NOTD: Ocean Drive

This just came and I haven't even swatched it yet, so you're seeing it on my nails first, for once. This is KL Polish Ocean Drive:

I cleaned it up some more after I took this picture - it's not perfect but you can get the idea. This is from the new summer line. It doesn't say it's a flakie but that's what it seems to me to be. It's rather sheer, but it was opaque enough to suit me in two coats. If you are a fiend about visible nail lines and you don't want to see any at all, you'll want three, I would think.

I wish Kathleen would do more polishes that aren't cremes, because I really like her formulas so far on the not-creme ones. (The creme formula seems nice, too, on the one that I've tried. I'm just not really a creme person.)

NOTD: Odhani

So here's Square Hue Odhani actually on my nails.

This is the second time I've worn it, as I mentioned, and I still love the color but man is it difficult to get on. Since it's a crelly, it's pretty sheer, and you can see that the tips either never got covered properly or are already chipping (maybe a little of both), and this is with four coats, I think. If you don't already have this polish you probably can't get your hands on it anyway, and honestly I don't think I recommend that you try, despite the lovely color. It's just too much of a pain in the ass. (Which is not to say that I'm not going to wear it again, since I already have it, but maybe I need to look around and see if I can find anything else in this not-too-light not-too-dark range of blue.)

Odhani vs Mesmerize

I showed my little Essie stash yesterday, and I said that Mesmerize was one of my favorites. When I was taking pictures, I noticed that Mesmerize is similar to Square Hue Odhani, which I had on last week, and loved. They're not dupes at all but they're close enough that they're interesting to compare.

This is Mesmerize, and then the other blue at the top of the wheel is Odhani (which was in last month's Square Hue collection):

You can see on these swatches that Mesmerize is definitely darker. They look more similar in the bottles, though, which is why I noticed this in the first place:

Odhani is a crelly; I think Mesmerize is just a regular creme. Odhani was a bit balky to apply but looked so beautiful once it was on that I really fell in love. (In fact I love it so much I may wear it again, and if I do I'll try to get a decent picture this time!)

Essie stash

Honestly, I don't have much of an Essie stash at all. Here's the first piece of it:

This is Wicked, Shine Of The Times, Midnight Cami, Mesmerize, and Status Symbol.

and then...

The three minis were a set from the Retro Revival collection: Birthday Suit, Life Of The Party, Bikini With A Martini, and there was also a mini of Starry Starry Night, but I also bought the large bottle of SSN and the mini is still floating around somewhere but I didn't turn it up when I was sorting all this out. So the other three are Starry Starry Night (in the normal size!), It's Genius, and Crocadilly, which is a magnetic. I think there is also another missing bottle, which is Sew Psyched (see here).

I like several of the Essies I have quite well, but I just have never fallen in love enough to spend the money on more of them. I had Starry Starry Night in my 2016 favorites, but when it came down to it I decided that two of the three I first bought years ago were my favorites - Status Symbol and Mesmerize (which I think is now called Mesmerized, but back in 2011 or 2012 when I got mine it didn't have that "d" at the end). I've got new swatches for those but I'll post them separately. (The other one I bought at that time was Midnight Cami, which I do also like a lot. Maybe Ulta was having a buy 2 get one free sale, I don't remember.)

Rendezvous With You

This is China Glaze Rendezvous With You:

It's a nice dark plummy purple with shimmer. I don't know much else to say about it!



(I coulda sworn I posted this after I did the China Glaze favorites, but I can't find it. Oh well.)

Stuck In The Middle

This is Pretty Serious Stuck In The Middle, which was part of a collab series:

This is basically a fuchsia glass-fleck, but it also has a lot of shimmer in it that seems to be mostly blue and purple, I think. I don't think it's quite as fabulous as it looks in the bottle, but it's pretty nice, just the same. (Oh, and it's also a jelly. I almost forgot that part!)

What color is this? Posh Plum

This is Xtreme Wear Posh Plum, which I'm pretty sure is discontinued:

I hung the "what color is this" tag on this post because this polish is not really what I would call "plum" or at least it's lighter than what I would expect. It's absolutely a red-violet of some sort, but looking at the swatch and not looking at the name, I would be inclined to call it more of a raspberry-ish color, not quite purple and not quite pink. Also, while it doesn't show in this picture, I have thought in the past that it has a bit of duochrome flash - blue, maybe? (If so, it doesn't show up on the nail in either of these swatches, new or old, but I think I see it in the bottle in the older picture. What I don't remember is whether it's sometimes visible on the nail, but I think it might be. I may have to actually wear it or something and try to find out.)

