I feel like I should get this manicure in while it's still November because on Dec.1st we all go full-on Christmas (as if that hasn't happened already) - this is Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice over Misa When U Say My Name:
This doesn't do justice to Pumpkin Spice, really, but neither did the try I had at it last year so oh well. Maybe it's not just me. Last year I put it over Zoya Cinnamon but this year I used the Misa, which is darker, so that may have helped a bit. P-Spice (the Xtreme Wear version, I mean, of course, not the Sinful Colors one that was out this year or any of the others that I'm sure exist) always looks coppery to me but everybody always says it's actually orange - maybe it's the dark jelly base that confuses me.
Pumpkin Spice is long-discontinued but I know there are bottles still out there floating around because I bought one last year. (As you'd expect, though, you probably have to pay a premium for it. I wish I'd bought about a dozen back when it was $2 and change, but it's a little late now!)
Added: I forgot to say anything about When U Say My Name, which is a pretty dark brown shimmer that I don't think I've worn before. I almost hated to put a topper over it. (Still available on Misa's website, if you're interested.)
This is a dark olive creme, and it's really beautiful, but I sat and admired it for a while, and then I put something on top of it. (Honestly, I do better with Kathleen's cremes than with I do with most cremes - at least with Kathleen's I usually wear them alone for a day or so before I start playing around with the colors. Other brands, I usually go straight for the layering polishes.)
I don't have a picture of what I finally did, but I put Zoya Rikki on it. Rikki is a light-green metallic, but it's sheer enough that I thought the dark olive would show through, and it did. I really like the combination; the dark base gives Rikki a lot more character. And Rikki is also really really shiny, and so I put Matte All The Things on top - this polish is so shiny that even matte top-coat can't hold it down completely, but at least it toned it down a bit.
Diamond Strength is a discontinued line, and for the most part the polishes in this line were very uninteresting so I can't be terribly sad that it's gone. However, they did put out a few LE collections a few years ago that I liked. This one is a plummy glass-fleck, and it's really beautiful. The flecks don't show up well on the swatch in this picture, unfortunately. Maybe I'll try to reswatch it at some point.
I took a few days off from posting over the weekend - I've been posting every day for so long that it felt very weird. I should also mention that I didn't buy a whole lot over the whole Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, and I don't think any of what I bought was nail polish, for a change. The only thing I bought yesterday was a big pile of towels from JCPenney's, because they were cheap and they've always had good towels. (I know that's a boring purchase but somehow I'm very picky about towels and I don't like paying a mint for them.) And Friday I bought a bunch of stuff from Nyx, mostly meant as gifts. It seems like I bought one other thing but I can't remember what the heck it was. And I know I already had one polish on pre-order that hopefully will be here before too long.
I just happened to look at Zoya's website, to see if they had any deals posted (they didn't; if there are any going on they must have gone out in an e-mail). It looked like this, with the box above down in the corner of the front page:
I've been watching the news just now - which is depressing as hell as usual - so I appreciate the unexpected laugh.
This is Zoya Logan, from the Ornate collection (which was a holiday collection several years ago):
Zoya says about it: "a full coverage, yellow-toned forest green with dense, foil-like yellow-gold and blue-green duochrome shimmer! Rich color, a sparkling finish and a subtle duochrome effect make this green very special."
I've sort of been saving this for the holidays, so I guess that means I'll finally get around to wearing it soon!
This is a polish from the British brand Barry M, a limited edition polish just called Silver Glitter:
I assume this isn't findable, or certainly not easily findable, at the very least. I bought it from a blog sale a couple of years ago; it was apparently a gift-with-purchase type of thing from Boots stores one holiday season. (Americans aren't familiar with Barry M, usually, but we're getting to know Boots these days, since Boots and Walgreens now have the same ownership and Boots products are now sold at Walgreens as well as at Target.)
Anyway, nice silver glitter (shown here over WnW Black Creme) - it's clearly meant to be a top-coat but it still goes on reasonably thick. I have a lot of silver and gold glitters, both, and this would be a good thing to do a comparison of, over the holidays. I'll have to start digging glitters out of my collection!
(Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the US - or rather today, by the time you read this - I decided I should wear something very seasonal. Then I had to decide what that meant,exactly, and I came up with an earth-tone other than orange, like brown or copper or both. I ended up wearing Misa When U Say My Name, which is just a shimmery brown - very pretty on its own - with Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice on top of that, and matte top-coat. I'll try to get a decent picture of that!)
It's one of those shifty sheer things that I tend to wear as a top-coat - it looks in the swatch like you might possibly be able to get it close to opaque, at least, but I won't swear to that. I'm not 100% sure I've ever worn this, actually. But it's interesting. It almost looks like it's got a blue-violet undertone, although it's hard to be sure. And it has some bits of sparkle in there, too.
I know I've talked about Zoya Kaufda recently, but apparently it's never gotten a post by itself so I'm rectifying that today.
Zoya described it this way: "Shiny, warm molten copper with rich orange-red undertones and golden frost. A fitting shade to match the changing fall leaves." I say described and not describes because this is a discontinued shade. Which is a shame, because it's a really nice polish that mostly got ignored. Zoya has so many polishes that they just can't all be famous, I guess. I think I picked this out because I wanted something coppery without being too yellow, and this works well with my warm-colors-averse skintone. It really is a perfect autumn shade.
This was around for years, so even though it's discontinued, I imagine it's findable if you decide you want it bad enough. I think it's so old it is just called a "Classic" - which, near as I can tell, means it pre-dates Zoya's 12-a-season release schedule that they have been doing for the last 10 years or so. For that matter, it's Zoya #195, which I think means there's only a handful of polishes still in production that are older than that. The new polishes that are coming out are in the 900s, I just checked.
It just occurred to me that I haven't bought any Zoyas since the Earth Day sale, I'm pretty sure. Nothing has grabbed me. It's not like I don't have a ton of Zoyas already so I don't know why I feel bad that I haven't bought more. (I did have about 80 Zoyas but I gave some away when I went to visit my relatives earlier this month so I'm probably back down to the low 70s.) (Wonder what they're doing for Black Friday?)
Most of these are microglitters in a range of colors. The outlier is the red one, which is called Sangria and which is a slightly orange-leaning red which seems slightly jellyish. (I don't seem to really wear red a lot, even though it looks good on me. So I haven't worn this one much either.) Also note that the other two minis are the same as the colors above them - I'll talk about those more below but I had the mini Glosstini ones first and then I found the full-size bottles on sale later on. I think that the microglitters are discontinued and that's why they were marked down.
I have one other stray old-school CoverGirl, and it's called Gold Rush:
I've been calling these microglitters, but I've also seen them called glass-flecks.
This picture is not in the same order as the one above; L-R, this is Midnight Magic, Seared Bronze, Pyro Pink, and Violet Flicker. Some of the Glosstinis were released as Catching Fire tie-ins but I don't think all of them were. There were a bunch of these at one time, maybe 10 or 12. Actually there are 9 in this post but Midnight Magic is not there, so it must not have been a Catching Fire release. I think some of them existed before that, though.
As far as favorites, I really like all of the glass-fleck ones but I think I'd have to go with Seared Bronze as the winner out of these..
I've always wanted to try ombre manicures, so I figured for that I'd need liquid latex to keep from making a gigantic mess. I saw a video that talked about buying it on Amazon - the link for that is down at the bottom. It seemed like a much better deal than just buying a small bottle of it, since the small half-ounce bottles cost as much as (or more than) the whole big jar, most places I've seen.
I had some trouble trying to decant it into a usable form, though. This is how it came - although I had already opened it and made a big mess with it by the time I took this picture, which is why the label has smears on it. (Basically, my ability to make a mess of things is pretty infinite.)
This is ammonia-free latex. Even in this bright color it does work as advertised - that is, it peels right off once it's dried. (Due to the aforesaid mess, I can attest that it peels off right off of a variety of items including my fingers and the table.) Here's a link to the same brand in pink - if you've ordered from Amazon a lot like I have, you probably already know to check the different colors for differences in prices and the shipping costs. This comes in a large variety of colors, some of which were eligible for Prime and some weren't. Amazon also sells another brand that comes in even larger containers, but I figured I'd probably never even use up a 4 oz. jar, much less 16.
