Spinning Out Of Control

This is Misa Spinning Out Of Control:

I went from watching Infinity War videos on YouTube to watching those Show Your Pantones videos from earlier this year (as one does) so now I am looking at all those purples I swatched a while back. This is maybe a little deeper than what most people interpret "Ultraviolet" to look like, but it's basically in the ballpark. (Blue-violet, just darker than the swatches below.) And it's lovely.

(I have all my birthday stuff that's swatched but which I have yet to take pictures of, so if I keep procrastinating about that maybe I'll just declare this Purple Week.)

I went to find some of the videos I was talking about and ended up watching Janelle Monae videos instead (I'm just having that kind of day), but here you go:

(Switching colors for Ms Monae)

Bleu Cobalt

This is YSL Bleu Cobalt, although obviously it's missing its trademark cap:

If I didn't know where this came from I would worry about the missing cap, and wonder if it was really Saint Laurent, but I do know its provenance, generally - I got it in a box from my sister, who was working in a department store at the time. I assume it's real and the cap just got lost somewhere along the line. I would say it might have been a tester, but if it was it never got used at all. (My guess is that my sister got it for free or nearly so, although I never asked. She sent me boxes of random-ish stuff like this at the holidays a couple of times, things that presumably had been marked way down for one reason or another. As I understand it, that was just a perk of working there.) Anyway, lovely shimmery deep blue. The polish below it is Essie Starry Starry Night - reformulated version - and the base color there looks pretty much identical. In the bottles they look pretty identical as well, although on the nail of course SSN has that glass-fleck sort of texture, or whatever it is in the new version. (In the original it was supposed to have been actual diamond dust, right?)

Amethyst (+ Orly Color Pass)

New-to-me polish news: Orly is now offering a subscription - they call it a "Color Pass" - which gives you the next four collections for $119, which ends up being well over 50% off. As I've said lately, I rarely ever buy whole collections, so I can't really see doing that, but I would think people who buy whole collections anyway would jump at it.


Here is (old-formula) Colorstay Amethyst:

This was on my list when I talked the other day about backup bottles. This and Rainforest (dark shimmery green) were my two favorite polishes out of this line, so I bought backups for both of them. It's a lovely shimmery purple (this blogger calls it "Barney purple").

NOTD: You Dew You over So Jelly

This is KBShimmer You Dew You over So Jelly, which are both from the "Unicorn Pee" collection (which was limited edition and was gone the last I looked):

I've had this on for a couple of days and I washed my hair yesterday, which is doom for most manicures, so this did pretty good, only the one chip! I've worn So Jelly before, but this time I put You Dew You over it, which is just the same pigment in a clear base. It looks really beautiful.

SquareHue 1970s

So here is the SquareHue 1970s collection, which is from 2015, I think? (I always forget these things) and it was marked down so I had a weak moment & bought it.

(I also bought the 1980s collection, but we'll get to that later. We're only talking about the '70s today.)

L-R, this is Watergate, Night Fever, and iPolish. iPolish doesn't sound at all like a 70s name to me -  but it's a white and a decent white polish is something I actually did not own. So I'm glad to have it to use as a base, at least.

(Looking at them in the bottles, this set looks kind of like it might be a holiday set, but actually it had to have come out in the summer, because they started with 1900s and did one box a decade up to the present. That would make it the August box.)


I get that Night Fever is supposed to be like a disco ball, but it's so holo-ish I'm having trouble as thinking of it as a 70s thing - similar to the problem I have with the name iPolish, really. I lived through the 70s and that just doesn't seem quite right to me. But that's nitpicking.

I did two swatches of Night Fever, and here they are piled on top of one another:

It's a mix of silver and holographic bits in several sizes. The wheel further to the left is Night Fever alone and the wheel on the right has it over Black Creme. (Added: I was looking at the wheel with the blacks after I wrote this last night and it looks like the holo in it might be linear - it caught the light really oddly and interestingly. Maybe they thought that looked extra disco-ish.)

Watergate looks much more blue in the bottle than it does on the wheel.

I think when I wear this I may try putting something under it, it's really sheer. But really pretty, too. The color reminds me a bit of Nail Junkie (and I love Nail Junkie, that's a compliment.)