Are You Jelly?

Here's China Glaze Are You Jelly?

If there can be such a thing as a neon jelly, this is it, or close to it, anyway. It's very bright.

NOTD: Lengha (+ some stray purchases)

It seems a little fallish to wear in the middle of summer, but I went ahead and tried out Square Hue Lengha and I really like it a lot. Square Hue does a good shimmer, I've noticed that before.

I'm not seeing ridges in person, but they really show up in this picture. But then I don't really think this picture does this polish justice, quite honestly.

I went in the grocery store to pick up a prescription and ended up with a new lipstick (which I'm about to need) and a nail polish (which I didn't need, but hey, it was on sale):

I'd really like to start calling this lipstick by its French name, Beau Gosse, because its English name, Hunk, just seems like a stupid name for a lipstick. Although I looked up "gosse" - I did take French once upon a time so I knew "beau" - and it means roughly the same thing, it just sounds better. "Gosse" means "kid" and "beau" is the masculine version of "belle" so it's more like "good-looking boy." I know I'm overthinking this as usual but this is my third tube of this lip butter so I keep being reminded about it. (Added: I was poking around on Temptalia just now, and figured out that in fact I must not have been the only person who didn't like the name Hunk; the color is still available but it is now called Thunderstorm. This must have been a very recent change since I just bought this lipstick yesterday.)

I decided to try Buffalo Nickel out as an accent nail. (Lengha has silvery shimmer so I felt like they coordinated reasonably well.)

Since Buffalo Nickel covered up the much darker Lengha, I think it's pretty safe to say this is most likely a one-coater, or very close to it, at least. I feel like I have something fairly similar to this... but this has a nice antique feel to it and I can't think of anything else quite like that, so I doubt that this is really a dupe to whatever silvers I have. (If I figure out otherwise I'll come back and say so!)

Dorothy Who?

This is China Glaze Dorothy Who?

I believe this is actually a recreated version - Dorothy Who 2.0, so to speak. This is from the same collection as Ruby Pumps, Wizard of Ooh Ahz (the link is to Scrangie's post on this collection from 2009). This collection was originally released in 2001, but apparently most of the original formulas got lost sometime in the interim and had to be recreated for the 2009 re-release. (Scrangie compares a couple of new vs old versions in her post - but not this one.) I don't think that applies to Ruby Pumps because it was in the core collection and was in production all along, but the rest of them were not. Dorothy Who is in the core collection now but wasn't then, as I understand it. Anyway, it's sort of the blue version of Ruby Pumps, as far as being a fine glitter in a jelly base. in this case, it's a bright blue with a mix of blue and silver glitter. I didn't put it in my China Glaze favorites but it was a close thing. It's really beautiful. (I think that part of the reason I left it out was because I have so many bright blues - you can see two more of them on this wheel. But I put Ruby Pumps in even though the same thing is true of reds, so go figure.)

Luna

This is Zoya Luna, which didn't make my top 10 Zoyas but was on the shortlist.

It's hard to get a really good picture of it, but it is a fine silver glitter in a pale gray base, which makes it somewhat unusual. I just checked and it's not on Zoya's website, so I assume it's discontinued. (I do see a couple of bottles on eBay though!) Actually I think all of the line this was in are discontinued - that would be the Ultra Glitters - I think it was Luna and Aura and Nova, something like that. (See here - I was close, it's Astra, not Aura.) Anyway, the reason I particularly value Luna is that it's a lovely base for jelly sandwiches. With something like Paloma over it, it's spectacular.

Quick Jeanius

This is Insta-Dri Quick Jeanius, which was in my Sally Hansen favorites:

It's a navy microglitter that leans just a hair toward violet. It's got a silver shimmer that's really gorgeous. This was from an LE "Rent the Runway" collection several years ago, so I imagine it's pretty hard to find. (Huh, that website Hollar that advertises so much on TV has it showing up on their website for $2, currently. I've heard very mixed things about them so I'm wary about trying them out, personally.)

