Rain, rain, go away

A little less than a week ago I said this:

Harvey is not supposed to hit us head-on, so we'll be fine, I'm sure. We're mostly just likely to get rained on a lot.

And well, that's true, for my husband and myself, as it turned out. We got rained on a lot, we couldn't really go further than the parking lot of our apartments for several days, we couldn't go to work (and our work ended up closing for most of that time anyway). But that was about the extent of our personal inconvenience. Where we live turns out to be the high ground of the whole town, I think, and furthermore, we live on the second floor. The power went out for a while on Friday but has stayed on ever since. And we had plenty of food and reading material and computer games to while away the time. But if you spent much time watching the news, you may have seen people who live not a mile from me. Where we live is some distance away from a big creek (we are not in the area near the reservoirs that were overflowing, we are on the other side of Houston from that) and the creek quickly overtopped its banks Saturday night and started crawling up through the neighborhoods around it. There was a little water at the far end of our street, and I'm told if you went further it quickly got deeper. That's about all I know that you couldn't get from the news or from Facebook (and I stopped looking at Facebook after a while, because too many people I know were telling stories about the water in their houses, and it was freaking me out, quite honestly). We were incredibly fortunate.

(Added, and I wish this had occurred to me before: Ways you can help)

I could stick a nail polish picture in here just to remind you what blog this is, but I've still got the same manicure (I Wand It That Way over Pixi-lated) that I had on a week ago. (Tomorrow it's going to have to go.) -- Well, ok, here's a repeat. The mani picture kind of sucked so here's just the wheel swatches - Pixi-lated is the blue on top and below that it has I Wand It That Way added:

(I really was going to post this later, but I accidentally hit post, so oh well.)

Square Hue stash

I thought I had exactly 25 SquareHue polishes, but as usual, there are strays. The lovely 5x5 grid is not actually correct. It matches the number on my spreadsheet, but what I finally figured out was that I didn't add the three I got most recently to the spreadsheet, so the numbers are off. I actually have 28, and I'll add those in later on.

My SquareHues are scattered chronologically all over the past several years - I bought a few sets in late 2014, cancelled in early 2015, subscribed again for a few months at the end of 2015 and into early 2016, and have started up again this year. And I also bought one 2016 set in a sale recently. So I have at least a couple of sets for every year since 2014. 2014 had a city theme, 2015 went decade by decade, 2016 was an adventure theme, and 2017 is various kinds of dances. I have them separated below by color, not by set, though.

I always try to take pictures of Square Hue bottles from the back, because the front label covers the polish up.

This is Odhani (from 2017), Lake Louise (2016), Akamai (2016), Lodgepole Pine (2016) and Na Prikope (2014):

Vaclavske Namesti (2014), Baby Baby Baby (2015), Victorian End (2015), Ikaika (2016), Gibson Girl (2015):

Nani (2016), Bird Fling (2015), Limeña (2017), Vogue (2015), Y2K (2015)

First Flight (2015), Parizska (2014), Hurricane (2015), Never Forget (2015), Idol (2015)

Johnston Canyon (2016), Via Sant'andrea (2014), Desert Storm (2015), Olympiad (2015), Via Montenapoleone (2014)

For the record, here are the sets I have. I have the full set of three for all of them except the 2017 ones - those I only have two of each three.

• Milan, Oct 2014
• Prague, Nov 2014
• 1900s, Jan 2015
• 1990s, Oct 2015
• 2000s, Nov 2015
• 2010s, Dec 2015
• Hike Banff, Jan 2016
• Scuba Hawaii, Aug 2016
• Kalbelia, June 2017
• Marinera, July 2017

The three polishes that weren't in these pictures were from the oldest and the newest sets, as it happened; they were Via Della Spiga, from the Milan set in 2014, and then Norteña, from Marinera, and Lengha from Kalbelia, both from this summer.

(I'mna have to think about favorites. I'll do another entry for that, when I decide something.)


Note that the link above for Via Della Spiga is a destash post and I remembered that, but it wasn't in the box with the rest of the destash candidates. But it's a really pretty red and I think I had been waffling and that's why it wasn't there. I suspect it's staying for now.

Colourpop polish (& lippies)

"Lippie" is not a word I ever say out loud - and I probably haven't typed it very often, either. But there it is in the title, anyway.

So Colourpop, famed for their lip products, finally got around to doing nail polish. I had never bought anything from them before, but they give you a $5 coupon on your first purchase, and shipping is free at $30 so that's how much stuff I bought. I got polishes and a couple of lip products for good measure, just to try them out.

