Oranges for Halloween

I've been talking about orange polish off and on all month, since I've been trying to wear mostly Astros Orange as long as the playoffs are going on. I'm not going to specifically talk about baseball* but since it's Halloween I thought this was a good time to talk about the oranges I've been wearing and the ones I haven't. The Astros version of orange is a brighter orange - but I'm also a Texas Ex (aka Longhorn) and I also went to a high school that had an orange color-scheme, so I've always been very aware of the differences between bright orange and the Longhorn version, which is usually more of a burnt orange. I've learned over the years that I can wear orange pretty well if it's a red-leaning orange, but burnt orange is less flattering to me (although mostly passable) and anything that leans very far toward yellow-orange makes me look really bilious. So while I own quite a lot of orange polishes, one way and another, they're a carefully-curated set of oranges that avoid anything too yellow-toned. I didn't do any new swatches for this but I'm going to pull some of my old ones and talk about the differences.

I've been doing a lot of layering, but most of my Astros manicures have been things layered over a couple of red-oranges. Zoya Destiny works really well. By itself it's almost a coral, which is why I've mostly been using it layered. You can see on the wheel below that it looks almost pink. The more coats you put on, the more orange it looks on its own, though. This is two coats on the swatch here, but three coats probably work better for my purposes.

Mostly I've worn Y'all Come Back Ya Hear on top of it. though.

The Zoya on the left here is Autumn, which is a very burnt orange and I didn't try to use that, but you can see that Y'all Come Back, next to it, looks very pumpkin-orange - maybe just a hair of red-orange to it, but not much - and furthermore it's a "sorbet" (as OPI calls these jelly-like polishes from the Texas collection) so it layers really well. You can get this pretty opaque on its own but I usually don't bother, I just layer it over something. Together with Destiny it's pretty much perfect for my purposes.

I also used Square Hue Nani as a base:

It's not as coral as Destiny but it's definitely a bit red-leaning, also.

I layered VIP here (above) on top of Nani, and as I mentioned at the time, I eventually put Colorstay Fall Mood on top of that.

I put it on with a dry brush, and just kind of spread it around lightly without covering up the orange. I like this technique. Fall Mood - which is from the previous iteration of Colorstay, not the current one - is a sort of hard-to-classify metallic bronze color. (The polish on the left here is Orly Flagstone Rush, which is a bit more orange-brown and probably would have worked fine for this as well. I was also thinking that Princess Penny would probably have worked well.)

The Astros have been in the playoffs so long that I've started over completely with the orange layers at least twice. I started with Destiny first, then Nani, then Destiny again. I did the Destiny thing the same way as the first time, with Y'all Come Back Ya Hear on top, but then a couple of days ago I switched it up and put Zoya Kaufda on top of it.

Kaufda looks more red-orange here than I usually think it is. It's sort of a hybrid orange-coppery shimmer. It's lovely, and went well over the layers underneath. It darkened it a bit but it still looks plenty orange enough. (I'm still wearing this mani but it's chipping now. I will probably just try to patch it up and get it to last a bit longer rather than start completely over again, though.)

The other polish in the picture above is called Candy Cane Cordial and it's a holo glitter, it's nice. I didn't come across that one and I didn't find Orly Retro Red, which is a matte red-orange that I was really intending to use the last time. Despite the name, it reads pretty orange and it seemed like it would work. Here's a picture of it:

Many of these polishes are discontinued, I should note. Zoya Destiny is still current and so was Autumn, last I checked, but Kaufda is not. Kaufda and Y'all Come Back Ya Hear are polishes that might be findable from beauty supplies and so forth, though.

*Yeah, ok, I can't completely not talk about baseball. Did you see that crazy game on Sunday night? I thought I was going to pass out before it was finally over. And now it's two games in Los Angeles today and tomorrow, and if we win either one of them we win. Yike. But Verlander's pitching tonight, so I'm hoping for the best. Maybe we won't have to go to game 7 at all. (Knock on wood.)