Mist You

I found a swatch of a polish that I genuinely haven't shown before, that I know of, Sally Hansen Salon Mist You:

(There are only a handful of polishes left, out of 600+ , that show up in my spreadsheet with a blank spot for the date when I swatched it, but this is one of them. They are mostly the sheer ones that I originally found it hard to get decent swatches of, or - in a couple of cases - things that are MIA somewhere in my junky house. But I am gradually working in as many as I can find, at least!)

As you can probably guess, this is Mist You over WnW Black Creme. Actually these top-coat things have turned out to be very interesting to swatch over black because you just never know what they're going to look like. Here it's purple - who knew?

Sephora/Tarte birthday set

Everybody who has a Sephora account and has their birthday in the first half of the year has probably seen this already, but oh well, I finally remembered to take pictures of it and I'm showing them to you anyway.

Have I got that right that you just have to have a Sephora account? I think I do. So-called Beauty Insiders. (I was always a Beauty Insider until Sephora Flash was invented, and since then I've been a VIB - which pretty much tells you that I rarely go inside the physical Sephora stores. So I think I knew for quite a few years that I could get a freebie if I went to Sephora around my birthday but I could never remember/be bothered to actually do it.)

So anyway, this year we have Tarte items - I think the alternate choice was some skincare set which I've forgotten already. Not that I'm not all into the skincare, because I totally am, but I pretty much have every skincare sample that Sephora's given out in the last several years two or three times over. So I figured I'd be different and go with the makeup.

It's two items: Amazonian clay 12-hour blush in Paaarty, and Tarteist creamy matte lip paint in Birthday Suit. They're mini-size, but pretty generous ones.

The colors are a bit more neutral than I really prefer, but I feel like I can make them work. I imagine it's difficult to please everybody with one color choice.

NOTD: LOL (with & without Leia)

I just noticed that Lavender Out Loud spells out LOL, so that's probably what I'm going to call it in my head from now til eternity.

This looks like it has bald spots in this picture, but I think it's just a reflection. It went on very evenly in two coats, and I didn't see any bald spots at all. It seems to me that most of the polishes I have that are similar to this tend to be balky to apply, so if I'm right then this one is unusual. I'm going to have to poke around in old posts to see if there's actually any evidence of that, though.

I wore the Periwinkle polish all week last week without putting any color-changing or glittery thing over it, so it was too much to expect me to go another whole week, I guess. I put Zoya Leia on top of it, and I really like how it came out.

It looks here like it shifted more blue, doesn't it? Pictures can be really deceptive on purples, but on the monitor I'm looking at now, this looks pretty true to what I'm seeing in real life.

Pretty Serious discontinued polishes

I got an e-mail from Pretty Serious (and I'm sure a lot of you guys got it too) that listed all the polishes that are discontinued. I just mostly wanted to make sure I can find it for future reference, but if you're interested in any of these, you might check their website to see if there's any remaining stock ASAP. Putting this together with other things they've said recently, apparently they are doing a major refurbishment and will have a new website and new bottles soon. Some of the old polishes not on this list will still be available but they will be in the new bottles once the new website is up.

Here's the list which I just copied-and-pasted:

A Christmas Time Paradox * Acid Burn Opal Flake Top Coat * Araneae

Blue Lagoon Cocktail Crush Top Coat * Chiroptera * Cocktail Bar

Corvus Corax * Darkling Squishy * Daphne's Disco Party

Eat, Drink and Assimilate * Enchanting Evergreen * Fairy Lights

Forbidden Zone * Fossil of the Death Worm * Frogtown

Frosty The Snowborg * Fruit Tingle * Glitz & Glam * Gloomy Kitty

Gluteus Equine * Gruesome Groom * Happy Heart * Badlands Bandit

Cherry 2000 * Dupe * Chariots of the Red Sea * Party by the Pool

Jack Frost Cocktail Crush Top Coat * Love Bite * Mojito

Morning Java * Pina Colada Cocktail Crush Top Coat

The Singing Seed * Strigiformes * Tarnished Tinsel * Under Dunders

Yuletide of the Machines * The Night Before

Added: I have quite a few of these, although there's more I would have liked to have gotten my hands on more of them. I have A Christmas Time Paradox, Dupe, Daphne's Disco Party, Fairy Lights, Fossil of the Death Worm, Frogtown, Party by the Pool, Mojito, The Singing Seed.