First here's the lip things. I wasn't sure what I wanted, here - I always hear people talk about their matte lip products, but I usually won't wear mattes because they always feel so dry to me. So I just kind of poked around by color until I found some things I thought I'd like. Since I'm so partial to berry/purple colors, that seemed like a good way to go at it, and this is what I ended up with:

I think these are both from different collaborations. I guess Virginia is the name of a character in the show Claws, which I've never seen. And you can see the name of the collab on the lip pencil - iluvsarahii - the color is Mamacita, which is a very very dark berry purple. I've tried it and it looks good on me but it's really dark. It's not exactly an everyday color. Virginia is an Ultra Satin color, which is a nice middle ground between the mattes and the very glossy ones, and it's a bright berry. I like it.

And then there's the nail polish. Here's the verbiage they're using to promote it on the website: "Super pigmented Polish! It's long wearing, and of course made in the USA and Cruelty Free." Near as I can tell, these claims are correct. It is very pigmented, very close to a one-coater at the very least, and (with I Wand It That Way on top of Pixi-lated, no other top-coat) even on my difficult nails, it has lasted 5 days with only slight chips in the last day or so. Until yesterday it was completely pristine, which never happens with me.

It came in little boxes, which you can partially see in the picture above. Once out of the boxes they are in square bottles like SquareHue bottles.

In fact I went and pulled out a Square Hue bottle to compare:

They are both .45 oz - the bottle itself looks identical but as you can see the caps are different. The brush is what I would call a medium size - not extremely wide, but wider than some, including than Square Hue's. It did the job just fine.

Notice that Pixi-lated looks more blue in the top picture but not so much in these other two. With Wand It That Way on top, I'd say it looks more blue-green. Without it, I thought it looks somewhat more blue. It's not as pale as it looked in my NOTD picture. The rest of the cremes are quite pale, but Pixi-lated is somewhat darker.

This is Colourpop's verbiage for these; I thought they were cute.
Pixi-lated (or, Pixie-lated, per the website, but that's not what the label says) - "No need to adjust your settings, this robin's egg blue is true blue."
First Wings First - "With a swish and flick, this pastel lavender is pure magic"
I Wand It That Way - "Believe us when we say, this clear with bright pink duochrome glitter is our fire"

What I bought is half the initial collection - the others are a very pale pink (Be Fairy Afraid, which is a great name), a pale green (Dust A Dream), and a holo top-coat (One Wish, Two Wish) which is sold out. Last I checked the other five were still in stock - they do have a limit of two bottles per color.

Oh yeah, and did I mention they are $6?

Here's Kelli Marissa's swatches:

Magic City

This is KL polish Magic City:

It looks more red in some pictures and more orange in others (see below). I would say that it's poised right in-between - a dark coral-red. I'm finding that these colors do pretty well on me, even though they're technically "warm."

Pacific Blue dupe? Porter Miami & new KL polishes

I talked about buying these at the bottom of this post, but I almost forgot to talk about them once I got them. So let's talk about the KL Polishes that I bought in the sale. And below I'll get to the possible-dupe topic.

The sale was buy any 2 polishes, get Magic City free. I had already been eyeing these other two polishes - Porter Miami, from the summer collection, and That's What She Said, from the spring collection - so I figured I might as well go ahead and get them and get the free one.

That's What She Said is a metallic, but the other two are cremes, as the bulk of Kathleen's polishes are so far. (I know she wants to build up a core set of cremes, but I wish she'd release more not-cremes, because I've really liked most of the non-creme polishes she's released so far.)

I'll link Nine Zero's video again below - the thing that I was most interested in there was that Jess said that Porter Miami is really close in color to Pacific Blue (the original formula). So I tested that out and I found that she's right. Color-wise, they look exactly the same to me, although Pacific Blue is usually a one-coater and Porter is not.

(I swatched Mesmerize as well, just for a comparison. It was darker when I compared the other blues a couple of weeks ago and that hasn't changed.)

Jessface90's video:

I'll get swatches of the other two that I bought up later on.

Also this came very quick and as always, they came in an envelope but well-padded and wrapped and they were fine.

Discard: Magenta Mirage

This is Color Show Magenta Mirage, which is a Shredded aka crackle polish:

You can see that I couldn't even get it to crack on the nail wheel. I think this was the first Color Show polish I ever bought, and I don't think it "shredded" very well back then, either, but it did more than you see here, anyway. It's a pretty color, which I think is the only reason I've hung onto it all this time.