I had a plastic squeeze bottle like you use for haircolor - I bought several of them from Sally's when I did that big order a while back. But I couldn't figure out how to get it into the bottle at first. I didn't have a funnel or anything like that (or a syringe, which is Kelly's solution in the video below), but my improvised solution worked - I took a piece of heavy paper torn out of my September Vogue and made a cone-shape, put it down into the squeeze bottle, and poured through that. It worked fine, although of course some sticks to the paper. That seems like a minor issue, though. Then, since that bottle has a pointed tip (although it's not visible in the picture below) getting it from there into the small bottle was easy-peasy.
The small bottle was an old Chick polish bottle that I cleaned out, so it has the advantage of having the cute chick graphic, but other than that any polish bottle should do. I just left the rest of the latex in the squeeze bottle and discarded the original messy jar.
(I haven't tried the ombre thing yet, but at least I'm one step closer!)
Around this time last year I compared this polish with another coppery metallic, and the best I could come up with to describe it was "indeterminate fall-toned metallic" - it's somewhere in the pale-copper-to-bronze range, but it also has some little flecks of stuff in it which I think may be what was throwing me off. Anyway, unless you can find it on eBay or somewhere, it's not available, since this is the older version of Colorstay. It really is a lovely fall color, though.
(Note that this is on one nail alone, and on one nail over an orange polish, because that's one of the things I tried while I was doing all those Astros-orange manicures last month. It looked good that way.)
(Come to think of it, maybe that's why whoever named it came up with "Fall Mood" - maybe they couldn't decide quite what it was either!)
This is China Glaze Fairy Dust (here over KL Porter Miami):
Fairy Dust is just a plain holo glitter topper. If I'd swatched it alone, you wouldn't really be able to see it. I like it over this nice blue polish, though. (I'm sure you can figure this out, but #8 on the wheel is Porter by itself and #9 is Fairy Dust over Porter.)
As it happens, I have another polish called Fairy Dust which I was wearing the other day. That one is e.l.f. and it's also a topper, but in this case it's a flakie. I wore it over the weekend over Mozart, the dusty purple KL Polish. The flakie looked really nice over it. Unfortunately I didn't get pictures, though.
It's from the Melrose collection, which I think was last year's fall collection, if I'm remembering right. (Or maybe it was summer. The only ones I have from Melrose are this and Vintage, and neither of them exactly look fall-ish.) Anyway, it's basically a very sparkly holo-laden top-coat somewhere in the range between pink and orchid. I'm looking forward to wearing this. Maybe around the holidays, it seems like that would work.
This is another oddly-named polish, China Glaze Where's The Party Canon At?
This is a My Little Pony tie-in, and so there's probably something in the My Little Pony movie or elsewhere in their canon - so to speak - to explain it, but to me it's sort of nonsensical. (The label does say "canon" not "cannon" which would make somewhat more sense - a pun, maybe? I don't know.) I do really like this polish, though, so understanding the name is definitely secondary. It's small glitters in a magenta-ish jelly base. I notice on other people's pictures, it looks brighter than it does here. I've only worn it layered so far, but it does seem to get perfectly opaque so it can be worn alone.
This is part of a collection that was released a few months ago, but it must not be too severely limited an edition - at least, when I googled, it came up as available on various shopping sites. (I got mine from Sally Beauty.)
I don't know, is that a Barney callout, you think? It tends to give me that earworm, unfortunately, whether it's intended or not. But I love this polish. In fact, I showed it six months or so ago when I did my Sinful Colors favorites. The reason I'm reswatching it now is because I gave in and bought a backup bottle on Amazon. You can see the line pretty clearly in the picture above - it's nearly halfway empty. I tend to do a bunch of coats, that's why I've gone through so much. I think the swatch is three coats.
I always try to compare, when I buy polishes from Amazon or eBay, to make sure the colors look like they're supposed to, even though I've never had the slightest reason to think anything I've bought has been fake. These look awfully close to identical. (I should have swatched each bottle separately, that would have been the best test, but I didn't think of it in the middle of the night the other night when I did this.)
(Original bottle from Walgreen's on the left, new one on the right.)