Bat My Eyes

This is China Glaze Bat My Eyes, which was a Halloween polish a few years back:

I was thinking I had already posted this picture, but I can't find it and anyway it's the right time of year for this, even if I have. It's a really lovely gold and black glitter (with some scattered flakes of other stuff). I said last year when I wore it that it was almost too elegant to be a Halloween polish, and maybe that's true, but it's also a really awesome Halloween polish. I didn't try to look and see if it was available this year (kinda late for mail order, anyway), but it still was last year so there might still be some bottles hanging around somewhere. This is very textured, for the record - I think I said last year that I pulled out the Gelous for this.

I saw this in Walgreen's:

(The mayor even had two faces, it was pretty cute.)

Dark Side Of The Moon

This is Deborah Lippmann Dark Side of The Moon:

It's a nice vampy eggplant color - they call it a cream but it seems to have jellyish tendencies to me. Anyway, very pretty - I think I got mine as a freebie from beauty.com - they used to do that from time to time. A gift with purchase, I guess you'd call it. But I just checked and it's still a current color.


In today's installment of the Orange Nails saga, I have had on Destiny again (orange pixie dust) with Y'all Come Back Ya Hear (orange jelly) on top, but I got kind of bored with that and decided to push the walls of my self-imposed constraints just a bit - so now I have Zoya Kaufda on top of all of the above. It looks very nice and I'd still say it matches the orange in my Astros t-shirt just fine. Kaufda leans more towards the "burnt orange" end of the orange spectrum, but with all that lighter stuff underneath, I think it keeps it from looking so dark. (I was intending to start with Orly Retro Red, which is basically a red-orange, but I couldn't find what I did with it. I don't think it's much different from all this other stuff I've been wearing anyway. (If you're not following baseball, but are interested in knowing: the Astros and Dodgers are tied at two games each, now. So there will be one more game in Houston and at least one in LA, maybe two if needed. Tomorrow in Houston, then a travel day, then game 6 in LA on Halloween night, and if the same team hasn't managed to win both of those, then there will be a game 7 to decide it all on Nov.1. And then I will paint my nails some Halloween color even though Halloween will be over by then. I've been saving It's Alive for that!)

Dovima

This is Zoya Dovima, a matte velvet:

I figure this is kind of in the Halloween wheelhouse, because it's a near-black and very elegant. It looks charcoal-colored in some lights and black in others, but it's beautiful all of the time.

(To my knowledge this is not currently available. Zoya usually releases some mattes around the holidays every year but these older ones have not been re-released the last couple of years. They do have some other colors and a matte top-coat available.)

Just Breathe

Here is Orly Breathable Just Breathe:

It's a nice pastel-ish purple. When I wore this (see the link below) I was amazed at how well it wore with no base-coat or top-coat - which is how it's intended to be worn. I wore two coats but I believe it probably needs three coats for it to be really opaque.

When I showed my manicure with this polish a few weeks ago, I also showed the video for Breathe (2am) because that was the earworm my brain was presenting me at the time. My brain can be unpredictable about the earworms at any given moment, but this week I've been listening to a lot of Pearl Jam and so - rather predictably for once - when I looked at this polish I got Pearl Jam in my head instead.

Moisturizer and blush from Walgreens

A couple of things I bought at Walgreens the other day:

I'd never heard of this stuff - or I looked at it and my eyes just skipped right over it, I suppose is more likely. But my dermatologist recommended CeraVe Itch Relief and I bought that a while back, and it does seem to work well, so I guess my brain started picking up that brand-name a little bit - I still wasn't thinking of it as something you put on your face, though. But then Rank & Style had this product as #1 on their list of moisturizers for sensitive skin, and that was what made me really notice it. I maybe paid a bit more for it at Walgreens than I would have somewhere else, but I was so floored - it's SIXTEEN OUNCES. Every other moisturizer I've bought has been maybe six or eight ounces at the most, and a lot of them (Origins! La Fresh!) are 1.7 ounces. Which is why I found 16 ounces to be such a shock, and went running out to buy it right away. I figured if I didn't like it on my face I can always use it for a body lotion! But I do like it, it turns out.

Now I have to say that this doesn't really have a consistency like the Origins and La Fresh moisturizers I've had. I thought at first it felt like a night cream, compared to those two which are extremely light-feeling. But it seems to sink in just fine so I don't really see why you can't wear it in the daytime as well. Some of that is just personal preference, of course, so YMMV and all that.