Let Your Twilight Sparkle

Here is China Glaze Let Your Twilight Sparkle, from the My Little Pony collection:

#11 on the wheel is Let Your Twilight Sparkle alone, and above it, it's over Porter Miami, which I think is a really gorgeous combination. I looked at this and said, "Ooh, it's like Zoya Leia, but blue" -and immediately went off to buy it. Which is to say, it's a shimmer topper that leans blue - or maybe slightly blue-violet. #11 on the wheel is LYTS alone and #12 (above that) is over Porter Miami. I really like that combination.

For the record, I wore LYTS this week over Insta-Dri Plummet and I tried to take a picture but it kept coming out all wrong. Over the very dark Plummet it looked like sort of blackened cyan metallic, if that makes sense. That's not what the pictures looked like, though, so I gave up on the picture part of it.

Here it is with Where's The Party Canon At:

(These were the only two of the My Little Pony set that I decided I Must Have. And I do really like them both, a lot, so I did good.)

NOTD: I Wand It That Way over Pixi-lated

Colourpop now has nail polish so you know I had to try it out. I really love this combination:

This is the top-coat I Wand It That Way over Pixi-lated, which is sort of a robin's-egg blue. The top-coat seems to change the color of it somewhat but I still really like this combo. The finish of the polish looks a little wacky here but I think that's just the picture. Both of the cremes I got seem to go on like a dream. (Also the color of my fingers looks weird to me in this picture but I think that's just a lighting thing as well - this was taken under the fluorescent lights at work.)

I'll get pictures of everything I bought up later on (maybe Monday) but I like this and so I thought I'd go ahead and post. It's conceivable that we will be evacuating ahead of a storm over the weekend - but I have posts already scheduled so you guys probably won't notice the difference! (Harvey is not supposed to hit us head-on, so we'll be fine, I'm sure. We're mostly just likely to get rained on a lot.)

I Feel Pretty, Fools Rush In

Here is Lippmann I Feel Pretty:

and Fools Rush In (both minis, from the Midnight Garden set):

These are both right in my wheelhouse because they're mid-toned, not too dark and not too light. They're the kind of colors you see referred to as pastel sometimes (especially around Easter) but they're really not, so much. (I use the term "semi-pastel" sometimes for borderline colors, but honestly I'm not sure these are even that close. These are just plain mid-tones.)

The labels both have the same number on them, so maybe that number indicates the Midnight Garden set, I don't know.

L'Oreal stash

Here are four of my five L'Oreal polishes:

 This is The Reign Of Studs, Nightlife, Hasty, and Jolly Lolly (which is from the Miss Candy or "gellies" collection). The fifth polish that's missing is another Jet-Set, so I actually still have more Jet-Set than I do newer L'Oreal polishes. I think the missing one is called Departure, and it's mauve.

Added: not missing, just in another box. Here's the pic:

As I was saying when I talked about Revlon, I spent most of the early 00s buying nothing but quick-dry polishes. So Jet-Set, Top Speed, and Maybelline Express were the bulk of my collection at that time.

It's interesting that two of these are #600 (but they are from different lines which presumably are numbered separately). And Jet-Set is long-gone, anyway, to my knowledge. (Added: to go with the picture above, the number on Departure is 305.)

Favorite: definitely Jolly Lolly. Red jelly, yum.

Clearly Spotted

This is Maybelline Clearly Spotted (from the Polka Dots collection, which presumably was a couple of years ago when matte glitter was all the rage):

I swatched it on the wheel (bottom to top) with no undercoat, with a black undercoat, and with an undertone of Color Show Tenacious Teal.

I think I like it the best over black, although of course if you want the black and the white to show up, you have to put it over a medium-toned color. (I just grabbed the green because it was there, and it's not bad but hmm, maybe a fuchsia?)

Sally Beauty haul

I've only done a Sally Beauty online order once before, and it went just like this one. It's not a bad thing, but it gets kinda crazy. I was coveting My Little Pony polishes, and I looked and Sally Beauty had CG buy two get one free. And I needed shampoo, and there was a 20% off coupon, and then there's that $50 threshold for free shipping. You get $50 worth of items added and then you put the coupon on and it knocks off $10 and you have to add even more stuff to get back to the free shipping level. So that's why I say it seems a little crazy.