Skincare scams

I bought some skincare products online that turned out to be from a scam company. I feel like I should have known better. They sell you samples, which arrive and are nicely packaged and seem to be perfectly legitimate, good-quality skin cremes, which I guess is to lull you into thinking everything's okay - then they bill you for a large amount of money and point to some fine print somewhere that you allegedly agreed to get a monthly shipment. I certainly missed that part, but I got billed anyway for two charges of about $90. The label on my products says Lunaluxe but I gather that their names are ever-changing and they just hop from one brand-name to another constantly. My bank seems to know about them already because they put a hold on one of the transactions and alerted me about the other one, so it could have been a lot worse, I guess.

I've been ordering stuff online forever - I was a really early adopter of online shopping, and I've so rarely had serious problems that I clearly got a little bit... complacent? or maybe a better word would be sloppy.... about this. I'm going to be a lot more careful, and I just wanted to get a warning out there to everybody else who might be tempted. I guess with the aging population and all, skin cremes are a big target for scammers. So be aware!

(See, that's what I get for letting somebody besides Sephora get my skincare dollars, I guess. At least Sephora doesn't send you things you didn't order.)

Candles by Victoria

I would never have thought of making a post for this if I hadn't seen people talking about CbV on YouTube. In fact, I think I may have first found Candles by Victoria from somebody on YouTube (very possibly MissHollyBerries) but it was some time ago. I'll put Holly's favorite-scents video that she did recently down at the bottom.

I've always liked to have some candles around, and I've bought them at various places over the years - Yankee Candle and brands like that, and sometimes Walmart - and there used to be a place online (also in Texas, just like CbV) called Cottage Candles that had awesome candles and sold them for super-cheap prices - possibly a little too cheap, since they aren't around any more. Anyway, my favorite scent in the autumn always used to be Claire Burke Applejack & Peel. (I don't think I ever bought candles from Claire Burke, actually, I think it was the room spray I used to buy, mostly.) I think Claire Burke is still in business, last I looked, anyway, but they're not as easy to find as they used to be and luckily CbV has an awesome Applejack & Peel scent. I've bought some scent shots (aka melts) and I've found some other scents that I like but nothing that I like as much, and this time I decided I was just going to stock up on Applejack & Peel, even though fall still seems like a long way away. It doesn't seem as fall-only as it used to to me, anyway.

I don't burn candles all the time but I especially have a thing about having a candle burning when we have thunderstorms, which this time of year happens a lot. (If the power goes out, at least then I can see my hand in front of my face!) I do use them at other times, but usually in the summer that's mostly when I light candles. It doesn't have to be a scented candle for that purpose, of course, but I do prefer the scented ones if I can find ones I really like. And we've had a lot of showery weather lately, and I was running low so I bought three candles this time. One was the jar style that is what I've always bought in the past but two were other shapes. One is the "tureen" shape which is smaller, and one is a round apothecary jar.

(On my monitor the wax in these looks here like a dark pink. It looks more red in other lights - I think maybe it's actually supposed to be red. Different scents come in different colors, although you can mix scents and I think if you do that you can also choose the color. But I like this color fine so I never even thought about changing it til now.)

This is all three (above) plus the nearing-empty one on the left - you can see how very low it is, one more long stormy evening and it'll be gone. (I notice the basic jar style has changed a bit since I last bought it - not much, but the two of them do look a bit different. I thought at first that maybe I'd ordered a different size, but when I put them next to each other, I'm pretty sure that's not it. Just a minor change of shape.)

I ordered the round apothecary jar and then I wasn't quite sure I would like it, when I looked at the picture again afterwards. But luckily, I do. It's not perfectly round; it's a little more squat than what I thought from the picture. It's a two-wick candle, as you can see.

The tureen is smaller and has one wick. I think if I'm remembering right that it was 10 ounces, where the straight-sided jar is 16 oz and the apothecary jar is 18. One thing I really like about these candles is that they burn down very neatly, all the way to the bottom, and it's not much work at the end to clean the containers out and reuse them for something else.

Candles by Victoria's website is here. It's not the very easiest website to navigate because all the candles are in one category and there are a lot of different types of candle. (They need to subdivide!) (Also don't be like me and look at all those foody candles on the front page and think they don't have anything else. They do.) They do have the occasional sale but it seems to be more often on the scent shots than on the candles.

For the record, there's no disclosures required here, I paid retail price minus a small "points" discount from my last purchase. (I really like that you don't have to wait til you get a minimum number of points to use them, that's a nice little feature.)