And then Walgreen's had CoverGirl stuff x% off (I've already forgotten how much exactly) and my eye was caught by this:

Apparently this color is Deep Mauve. It's definitely darker than the MAC blush I've been wearing (which is really a little too pale, honestly) but it doesn't seem excessively dark, either. If I end up using this I will probably have to be careful to put it on lightly, but it's a beautiful color. I'll get back to you about how I end up liking it.

Cozy In There?

This is KL Polish Cozy In There?

This is a Walking Dead reference, as I talked about here - from the pilot, I think? (Or maybe it's the episode after that, I'm not sure.) It's a beautiful darker dusty blue - and like the majority of the cremes in this collection, it seems to be a bit darker on the nail than it is on the bottle.

Available here.

Dust A Dream

This is Colourpop Dust A Dream:

This has the same nice formula as the other Colourpop pastels - this one is pale mint green, maybe slightly dusty. As I'm writing this, this polish is still on Colourpop's sale page for $3 - which I assume means they're discontinued. Don't know how long they'll be there, but it's a bargain!

(It looks more blue in this picture than it really is.)

Princess Penny (+ orange polish & baseball)

This is KL Polish Princess Penny. I forget what Kathleen said it was named after... something involving Mary-Kate and Ashley? Again, I'm totally the wrong age.

Anyway, this is a really pretty bright copper-penny color, and I'm dying to try it. I don't think it will pass for Astros orange, though, and oh yeah, THE ASTROS ARE IN THE WORLD SERIES!! (Sorry, I can only resist for so long.) So I'm sworn to wear bright orange, or something that can pass for bright orange, until at least this weekend. (If the Astros sweep the Dodgers, it'll be over Saturday. Or, uh, y'know, the other way around, I suppose. I'm not that ready to stop wearing orange, thanks. Either way it goes until November 1 at the longest.)

Right now I'm wearing sort of a gumbo of oranges - I keep adding more stuff. I started with Nani, added a flakie top-coat, and then yesterday added Jade VIP, which is orange microglitter. Then it was chipping last night so I added Revlon Fall Mood (which is an old Colorstay polish) which isn't properly orange either but I sort of dry-brushed it around on top of the existing mani so that it covered up the chipped parts but it still reads as orange. If I'd thought of it in time I guess I could have done that with Princess Penny instead, but oh well. Anyway, I'll do something new tomorrow or Tuesday, I'm sure. I've still got a couple of orange things I haven't used, so we'll see what I can come up with.

Back to Princess Penny: it's available here, or in the box set - I got an e-mail saying the box set was nearly sold out though. (I don't know why they're telling me, actually - it's not like I'm going to go buy another one!)

Fall favorite: Winterberry

Here is a classic, Sinful Colors Winterberry:

It doesn't seem to be a current color but it was around for a long time so I think it's findable. (Maybe not for $1.99 any more, though.) It's a nice sort of grape/taupe color that's very different, with lots of silver shimmer. Sinful Colors really should have brought this back considering how trendy grayed-out colors are this year.

Clave

This is SquareHue Clave, from the Salsa collection:

I have to be honest and tell you I don't even remember ordering this. (I have the SquareHue subscription where you pick two out of the three polishes, each month, or you can choose to skip the month. What you can't do is only pick one, which is what I'm always wanting to do.) This is a charcoal crelly, I'm sure I'll wear it, but I can't think why I thought I really wanted (much less needed) it.

I also haven't been able so far to find the wheel I was using when I took this picture to confirm, but I think the swatch above Clave is SquareHue Y2K, which is a more metallic charcoal. Clave is darker - almost black - and has a nice depth to it.

I went to look up what "clave" meant in a salsa context, and it turns out that while it literally means "key" in Spanish, what it means in music is a type of percussion instrument, and a type of rhythm - it's easier to show you than to tell you, really:

This piece is called Rumba Clave, and both performers are playing claves - it means those dowel-like things, which you see often in salsa music. (There is a really long Clave article on Wikipedia, clearly lovingly written by somebody, but it's somewhat over my head - I was a music major long ago and I get some of it, but music theory is what drove me into changing my major in the first place, and that's exactly what that article is long on.) One thing about it, this year of SquareHue is teaching me things about dance music that I probably never would have known, otherwise. The only context I knew for "Clave" was in the Mortal Instruments books, which is not at all the same thing.