With all of that going on, I got quite a lot of stuff for 50-odd dollars. (I did already have a current beauty club membership, for the record.) Starting with the four polishes:

• China Glaze Where's The Party Canon At? (My Little Pony - and as I said the other day, it's canon and not cannon, I've seen it online spelled both ways but my bottle definitely says canon) - raspberry glitter
• CG Let Your Twilight Sparkle (also My Little Pony) - blue shimmer top coat, because I have a weakness for those
• CG Fairy Dust - because I didn't have it and there wasn't a third MLP polish I really felt like I had to have
• Wood I Lie To You (this was on clearance - Finger Paints Hard As Steel, the ones with the bamboo pattern on the cap) - fuchsia/berry creme
• another 32 oz. of nail polish remover, because I go through a ton of it
• Ion Color Defense After Color Sealer, 6 oz. tube - this goes with the hair color I've been using, and all I had were some little packets of it. And then it was ALSO buy two get one free, so I got more items from that same collection...
• Ion Color Defense Sulfate-Free Shampoo (because I've been experimenting around to find sulfate-free shampoos that I like and that are reasonably priced)
• Ion Color Defense Leave-In Protector
• a liter bottle of Biotera Color Care Shampoo (and this one is not sulfate-free. I haven't fully committed to sulfate-free yet, mostly just because it is generally more expensive. But this looks like it's meant to be a Biolage knockoff and I always did like Biolage.)
• Vanilla lip scrub
• Palladio baked blush in Berry - because I seem to be on a perpetual search for the perfect shade of blush (I'm not sure this one is my holy grail or anything, but it's not bad!)
• a packet of charcoal detoxifying hair mask
• assorted empty plastic bottles
• and a pump that hopefully will fit the liter bottle, because I wasn't sure I still have one

Whew.

Oh, also, I ordered this either very early Saturday morning, or very early Saturday night, I forget which - but either way, I ordered it over the weekend and it was here on Tuesday. That's pretty awesome service.

Cerulean

I showed Insta-Dri Cerulean, from the Crayola collection, in the blue cremes post a week or so ago, but I didn't ever put this picture up, so I'm remedying that now:

It's a really pretty color and very near to a one-coater. (#1 on the wheel, here.) None of the polishes in the line are really unique, but then, wouldn't you expect the basic crayon colors to have been well-covered territory by now? There'd be something wrong with the powers-that-be at the nail polish companies if they hadn't done things like this many times before now.

Here it is on my nails.

NOTD: Where's The Party Canon At?

This is actually Where's The Party Canon At? (and yes, it's canon and not cannon on my bottle, I checked) from China Glaze's My Little Pony collection, over another polish I just bought, Finger Paints Wood I Lie To You. And it's mattified (with Matte All The Things), because I was going to work and all that sparkle just seemed like a little too much. It's still pretty sparkly but nothing like it would have been with regular top-coat.

Wood I Lie To You is a sort of a berry creme and so I thought it would be a good undercoat for Where's The Party Canon At? which I would call more of a raspberry base. I think WTPCA eventually gets pretty opaque on its own, but I still used two coats even with the undercoat.

This is part of a bunch of stuff I bought from Sally Beauty online - I think the haul post will be along on Monday.


I am not an expert on My Little Pony in any way shape or form - I'm too old, I was grown before they came along - but I feel like the names of the two polishes I bought from that collection must be fandom in-jokes I'm not quite getting. (The other one I got is Let Your Twilight Sparkle. I did read The Secret Life of Dolls back in the day and that's what "twilight sparkle" makes me think of.)

Comparison: dark blues

Dark blues, mostly cremes:

Here is the whole list of blues in numerical order (including the ones I already talked about), so this picture starts with #7:

1. Cerulean (Insta-Dri)
2. Robyn (Zoya)
3. Peri-wink-le Of An Eye (WnW 1-Step Wonder Gel)
4. Mesmerize (Essie)
5. Pacific Blue (old formula - SH Xtreme Wear)
6. Intrigue (Revlon Brilliant Strength)
7. Blackout (Revlon Super Top Speed) (this one is not actually a creme, but it's so dark that it's hard to tell what it is. I think maybe it has some paler blue shimmer in it.)
8. Midnight Cami (Essie)
9. Plummet (Insta-Dri)
10. Nail-robi (Color Club)
11. Cynthia (Zoya)

The brand-name is completely gone from my bottle of Blackout, but here it is from Kaz. Her bottle says "Super Top Speed" and that does ring a bell with me.