Holly on her favorite scents:

Holly's favorite scents are mostly not my favorites, I have to say. I don't love sweet-smelling things, for the most part. I don't want a candle that smells like cupcakes or breakfast cereal or whatever, and that seems to be what a lot of her picks are. I don't find those scents really repellent, but I don't enjoy smelling them for a long period of time, either. (My favorite scents are spicy or citrusy or green, usually.)

Orly stash & favorites

For Orly, I have several pictures divided by bottle type. What I have the most of are the regular large bottles:

L-R, top row: Purple Poodle, Fowl Play, Intergalactic Space, Sparkling Garbage, Vintage, and Retro Red. The one in the middle on the right is Diamond Love, a top-coat. And L-R, bottom row: R.I.P (which is seriously settling, isn't it?), Pearl Wisdom, Sweet Peacock, Rage, Glitz, Flagstone Rush

There are thirteen bottles pictured above, although actually I have a 14th one that's not here because it's a backup bottle. (That's Pearl Wisdom - I used to wear it all the time but I haven't worn it in years. So probably the backup bottle should be the first thing here to go into the destash box.)

Then I have four minis (hopefully in the right order):

These came in a set: Tiara, Groupie, Hot Stuff, and Razzmatazz.

Then Orly Color Blast - I only have three and two of those were a set:

The first two are the duo, a Frozen tie-in. The pink is Free Spirit and the blue one is Frozen. And then the third one is just called Plum Chunky Glitter, as I recall. It shows up nicely over certain colors, but as usual with glitters, I haven't worn it much.

Hmm, favorites. They do make nice fuchsias, and I like both Hot Stuff and Free Spirit a lot. (And I like Frozen, for that matter. That was a nice duo.) But I don't think that quite rises to the level of favorites. For the record - although I've said it before and I will undoubtedly say it again - Rage is just not my color, although I think it's pretty. I know a lot of people are crazy about it but on me it doesn't look great.

Favorites: Fowl Play and Sparkling Garbage
(I only have 20 Orly polishes altogether, so two seems like a reasonable number of favorites. I don't have new swatches and I probably won't do a new one for Sparkling Garbage since I swatched it back in December. I definitely will try to get one done for Fowl Play, at least, though!)

Runners-up: Flagstone Rush (which is the brownish metallic), Sweet Peacock (only falls short because it's a dupe to other blue metallics), Intergalactic Space, R.I.P

G-listen To Your Heart

This is Sephora by OPI G-listen To Your Heart:

This is from the same line as SPFGW, which I showed a couple of days ago. On my monitor, at least, you can read that it says "top coat" on the bottle, but officially the line was Jewelry Top Coats, or so my spreadsheet says. Anyway, this one is maybe more sparse than the other one, and it's a really pretty raspberry color. I like this one quite a lot.

Gift Of Sparkle

This is Studio M Gift Of Sparkle:

It has what I'd call a plummy/purple base, with a lot of small glitter and I think some holo. (I don't have in front of me right now to check, but I'm pretty sure there's holo.) I haven't worn this polish much, but it's pretty and I doubt that it's anything that's going in the discard box at this time.

(You get these at Meijer stores - they were still available last year when I looked, I know, although with glitters somewhat out of fashion right now it's possible they're not any more. I would imagine they are findable, though, since they've been around for years now. They are also supposed to be dupes of some Color Club glitters - I think for that matter that they were made by the same manufacturer, so possibly not just duplicates per se but identical.)

I didn't post anything this morning, so this is my belated Monday post. I could've just skipped it, I suppose, but I have all these pictures I haven't posted and I figure I might as well keep posting them in between other things when I get a chance!

Sugar Plum Fairies Gone Wild

This a long-discontinued polish, now - Sephora by OPI Sugar Plum Fairies Gone Wild:

(You don't hear about Girls Gone Wild much any more, so I imagine there are a lot of people who wouldn't even get this joke.) I would call this an orchid glitter in a clear base. It looks here like it may have some holo glitter in it as well. It's from a line called "Jewelry Top Coats" so obviously it's not meant to be worn on its own.

I don't wear this much but I can't see getting rid of it. It's pretty, and for whatever reason I'm kind of sentimental about the S-OPI line, as well.

Carter

Here is Zoya Carter, which was in my top 10 Zoya polishes.

