. I may have gotten an e-mail before that had these same codes, but I certainly hadn't used them except possibly the lowest-value one (which was $10 off any purchase). Since I already had $50 in merchandise in my cart, getting up to $60 to get 20% off the entire purchase sounded eminently doable. (In fact I think it may have come out a little cheaper by the time I got done, but I didn't really sit and do that math at the time.)

So here's what I ended up with:

I love their cute colorful boxes.

Here's the labels (although reading that green one, in particular, may be iffy, depending on your monitor):

Going L-R on the picture above, there's A Christmas Time Paradox, which is basically more or less a Tardis-blue metallic. It's full of silver shimmer, though, which makes it somewhat different than my several other Tardis-blue polishes. Daphne's Birthday Party is just a mixed glitter in Happy Birthday mode, but I've never had one of those that I really liked and it seemed like a good time to give it a try. Then the other Daphne polish is Daphne's Disco Party, which is a matte glitter which I already had but I decided I needed a backup - I've gone through well over half the old bottle one way and another. Then, let's see, Mojito is a topper, basically, I think, a white that shimmers green. And Fairy Lights I'm wearing now and it's not at all a dupe for the Mojito-type things - instead it's a shimmery off-white which comes very close to being opaque after three coats. If you're very choosy about the VNL issue you might want to put a white or off-white undercoat on first. But after three coats and a matte top-coat I'm very happy with what I got. (I did order PS's matte top-coat but I didn't try that yet, I just grabbed my old standby Matte Me Crazy instead. And let's see, then we have The Singing Seed (from the Museum of Naileontology collection) plus Matte All The Things, their version of matte top-coat, and Cute Cuticles Purity which I think is meant to be the non-irritating version of your basic cuticle goo. (Added: I have now tried out Purity and I really like it. I don't have another one of PS's cuticle oils to compare it to, but compared to the several I already own, it feels super-light, like it just practically disappears immediately into your skin.)

I'll have individual swatches up later.

Electrique

This is Pahlish Electrique:

This is a cool purple with a lot of small glitter scattered in (the flakes are either gold or copper, depending on who you ask) - and you can see on the wheel that it's kind of matte. It looks good like that, or of course you also could top-coat it. I think I've worn it both ways. There's something kind of unusual about this, can you see it? The white at the bottom is a clue - this is a crelly. I don't have many crellies, and this is the only one I have that doesn't also have big glitter in it - I'm not sure why that's what everybody does with crellies but it seems to be that way. Or maybe there are more "secret crellies" like this that I'm just not aware of.

I really like Pahlish and I shouldn't even look at their website because it makes me want to order stuff. (And I am on an official no-buy status for the first time in a while because I went nuts with Pretty Serious the other night - that was Friday night and the polish arrived Monday and I've already got pictures coming up for that.) This is the only Pahlish I have that I didn't buy myself - Karen D gave it to me, back a couple of years ago when I last saw her in person. I think maybe she said it came from one of their monthly duos, which means it's probably really hard to find.

Anyway, you can see the white much better on this side of the bottle:

If I have other crellies like this, I don't know about them - but I would never have thought to call this one a crelly if it hadn't separated like this, either.

Added: previous swatches here.

Pahlish stash & a favorite

I was thinking about doing all my indies in one big group, but I decided I have too many of them for that. The brand I have the most of is Dollish Polish, but I haven't gotten around to taking pictures of those yet. Instead I have Pahlish, which is maybe #3, quantity-wise, our of the indies. (#2 is Lynnderella.)

I have a whopping five Pahlish polishes:

The two on the left were a "Trim the Tree" duo, Boughs of Holly and Yuletide Treasure. The other three are Blood Of The Mountain, Pyrite, and Electrique. Actually the reason I decided to go ahead and do Pahlish now was because I wanted to reswatch Blood Of The Mountain. And I did that and I'm glad I did, because now I can't figure out what I ever thought was wrong with it. It's a very brownish-red holo and I don't know, maybe I expected something else, but I like it now. It's going in my "save for fall" group along with all the browns and such in my collection. (But don't worry, I'll post those swatches first.)

I decided I only get to choose one favorite, since I only have five of them. And that's definitely Pyrite. I'll do separate swatch posts for all these later, but Pyrite is a really awesome brassy gold. (See here if you can't bear to wait.) Even though I have a lot of gold polishes, Pyrite stands out.

And  Yuletide Treasure gets the runner-up spot, even though I'm not as much into the holiday glitters as I was a couple of years ago. It's still really pretty.

Wavy Blue

This is Triple Shine Wavy Blue:

I think that the Triple Shine line had more of these microglitters, and now that they're discontinued I wish I'd bought more of them, because I really like this one. It's prettier than it looks on the wheel, here.

Added: A bit more info on this polish here.