This is Sinful Colors Pumpkin Spice, which as far as I know is a new polish this year:
It's a sort of a mixed fall-colored glitter, with coppers and so forth* - pretty definitely not something that will get opaque. You can see that on the swatch. However, below the one where it's by itself, I tried it over Square Hue Lengha (which is just a shimmery brown) and I liked that quite a lot.
(It's a wonder there haven't been more polishes named Pumpkin Spice, what with the popularity of the Starbucks flavor - or maybe there are and I've just missed them. The only other one I know of is my old favorite Xtreme Wear one - also coppery - which is discontinued.)
Other swatchers describe it as orange and gold, not copper - I always have trouble with sorting out glitter colors, or maybe I'm just too impatient. (Here it is over orange. I think I tried it over the Astros colors somewhere along the line and didn't like it, but her version looks really pretty.)
Zoya's description is a mouthful: "a deep blue-based purple with a micronized metallic pearl finish and an aqua flash that embodies the beauty of exotic island flowers!" It's a pearly blue-violet, however you look at it. I can't say I've noticed the aqua flash - I'll have to look for it when I wear it again! (Anyway, this is definitely a current color, and it's quite beautiful.)
This is OPI Peru-B-Ruby. If you look it up, as I did, you will find that this is not the color it's supposed to be. Apparently mine has darkened. A lot.
Normally, it's a dupe for Chanel Tentation - it's pink, or at least fuchsia - it's one of those colors that often reads as being right on the line between red and pink. (If you scroll on down at that link, there's a comparison swatch.) But somewhere along the line, this bottle turned seriously darker. It's actually really pretty the way it is, but it's absolutely not what Peru-B-Ruby is supposed to look like.
Usually when I label something "what color is this?" it's because I can't decide, or it's in between - but this one is just weird. (I don't have kids, or a husband who is prone to practical jokes, or I'd think somebody switched the labels around on me!)
Added: Here it is a year and a half ago - I think it's darkened there but it's not as dark as it is now.
This is Pretty Serious Frogtown - named, I believe, after an old movie called "Hell Comes to Frogtown" :
It looks kind of teal in the bottle but mostly on the nail it just reads kind of green, as I recall. (As a polish with a "frog" name should, I suppose!)
This is KL Polish Mozart, which is another polish from her fall 70s Vibe collection:
(I rewatched part of Kathleen's video about this collection and I'll put it at the bottom again - "Mozart" is a nickname her dad has for her, is the short version of the naming story.) This is a really nice dark dusty purple. Note that the swatch is quite a bit darker than the bottle color.
I'm sitting here with freshly base-coated nails and I'm seriously thinking this may go on my nails next. So I'll report back on that.
Kathleen also just put up a pre-order for her next collection, which comes in a limited edition box set * with a free Colourpop lip color. (It's the same price that I paid for the box set you can see below, so the lip color is truly a freebie seen in that light.) I don't feel any urge to run out and buy this whole box, thank goodness - although I'm sure I will end up with one or two! Note that the polishes themselves are not limited edition, just the set. All of Kathleen's polishes are permanent, as I understand it, except the couple that were specifically marketed as limited edition (which is Das Esspensive and Mami Martha). (Also, I just noticed as I was about to hit the "publish" button that the box set now says "sold out." I don't know if that's it for the set or if there will be more!)
*Added: I originally had the wrong link in the paragraph above, so if you tried to click through and couldn't, sorry, and it's fixed now. Also I notice that the individual polishes are on her website as well, not just the box set.
Here's Jess' take on the fall collection, because I happened to find it just now:
This is another of those discontinued lines from Sally Hansen (there are a lot of those), Diamond Strength Royal Invite:
This polish was an LE, I believe, and that was several years ago so I don't know whether this one is easily findable. But it's quite beautiful. Sally Hansen got on a kick for a while there of doing these limited editions, and they came up with some great stuff. They need to do that a lot more. Anyway, as you can see, this is sort of a blue-violet with a ton of shimmer. I haven't poked around to check but I think I put this in my top Sally Hansens list.
This is Sinful Colors Kissy, a really nice teal-ish shimmer:
I put this in my top 5 Sinful Colors polishes, I like it so much. I do have other things that are similar but nothing that's an exact dupe, to my knowledge.
(Added: not a current color, I checked. However, I see several bottles on eBay for reasonable prices right now.)