Chloe

Here is KL Polish Chloe:

There's not much to say about it, really: it's a drab olive-green creme. And yet I'm definitely drawn to this color. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

NOTD: Destiny naked

(I started to channel Simply Nailogical and say "without taco" but I think that's getting a little too obscure - if you can call a YouTuber with several million followers obscure.. I also had "sans top-coat" in the title at one point. But I decided "naked" is both slightly dramatic and perfectly true.)

(I just noticed that the video I linked above has 13,000 comments. That's insane.)

I notice I've posted two different NOTD pictures of Zoya Destiny but both of them are with top-coat. Pixie Dust polishes are meant to be worn without, but the fact is that I probably wear them with some sort of top-coat more than I do without. (Sometimes it's just a shiny top-coat like Seche Vite, or a matte one; sometimes it's some kind of shimmery top-coat that builds on what's underneath it.)

Destiny with jelly on top

Destiny with top-coat

Aaand now Destiny without anything at all on top:

It's more pink-leaning by itself, although I'm not sure if you can pick up on that here. I wore it like this yesterday and then I put Y'all Come Back Ya Hear on it again because my beloved Astros are orange, not coral. Not that the color of my nail polish has helped them at all - they've lost three games in a row, now. Just the same, I am sticking with orange polish as long as they're still in it, so may I still be wearing it at Halloween.

Baseball eventually makes you superstitious. It's weird that way.


Added: just for the heck of it, here's the same video I linked to at the top, showing Christine dressing up her cats (and her boyfriend, and herself). It amuses me, and it does have some slight references to the whole "taco" thing.

Splash Of Grenadine + MAC primer

I wanted to buy the MAC Prep+Prime, so I ordered it from Nordstrom's, and of course I couldn't resist adding a polish as well - I picked Essie Splash of Grenadine:

I had a sample of the Prep+Prime (from a past Nordstrom purchase? I'm not sure) and I really liked it. I haven't regularly used primers but I notice I come home from work a lot of nights and my makeup is mostly gone. With this it does seem to do better.

I've tried the polish out - it ended up underneath "Fairy" in my mani a couple of weeks ago. It's not bad, but it's sheer. I think I'll end up wearing it but it's maybe not the best choice I could have made since I do have other similar things.

Turn On The Northern Lights!

Here is OPI Turn On The Northern Lights!

Remember me saying I only bought one polish from the fall OPI collection? This is the one. There were other things that I liked in the Iceland collection, don't get me wrong, but this is the only one that felt like it was a "must-have" to me. (I tend to have a very literal brain and whenever anybody says something is a "must-have" I usually scoff, because really I don't think there's any such thing. Nail polish by its very nature is not actually a must-have item, and certainly no individual polish truly is. But anyway, this was the closest thing to being a must-have in this collection.)

I said before that this polish was kind of similar to Teen Spirit and it's certainly in the same ballpark - very dark and shimmery. But this is more blue where Teen Spirit is more purple, and the pigment in it is much different. I compared the shimmer in this to the "unicorn pee" pigment that was in that KBShimmer line recently (which is back in stock!) - it's probably not that same pigment because that's supposed to be really difficult to find and if OPI could get hold of enough to do a full run of (presumably) thousands of bottles, then people have been exaggerating about how rare that pigment is. But really I think the answer is that it's not that same pigment. It's very pretty, whatever it is, in any case.

This is the first OPI I've bought that has the label variant with "OPI" in giant letters. I know they've been using a similar one for the Infinite Shine polishes but this is the first time I've seen one on a main-line polish. I did buy this on eBay - meaning I go "is this real?" at the slightest provocation - but it was a seller with good rep and I have no reason to think it's a fake - the polish itself looks just like it's supposed to, as far as I know!

Aha, here's somebody's pictures where they got both the new and old bottles from this collection, so it's not just me. She complains about it there and I have to say I don't think the new labels are any improvement aside from the name being larger. Maybe that was their reasoning, I dunno - bigger is better, maybe? I've been buying OPI polish off & on for around 15 years and the print on the bottle has never changed substantially in all that time. I don't have any problem with brands updating things from time to time, but this particular change? meh.