And then as I said way above, iPolish is just white:

Added: It occurred to me eventually that I do in fact have one white polish - I have a mini of OPI Alpine Snow. I always forget about that. And I have a Sinful Colors white nail art polish also - not that I actually ever do nail art!

Fairy Dust + other fairy-related polish names

This is Khroma Fairy Dust:

This version of Khroma doesn't exist any more; it was the Kardashian sisters' original attempt at a beauty brand, but there was already a brand named Khroma and they successfully got the K-girls blocked from using it. I like this one, though - it's a nice mixed-gold glitter that's not quite like anything else I have. For one thing, it's champagne-leaning gold rather than brassy-gold, and then also, as you can see, it gets something close to opaque. I'm pretty sure this was only one coat, so I think if you worked at it, it should be easy to get opaque. I'm honestly not sure whether I've ever worn this so I need to at least try it out as an accent nail.

I am about to start swatching golds so I'll probably end up doing a new comparison wheel, but I have quite a lot of gold polishes and the last time I tried this I decided that they were every one somewhat different. (It may be a while before you see the rest of them because I've already got a ton of other pictures I haven't put up yet. If I come up with anything I think is especially interesting I'm sure I'll put it up sooner rather than later, though.)

Added: I was poking around my archives looking for something else entirely, and I found that I have worn the polish above before, as a layering polish. Here. Also here's an old post where I also talked about it.


Meanwhile I started thinking about names; specifically that I have no less than three polishes named Fairy Dust and several more with "fairy" in their names. Besides this one, I have the China Glaze Fairy Dust (a holo topper) and an e.l.f. one which is a bog-standard flakie in a clear base. (The e.l.f. one does not actually have a name on it at all, but it was printed on the register tape when I bought it at CVS and I've confirmed that online as well.)

Fairy-named polishes I own, including the above:

• Fairy (Enchanted Polish)
• Fairy Dust (China Glaze, e.l.f., Khroma)
• Fairy Lights (Pretty Serious)
• Fairy Snot (Chick Polish)
• Sugar Plum Fairy (Julie G)
• Sugar Plum Fairies Gone Wild (Sephora by OPI)
• Be Fairy Afraid (Colourpop)

Actually the whole Colourpop nail polish oeuvre is fairy-related, I believe - besides Be Fairy Afraid, there's Pixi-lated, I Wand It That Way, Dust A Dream, First Wings First, and the only one I don't have, the holo, is called One Wish Two Wish.

An old Topic Tuesday: total polishes

I saw this in somebody's YouTube videos, and I somehow missed it before (I think it was maybe back in February), and that was how many polishes do you own, total? I can answer this pretty easily because I have a spreadsheet for all my polishes that I maintain pretty obsessively. And let's see, the answer at the moment is 619 regular-size bottles and 95 minis, so that's a grand total of:

714

I knew I was hovering around 700, so that's not any more than I expected. Note that I saw this topic on the title of a video, but I did not watch anybody else's videos yet so I don't have a handle on what numbers the YouTube people were coming up with. I suspect that they mostly are higher than that unless they've done a lot of destashing. (But destashing was a huge trend on YT nail channels last year so it may be smaller for some people than I'm guessing.) However, I think I can say pretty confidently that my 714 is a number larger than a lot of people's, in general, and way smaller than others.

When I started keeping the spreadsheet - maybe four or five years ago - I was at a couple of hundred, so my collection has grown a lot - and I got there mostly without buying entire collections. Normally I pick and choose - Dollish Ultimate Fandom is the only thing where I ever ordered a full set, and that was minis. (I have a full set of China Glaze polishes from one holiday season, but I got that in a blog giveaway.) It's like being a picky eater - I'm also a picky orderer. It's really rare for me to buy more than a couple of polishes at a time out of a collection.