This one might be my favorite Zoya ever, quite honestly. I don't think I've ever gone so far as to say that before, but I really do love this. I love it on its own and I love it with top-coat. It's gorgeous either way. What makes it stand out is the red-violet glitter in the neutral purple base. (In fact, Zoya calls the glitter magenta - so more red than red-violet, even.) There's nothing different about the formula from any other Pixie Dust - it's the color that's different.

(Note that this was also in my 2014 favorites, and there are mani pictures at that link.)

NOTD: Peri-wink-le Of An Eye

This is Wet n Wild 1 Step Wonder Gel in Periwinkle Of An Eye (or "Peri-wink-le" if you must), 2 coats.

I don't know how well you can see this, but it does have very slight bald spots. Probably unless you're more nimble than I am with the application, this really needs 3 coats to be opaque. But in real life the spots are not noticeable unless you're looking really close.

I said I was going to make "what color is this" a series (I've used it as a tag for some time), but this is already a(n) NOTD post and putting both would have made the title awfully long. But the way this falls under that tag is, is this actually periwinkle, or just blue? I just looked Periwinkle the color up on Wikipedia and the "official" version of periwinkle is pretty much pale purple. (It's actually exactly half and half cyan and magenta - 20,20,0,0, in CMYK terms -but I looked up purple and violet and both of them are officially more magenta than cyan. So I guess that means that periwinkle is a blue-leaning violet - officially speaking.) However, like many other plants (lavender and lilac come to mind) the colors of an actual periwinkle bloom can actually be all over the place. So - like many of my "what color is this" tagged posts - the answer is unclear. This polish is pretty much blue, with maybe a drop or two of purple - I thought I saw a slight purple tinge in bright sunlight, at least. I'd still call it blue, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there's a periwinkle cultivar that blooms in exactly this color.

Here's the swatch I posted the other day, for reference:

Aside: Looking for an internet rabbit hole to fall down? If you haven't read up about the color purple and the color violet and the differences thereof already, start here. Warning: veers off into science very quickly. But I was really fascinated, especially with the part about "Tyrian purple" and the reasons why only rich people could afford to wear purple. (Short answer: because more than 10,000 sea-snails had to die in order to dye a handkerchief!)

Wet n Wild highlighter & pigments

Here's the last installment of my Wet n Wild haul - this was what started it, the "Unicorn Glow" collection, which is limited edition. There was a whole set of this stuff, but the set was sold out, and I was happy not to be tempted - I really wasn't sold thoroughly enough that I thought I really needed to buy the whole kit & caboodle. On the other hand, I can maybe justify some selective dabbling, since I have younger cousins who will be happy to get whatever I decide I don't want.

I'm pretty sure some of my cousins will end up with the hero product, the Unicorn Glow highlighter:

Not only is it all rainbow-colored but it's very glittery. I also bought a more subdued version as an alternative, thinking I was more likely to actually wear that, but it's just as glittery so I imagine both of these will get passed along unopened, really.

The pigments I am going to at least experiment with a little - I bought two of them, purple and blue:

Square Hue Kalbelia collection

It's been more than a year since I got a Square Hue box - I'm not at all sure how long I'll stick with it, but I was lured back by the changes they made, where you can skip months or you can pick two out of their three monthly polishes instead of getting all three. That's what I subscribed to - Box No.2, they call it. I just went in and picked the two I want for next month. I don't remember what the monthly theme was, but there were two brights and a "straw" color - and that's certainly not my kind of thing, so I got the two brights. (I think it's a coppery red and a plum.)

But that's next month. This year's Square Hue is dance-themed, and June is Kalbelia, which is a folk dance. Here is an example, and here are the swatch card and the polishes in the box (although I had already pulled them out long enough to swatch them, as you can see):

You can see the space in the middle where the 3rd bottle would go. In this case the third polish was a bright pink creme, and I figured I have plenty of those already and didn't need it. You can't see the bottles very well in the picture above, so there are a couple of different shots below. (If you're interested in knowing what these names mean, it's just below; if that doesn't interest you, the swatches are there, just skip the next few paragraphs and scroll down.)

First of all, Kalbelia is the dance, we've covered that (I didn't know the name but I do remember having seen that type of folk-dance before - I couldn't tell you where!) and I do actually know what a lengha is - like a lot of my general fashion knowledge, it's one of those things I learned from Pinterest. It's spelled various ways but basically in this case it means the skirt like the one above, which is tight at the waist and then flares out. You hear the term "lengha choli" and that is the name for the whole outfit - the choli is the top and the lengha is the skirt. (I can't believe I actually found a use for the time I spent looking this up one day a year or so ago!)