Here's the bottom label:

(Sorry for rambling all over the place here. I saw somebody who was talking about writing blog posts say that you should write a post and then cut out 20% of it. I think there's undoubtedly truth in that, and I do cut stuff, but some days I decide you guys are just going to have to read my rambling. I write very short entries a lot, so it's not like I always do this - right?)

Wishbone

Here is KL Polish Wishbone:

I don't buy pale polishes much and I don't buy cremes all this much, so I really didn't have anything like this. It's a pale gray with maybe a slight hint of taupe, I would say. It's very cool-toned, which is pretty hard to find in a nude.

This is from the fall collection, 70s Vibes. I think Kathleen said this is named after a kids' show of the 90s. I only very vaguely remember it, but then Kathleen is much younger than me, so it's not too much of a surprise that our cultural references are not quite the same.

Here's the theme song (if this gives me an earworm I'm gonna be pissed at myself for looking for it):

Teen Spirit

Here is China Glaze Teen Spirit, from last fall's Rebel collection:

I have a couple of other polishes from this collection but for some reason I didn't pay any attention to this one at the time. But it's lovely, in a Turn On The Northern Lights vein (though they aren't dupes) - it's a deep purple with a lot of flaky stuff in there.

The Rebel collection was supposed to be a callback to the grunge era, as I understand it, so a Nirvana reference seems like a must. (I have always loved Smells Like Teen Spirit, myself, although I was nothing like a teenager at the time that came out.) I didn't check to see if this polish is technically still in production or not, but I just bought this recently so it should be findable.

NOTD: Destiny layers

So I was talking about doing some kind of Astros manicure - their colors are orange and navy. (If you think that sounds loud, try their "rainbow" uniforms.*) I toyed with the idea of doing some sort of orange & blue nail art, but I had pulled Zoya Destiny - which is a Pixie Dust - out of a box earlier in the week and I got inspired by that. It's sort of a bright coral - it reads as orange, mostly, but it's got definite pink leanings in there somewhere too, which makes it better for me. So I decided I would do some sort of layering thing with that. Something like Nani on top of Destiny, is what I was thinking, but then when I tried it Nani was too opaque and covered up the Pixie Dust sparkle too well. Luckily I had pulled out a bunch of fall colors this week and so I had OPI Y'all Come Back Ya Hear handy (from the Texas collection, naturally) and it's a "sorbet" so it was perfect for this.

This is Superfood basecoat, two fairly light coats of Destiny - I just wanted it opaque - and then I think just one coat of the OPI and a coat of Gelous - and then I woke up this morning and decided it wasn't shiny enough and added a coat of Seche Vite. This picture is a little washed-out, it's actually nice and bright.

(And the Astros won, so woo! They play again this afternoon and then go to NYC for more.)


* That is Ron Paul in that picture, yes. He was not secretly a pro baseball player, but before he became (relatively) famous, he was a local congressman for years and years. His district was suburban Houston, so he is wearing that uniform for a reason. (The rainbow jersey is still very popular, actually. Watch one of the playoff games in Houston and you'll undoubtedly see some people wearing them. Not many people go whole hog with the stirrups and all, though.) (Added: it looks like the picture that I linked to is gone, so if this doesn't make any sense to you, that's why!)

All Night Long

This is Deborah Lippmann All Night Long:

(Man, I know all Lippmann polishes are named for songs and everything, but that's an earworm I'd rather not have.)

I looked on the website a while back and I didn't see this polish listed, so it may not be available any longer. But it's a really nice fall color.

Hematoma

Wicked Polish finally did a restock and I couldn't resist Hematoma:

The top one of the two swatches is Hematoma by itself, and the second swatch is over Pixi-lated. Hematoma has small and large bright blue glitter and medium and large purple glitter; the base isn't clear, as you can see in the bottle, but it doesn't seem to show up much. Honestly, I never end up wearing stuff like this much, but it's just so interesting! (Added: I think this is one where the collector's itch got to me, really. But hopefully I'll manage to wear it at least a few times.)