Note that the reason I said 714 was the answer "at the moment" is that my birthday is coming up, and there's stuff here (in this very room where I'm sitting) that's meant to be part of my birthday present and so I know it's here but I haven't opened it yet - and thus it's not on the spreadsheet yet, either. My husband will get me some kind of a surprise present, he always does, but for the most part I pick out and order myself whatever I'm most wanting when my birthday is coming up. In practice, this works out, because while it means most of my gift is not a surprise, it also means get what I want and I release myself from feeling terribly guilty about however much money I spent. I haven't looked, so I'm not sure how many polishes are over there - I think maybe 9 or 10 polishes and some other stuff that is not polish. I know there's a Clinique gift in there plus whatever Clinique purchase I made to get the gift, and there's a Boxycharm box, and Zoyas from the Earth Day promo, and a second round of Starrilys. (I'm also due to get a Pretty Serious preorder that was delayed, and I got a notice that that will finally be along in the next week or so - whether that will be in time for my birthday or not doesn't really matter. I've forgotten what's in there exactly but I believe it's another four or five polishes at least.)


(For the record, this week's actual topic is your most expensive polish. I'm pretty sure mine is a Lynnderella that I paid a little over $20 for.)


I don't have a display rack or a storage system that's very photogenic, so I'm not going to attempt to post pictures of the whole thing. However, here are some pieces of my stash.

Part of my Zoyas:

These are actually pretty recent - all of my purples sorted into a box:

and greens:

Break Through

This is Essence Colour & Go Break Through:

I'm sure I have some other things that are close dupes to this red-violet creme, but nothing on this section of this wheel is close, at least, and this stands out and looks really beautiful here, to my mind. I haven't seen these around in a while - I think I bought this at Ulta, but HEB also carried them for a while. I believe they were $1.99, although these are fairly small bottles (8 ml?) so they're not as cheap as you tend to think.

Blue-Ya!

I have two swatch pictures of China Glaze Blue-Ya! and I'm posting both of them because the color looks a little different on each:

I have the one above marked as one coat so I guess that's the difference. Below it's two.

Also note on the one that says "BC" (for WnW Black Creme) with a line over to Blue-Ya, that is Blue-Ya on top of Black Creme. (So in case you're having trouble reading on a cell phone or something, it's Blue-Ya over Black Creme at the top, and Blue-ya - two coats - alone underneath that.) It's... interesting over black but I don't think I would wear it that way. Anyway, Blue-ya is that very shimmery formula that I like so much and so it's right up my alley.

(Actually, if you look back at my manicures, I rarely wear anything over black. I swatch a lot of things that way to see what they look like but I think black is very messy to take off and I don't really ever wear it IRL. I pull out the really dark blues or a charcoal if I want that effect, usually. Those tend to be easier to deal with.)

NOTD: Dust A Dream

I washed my hair with a little too much vigor (I forget that my hair is not oily like it's been all my life, and I tend to scrub more than actually I need to these days) and the Pie Hole mani didn't really survive that real well - it had already been on for several days, anyway. But I guess I still had green on the brain.

This is two coats of Colourpop Dust A Dream:

You can see that it's a nice pale minty green. Up close there are some tiny dark spots where the polish didn't quite go on perfectly but they're not noticeable even in this picture. (What is noticeable are my ridgy nails, but I put the iridescent top-coat from this same collection, I Wand It That Way, on top of this and the ridges don't show up as much now.)

NOTD: The Pie Hole

I showed a mani with this same polish some time ago, but that time there was something under it and this time there's not:

This is Fanchromatic Nails The Pie Hole. This is not especially surprising, but if you look at the entry I linked above, this polish is considerably more neutral-looking by itself than it was over Bitter Buddhist. Actually, let's put that right here where we can compare:

Hmm. Wow. Actually I think what I'm seeing is considerably more extreme than what I saw in real life. These are both daylight pictures, but the top one is in direct sunlight and I'm guessing it washed it out some. I still have this on and it doesn't look nearly as pale as the top picture. And honestly I'm not sure that the greener version below was quite that green, either. I like this polish both ways, but I think I did like it better with Bitter Buddhist underneath. (Just don't expect anything quite this bright.)

(Try saying "a bit better with Bitter Buddhist" five times fast.)

Topic Tuesday on Wednesday - Backups

I keep forgetting to check and see what the #topictues question is, but this week I did remember, and the question for this week is about backup bottles. I don't buy backup bottles a whole lot, but sometimes when something I really like is being discontinued and it's marked down, I'll get one. And a few times I've gotten already-discontinued things on eBay or Amazon, if I find them at a reasonable price.