Here is KBShimmer So Jelly, one of the Unicorn Pee polishes:
Unicorn Pee is the official-unofficial name of the pigment providing the shimmer in these polishes. (Surely if you order it from a wholesaler or whatever, that's not what they call it, though.) It's called that among nail polish fans because it's supposed to be very rare - and it is officially the name of KBS's collection. So Jelly, as you might guess from the name, has a jelly base in dark red and then that pigment, which is really beautiful. In the jelly base, it just glows.
This is OPI Show Us Your Tips! from the New Orleans collection. (A terrible pun that still manages to make me laugh.)
It's a lovely periwinkle-ish blue-violet that leans to the violet side - is that the best description for it? I feel like there's got to be something better that doesn't involve the word "blurple" (which I guess it is, technically, except that's usually used for darker colors). Nice and shimmery, really beautiful and I don't think I have anything like this. I'm trying to figure out if there's some reason I swatched this twice, but I haven't found this wheel to see if I wrote anything on it. If I figure it out I'll come back and say so!
I didn't buy anything from the New Orleans collection at the time it came out - this was the only one that interested me at all and I never even got around to it til now. But I'm glad I did.
This is Square Hue Tumbao, from the Salsa collection.
I guess you would call this a light dusty-rose, wouldn't you say? The swatches at the bottom of the wheel above are the same as the ones below - that is, the darker pink polish is KL Zoey. They seem awfully similar in color, really, except Tumbao is lighter and Zoey is darker.
(I think these are the last polishes I'm getting from the Dance Collection. I'm taking a couple of months off, and I'll see what they come up with for next year!)
The Astros' parade is today, as I think I mentioned yesterday, and I can't go but I'm still wearing my orange mani and I'll be wearing my "Houston Strong" Astros shirt as well. (I don't actually live in Houston proper - and in fact I've never lived inside the Houston city limits, ever - but I've lived somewhere in the general vicinity of Houston for the vast majority of my life so for purposes like this I consider myself a Houstonian.)
Here's what's probably the last orange manicure of 2017 - after this I'm sure I'll go on to other fallish colors. This is Jade V.I.P. over Square Hue Nani:
Nani is just a red-orange creme; and then the Jade "Special Glitz" polishes (which I have in several colors) are microglitters with a lot of sparkly stuff. They're not super-super sparkly, which is kind of nice, really. Sparkly enough to look nice, without being all "Hey, look at me!" - if you know what I mean.
This is Square Hue Akamai, which is from the Scuba Hawaii collection in 2016:
They call it a foil but I don't feel like it quite gets to full foil-ness here. Close, but no cigar. It's a lovely color, in any case. Would you call this teal? It looks like it in the bottle but maybe not quite dark enough for that on the nail. It's pretty sheer.
Meanwhile, guess what, I am still wearing orange. I wore two coats of Nani today - which incidentally is from the same collection as the polish above - and then since the Astros actually went and WON the thing, now I feel like I have to keep wearing it for a day or two more. (The parade evidently will be Friday, although I have to work so of course I won't be going.) So I put Jade VIP on top again, which looks really pretty.
Added: I looked it up - akamai means "clever" in Hawaiian. I guess that fits with why it's also the name of a tech company.
Colourpop - a limited selection, anyway - is now available at Sephora. There are several limited edition sets and a very small selection of single eyeshadows. I've already seen some discussion of this - the sets are more expensive than the sets on Colourpop's website; however, they have more colors and apparently the pans on the eyeshadow sets are larger, so if you do all the math it supposedly comes out as a somewhat better bargain. I had heard before that Sephora did not intend to raise Colourpop's prices.
(No nail polish, though. I didn't expect it but I'm still wondering if they have some plan for these nail polish formulas, since they are quite good.)
Here is Colourpop Be Fairy Afraid:
These are still on Colourpop's website (on the sale page) for $3. Be Fairy Afraid is #3 on the wheel, the pink. From a distance the purple and the pink look pretty similar, but I think the pink is a little paler than the purple one. They really do have an extraordinary formula.
(As you may already know if you follow baseball at all, the World Series is going to game 7 tonight. My nails are a mess and I may just start over with one last orange mani.)