NOTD: Prince Cornelious

This is one of the new KL Polishes, Prince Cornelious:

It's a really awesome red-brown. KL Polish describes it as a bronze with a shimmer/glitter finish, but it's better than that makes it sound. It's really beautiful.

This is apparently named both for Prince Cornelius, the fairy prince from the 90s Don Bluth version of Thumbelina, and also for Kathleen's dog Cornelious (spelled slightly differently). I had to look this Thumbelina movie up because I had never seen it.

Kathleen's video (in case you want to hear her tell her naming story, or for additional swatches!)

Added: KL Polish also has a limited-edition BCA polish, Mami Martha. I'm trying to resist because I bought the set above, but I don't think I had mentioned it here so I'm remedying that.

The first run of this sold out but they are rushing another run though and you can still pre-order that, last I looked. (The page is here.)

Alien Nation

This is Cuccio Alien Nation (named, I assume, for the old science-fiction movie and TV show of the same name):

It looks like just a brown/bronze when you first look at it, but it has a green flash to it once in a while. It's interesting. I have tons of browns (and bronzes too) so it's hard to convince myself I really need another one, but I wanted to try out this brand and this one looked kind of cool. (Plus, y'know, a fairly obscure SF fandom reference, those are hard to resist.)

I got mine from HB Beauty Bar, as I mentioned the other day, but I think Cuccio must have been sending out a lot of promotional samples because I've heard this brand mentioned an awful lot all of a sudden. Which I guess was wise of them, because I didn't know it existed before that.

KL Polish 70s Vibes (+ stash, now doubled)

I bragged to my husband because I had only bought one polish out of the OPI fall collection. "I never buy whole collections," I said. Then - I think it was later the very same day - I looked at the KL Polish fall collection and (take a guess!) I bought the whole thing.

I had taken a picture of the six KL polishes in my stash, but now my stash for this brand is doubled. This collection comes in a cute box and everything (although I didn't get a decent picture of the box so far, you can see it here):

Left to right, the colors are Princess Penny, Cozy In There?, Mozart, Prince Cornelious, Wishbone, and Chloe. I'll put Kathleen's video at the bottom; for one thing, she goes through the origin of the names. I do have to mention that Cozy In There? is a Walking Dead reference that I actually understand. I quit watching after, like, season 2 but that's actually a reference from very early on, where Rick is stuck in the tank and Glenn is talking to him. I guess it's practically the first thing Glenn says, right? (I believe this is the 3rd Walking-Dead-themed polish I have - the other two are Dollish, Walker Bait and Look At The Flowers, Lizzie. Which seems excessive for a show I quit watching years ago, but oh well.)

In fact the one Dollish set of minis is the only time I've ever bought an entire collection in one shot, until now. I think there are some Zoya sets of six that I've accumulated all of over the years, but I never make any effort to be completist. That's just not me, generally.

So I wasn't intending to buy this whole set, really I wasn't. But there was the metallic! And... the other metallic! and that dusty blue! and the drab green! The neutral one (Wishbone) and the purple one (Mozart) were the two I might have skipped, but then I realized that Wishbone was actually a sort of a bone-color, a gray, and I don't think I have anything remotely like that, and by the time I got to Mozart, I was like, well, if I'm getting five I might as well get all of them, since there's a price break on the set. And it turns out I like Mozart more than I thought from the pictures, too - it's dustier and a bit darker than it looks in the bottle, I think. I thought it was a dupe for things I already had, but it doesn't seem to be.

There's a whole set of swatches, of course, which I'll post later, and I'll put the wheel picture at the bottom, but let's finish the stash since we've already got half of it here anyway. Here's the older half:

This is in release order. L-R, this is Zoey (the only polish I bought from the original set of six), then Das Esspensive XXV (which was LE), then That's What She Said (from the spring collection) and then three from the summer collection, Ocean Drive, Porter Miami, and Magic City. There's no question of a favorite here, it's Das Esspensive. Prince Cornelious might give it a run for its money, but surpass it? I doubt it.

Kathleen's video:

Fall favorite: Rich In Heart

This is Sinful Colors Rich In Heart:

It's a mixture of dark brown and red. Brown base, red shimmer? I'm not sure. But it's beautiful. It's fairly similar to OPI Germanicure, but darker. They're definitely not true dupes.