Here's Blackout close-up (#7 on the wheel):

You can see the fill line here, I've worn this a fair bit here and there. (Let's face it, I'm more likely to wear things more that are not cremes. It's just a fact of life for me.) (Also, as I mentioned in the Revlon stash post, all of the Top Speed line is now discontinued.)

I talked about Plummet and Nail-Robi yesterday, so I won't talk about them again; instead, here is Zoya Cynthia.

It looks almost greenish next to its violet-leaning neighbor on the wheel. I think what it is is super-dark indigo. (Zoya calls it "blackened peacock teal" which also implies that there is a little green in there.)

And I don't seem to have a picture of Midnight Cami on its own, but here's the group picture:

I am going to have to come back later to talk about Midnight Cami because it is also not a creme and I hadn't worn it in so long I'd forgotten that. Obviously I am terrible at identifying cremes from not-cremes. :)

Dupes!

This is a subset of the dark-blue cremes post that's coming tomorrow, but I unexpectedly found two polishes that are basically dupes and I wanted to show those together. It's Insta-Dri Plummet and Color Club Nail-Robi:

It's hard to see with these dark colors, but these two are number 9 and 10 on the wheel, and on my monitor you can just see that these two look different from the other dark blues, and like one another. These are both blurples, basically - in different lights they may look like a purple-leaning navy or a very dark blue-leaning purple. I've seen them both called purple but to me they look more blue if you don't look closely. I guess it's just a trick of the light, because if you look up swatches, they look more blue in some people's pictures and more purple in others. (ALU had a post with other dupes for Plummet, not including Nail-Robi. Zoya Pinta was one of them.)

Love In The Dunes

This is Deborah Lippmann Love In The Dunes, a mini-size polish from the Midnight Garden collection:

It's one of those taupes which is slightly purple-leaning. (Lippmann's website calls it "purple gray" but it doesn't read particularly gray to me. Added: turn that around and call it grayed-out purple and that's closer. But I still think it has more brown than that implies.)

This is still a current polish in the Gel Lab Pro line (see the link just above) but apparently not in the regular line. The Midnight Garden minis aren't labeled as Gel Lab Pro but I suppose that doesn't mean they aren't, necessarily. (I'm still inclined to think they're not, though.)

Garnet Nectar

This is Terrybly Garnet Nectar:

It's a creme in oxblood red - or, I suppose, actually the color of a garnet. You may remember that I was not very impressed with the other one of these polishes that I bought. This one didn't seem as balky when I was doing the swatches - I started to say "I'll have to wear this and see" but I'm always saying that, and we're going to have to get closer to fall before I'll be able to talk myself into wearing any more dark colors, I'm not going to kid myself about that. Anyway, whenever I do finally wear it, I'll definitely report back.

You may can still find these polishes around but I'm pretty sure they're discontinued. Don't pay full price for them, for sure.

(I say "closer to fall" rather than "in the fall" because fall is mostly just an abstract concept where I live. By the time Halloween rolls around we might be seeing less fiendishly hot weather, or at least we start to get the occasional cool front that gives us a little relief for a day or two now and then. Usually if we get any fall color at all, it turns up around Thanksgiving, or even later.)

SquareHue Scuba Hawaii

SquareHue had a 40% off sale for subscribers only a couple of weeks ago, on past boxes. But you had to buy the whole box (some of them were two polishes and some were three), and I'm such a picky person that there aren't many boxes where I wanted everything in it. If there's something like a "straw color" (that one was in last month's collection) that's a dealbreaker for me. (I unsubscribed from SquareHue after the January box in 2016 and didn't resubscribe until a few months ago, after they finally changed their policies where you could pick your polishes to some extent, or skip boxes entirely). Well, the only collection that they had available in the sale where I thought I might actually wear everything in it was Scuba Hawaii, from last August. I knew people had raved about that collection. Even then I immediately started second-guessing myself about the orange polish, though.

But the box is here and I do actually like the orange. It's red-orange enough that it's fine.

Here's the swatch card as well as the wheel swatches. The orange is Nani, and the violet is Ikaika, both cremes, and then the third one is a foil, Akamai. That one is pretty sheer but I think if you build it up enough it'll be awesome. So I'm pretty happy with this. (The box was marked $25 and so 40% off was $15, and that includes shipping. I think that was a pretty good deal.)

(See, in this picture the orange doesn't look very red-orange, either. That was why I got nervous about it. But yay, I like it fine.)