I did not know "odhani" but apparently it is also a garment - it means "wrap" but it seems to often mean the headcoverings that you see in Indian fashion, which are wrapped around the body and up over the head.

The garment names don't really seem to have much connection to the colors themselves - an outfit could be any of these colors, presumably. (For the Kalbelia dance, it may be traditional to have them be dark with bright embroidery, as in the picture above, but I'm not at all sure about that part. The videos I watched all seemed to have a color-scheme something like that, anyway)

In this case, Odhani is the blue - which is a crelly - and Lengha is a taupe/brown shimmer:

One way I can tell this (the blue, that is) is a crelly is because the color looks noticeably different depending on which side of the bottle you look at. It was darker on the back, here, and lighter on the side. I think that's because crellies tend to separate. (For a fairly extreme example, see this one.) You might notice that these colors are (coincidentally!) a little similar to two of the three Wet n Wild ones, I just got, but you'll also see in the swatches below that they are both darker. Definitely not dupes.

Here is Odhani:

See how much paler Odhani seems in this picture than the one above? But actually the swatch does seem to match this one quite well. At the top of the wheel you can see Periwinkle Of My Eye, and it definitely looks considerably lighter, although both are grayed-out blues and are certainly fairly similar.

And here's Lengha:

You could think of it as a darker version of the nice taupe from the Wet n Wild collection (again, visible at the top of the wheel). But it also has really pretty shimmer to it.

Wet n Wild lip products

Yesterday I showed new Wonder Gel polishes that I got, but I didn't show the picture of the whole haul, so here's that:

This is something I ordered late one night a couple of weeks ago, so this pre-dates the two Sephora orders I showed last week - and price-wise, this was much less of a splurge than that was. Wet n Wild had a bunch of stuff marked down, and I was interested in some of the limited editions (Unicorn Glow!) and trying some lip products out. And of course I ordered several colors of nail polish while I was at it. (They have free shipping over $35 so I was trying to hit that mark. I also got an extra 10% discount that came in an e-mail, so with Wet n Wild's very reasonable prices I got a lot of stuff for barely over $35.)

Here are the lip products:

I really like the ombre one (the double-ended one) but I like them all pretty well. I never end up wearing matte lipstick like this Megalast by itself - it makes my lips feel too dry - so I end up using it as a basecoat, more or less, and this is a good color for that. (I've been doing this a lot with that Kat Von D I got last summer and it works really well.)

So the idea on the ombre one, in case you haven't seen this before, is that you use the purple like a regular lipstick and the pink only on the inner part of your lips - where you pucker, basically. I had seen pictures of this concept and I thought it looked interesting, but it's probably not really meant for somebody my age, any more than that highlighter is. Still, I think I'll enjoy playing with it. The color is called Mutually Beneficial, as you can see below.

I noticed that this product had some really bad reviews, but they all seem to be talking about how much they hate the other color combinations, not the quality of the product. I think most people bought the paler ones, which is the last thing I would buy. You can look at the picture above and see exactly what colors I like on my lips - I like things that lean at least a little purple, for the most part - berry and fuchsia colors and things like that. The middle item, the one that looks really purple is a lip gloss that was a limited edition color, and I took a guess that it would probably look much less purple in real life and I was correct. (It's called Violet in Furs and it was all of 99 cents.) The Megalast color is Back to the Fuchsia.

(I'll do another post later & talk about the remaining items. This is already plenty long.)

Wet n Wild Wonder Gel

I bought a bunch of Wet n Wild products, and I'm going to show the nail polish in one post and everything else in another post tomorrow.

This first one was a new color for spring, but it doesn't say it's limited edition so it might stay around for a while. I was almost sorry I bought this because I was unsure from the pictures how much difference there was between the lavender you can see on the wheel and the taupe, but actually there's quite a lot. They're both grayed-out, definitely, but the lavender is quite lavender and the taupe is quite brownish. So now I'm glad I bought both. (Oh, and this is called Taupe As A Joke, which I feel like is a joke I'm not quite getting!)

Then this is Lavender Out Loud:

Not very loud, but quite pretty. Maybe it's more of a... heather color, really? but whatever.

The third one is my favorite - Periwinkle - no, make that Peri-wink-le Of An Eye:

Yum.