(added: ugh, this looks terrible on my work computer - you can't tell what color this is at all. It looked fine on my home one, but I apologize if you can't see the color here!)

I checked Sinful Colors' website and this is not a current color. But it's been around for years so I bet you can find it on Amazon and/or eBay, still. (I didn't check to see, though.)

Empty

I started to call this something like "recent empties" but I'm not sure some of these actually qualify. Sometimes I take the picture, throw the container away, and then don't necessarily get around to posting it for a while. I think that's true of this first one, at least:

I had two of these because it was a BOGO sale or something, and I'm still working my way through the second one. I don't use dry shampoo a whole lot, but when I do, this one is my favorite. Everybody always talks about Batiste but Batiste makes my head itch, for some reason - I guess there's something in it I'm sensitive to. Clean Freak here doesn't have that problem and it works and it's relatively cheap - I guess I'd call it my Holy Grail of dry shampoos for that combination of qualities. (I unearthed a post from almost two years ago where I talk about this same product - not the same can, though! - and complain about it not lasting very long. But I think I was just using way too much; I haven't had that problem lately.)

The next picture are both samples - I don't always talk about every sample I use up, only if I have something to say about them. First there's a John Frieda sea-salt spray, and the thing I have to say about sea-salt spray in general is that I've had samples of quite a few and at least one full-size bottle (which was Verb) and I liked all of them, but as far as I can tell they're all about the same. So the moral of the story, I guess, is don't think you have to buy the expensive brands of sea-salt spray in order to get properly beachy waves. This one was fine, but I think pretty much every hair-care company has one of these now, don't they? John Frieda is probably a good moderately-priced option and seems to be in every grocery store and drug store these days.

I'm not even sure where the John Frieda stuff came from (a Wal-mart box, maybe?) but the Boscia black cleanser came from a Play box, I'm pretty sure about that one. And I liked it enough that I bought a full-size one shortly afterwards. It isn't cheap, but you only have to use a little bit so it lasts a long time. It's really not meant for my now "mature" (dry) skin type and I don't use it daily, so I still haven't used up that 5-ounce bottle in over a year. But I think I would have liked it even more - and used it more often - when I was younger and my skin was much oilier.

Then there's this Clinique, which is also a sample size. I used the "yellow moisturizer" from Clinique (meaning this one, the Dramatically Different Moisturing Lotion) for years and years - I know I've talked about this before. Again, my skin type has changed, and when I had oilier skin, this was totally my Holy Grail moisturizer, because it's lightweight, it doesn't break your skin out, all of those earlier-in-life kind of concerns. And it's not cheap but it's sort of moderately priced. For years, I would time my yellow-lotion purchases with Clinique Bonus Time at one store or another, and the bonus item I really wanted was this item right here, the yellow moisturizer in a tube, so I could carry it around with me.

They've changed the formula recently but I've had a sample of the new one and it seemed fine, too. I've mostly switched to other brands these days but I would still recommend this as a lightweight moisturizer.

And then I think this is also something I've talked about before, the L'Oreal sulfate-free shampoo line:

This is the one I just used up - it is the frizz-defying formula but before that I had the color-care formula. I wasn't coloring my hair for a while there and I didn't need it, but actually I loved the color-care one partly because it smelled so good. I bought a new one lately, and I found an ad for it in my September Vogue so I'm showing it here so you can see. I guess it's rosemary that I think smells so good.

(Regarding that issue of Vogue, 125th-anniversary "commemorative" edition or not, the only way I can read those giant issues like that one is to tear the pages out of them as I go. Which is why these ads lay so nice and flat!)

Nani

Here is Square Hue Nani (in Astros colors, which is why I picked this to show today):

I said before that I was going to try to do some sort of Astros mani, but I did Enchanted Polish Fairy a few days ago and it seemed like too soon to take it off again. Maybe in a couple of days. The Astros won Thursday so they're going at least 4 games, and hopefully more. Anyway, I did wear this once when it first came, even if I can't find a picture to prove it, and it's just red-orange enough to be flattering on me. I liked it a lot, in fact.