I don't have really good records of what I have backups of, partly because sometimes I decide to give them away and then I forget that I did that. But here's the ones I'm sure I have two of, by brand.

China Glaze - Travel In Colour
Pretty Serious - Daphne's Disco Party, Elliott, Party By The Pool
Revlon Colorstay (the discontinued version) - Amethyst, Rainforest
Sinful Colors - I Love You, Nail Junkie
Spoiled - Cougar Attack
Zoya - Leia

I may have given the backups of these away:
Colourpop - Be Fairy Afraid, I Wand It That Way, Pixilated
Orly - Pearl Wisdom

I'm on my second (or third, in some cases) bottle of a few of the polishes above (Cougar Attack, Nail Junkie, Travel In Colour, & also Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice) and also these treatment products:

• Colorstay Top Coat (also the discontinued version)
• Gelous
• Instant Artificials
• NailKale Superfood Basecoat
• Seche Vite

(I switch around brands on top-coat and base-coat a lot, or that last section would probably be longer.)


Here's Nail Junkie:

Ikaika

I mentioned the SquareHue Scuba Hawaii collection, and this is one of those polishes, Ikaika:

(I kept forgetting how to spell this until I started thinking of it as two repeating words, ika-ika - although I don't think that's how it's pronounced.) This is just a purple creme, but it's somehow an exceptionally lovely one.

Here's somebody else's pictures, for comparison. And here's the box (which I also showed yesterday, but nobody's paying me to show this, just for the record. I just still had SH on my mind, I guess. Actually I've been wondering if SquareHue is about to go out of business, since they discontinued the subscription model. They said that they were just going to sell from their website, but nothing new has appeared and it's been several months, that's what makes me wonder.) Note that it's now on sale
(added) as I guessed, SquareHue has now announced that they are shutting down.

Real quick, because I am a procrastinator par excellence and I need to go work on my taxes - I had what I thought was a really promising theory about these polish names, but I think I must have been wrong. When I talked about Akamai I noted that it's a word meaning "clever" in Hawaiian, and it turns out that Ikaika means "strong" - so I was just sure that the third polish must be some other adjective that can be used to refer to a person, like, I dunno, "small" or "fast" or something. But no, in a quick search I didn't find anything like that. (It's Nani, which just sounds like a nonsense word, really. But I love that polish!)

NOTD: Sierra Sunset

This is SquareHue Sierra Sunset:

This is kind of a cranky polish - you can see the bare spots, and this is three coats, I think. I went ahead and did a fourth one and it looked better, but that's an awful lot of coats. The next time I try this I'll probably just put something underneath it. It's mostly not as red as it looks here - I thought it looked more like a burnt orange in most lights. It'll be a really good fall polish if I can figure out how to get it to apply a little better.

I have this because I happened to be poking around on SquareHue (for reasons I've now forgotten) and I found that they had marked some of the older sets down to $12 for sets of three, and I ordered two of them. I got the 1970s and 1980s sets, from the year they were doing decades - 2015, I think? (I'll get pictures of all of that up soon, hopefully.) (Added: links to some of the sale sets, down at the bottom)

And then after a day or so I got tired of looking at the unevenness and slapped Zoya Leia on top of it - I had Leia on the brain from talking about it one day last week, I guess. (Not to mention that I was watching Rogue One on Netflix the other day.) So of course Leia turns everything some degree of pink - very pink, in this case:

It was still pretty messy but Leia is so showy I doubt anybody but me noticed the imperfections in real life.

(updated: all of SH's website is now down except the front page)
SH sale sets still available as of 4/16/18:
1970s
1980s
also Scuba Hawaii (probably my favorite SH set ever)
also Hike Banff (which contains Lake Louise, another favorite, as well as a beautiful dark green and a neutral light tan)

Hot Stuff

This is Orly Hot Stuff (a mini, in this case):

I really like this color - it's a deep fuchsia, which is something that's surprisingly unusual. (This is a discontinued color, but I think there are some things that are close - Zoya Dita comes to mind.)

Enchanted?/Don't Mesh With Me

First of all, Enchanted Polish has a new line, Enchanted Studio, which they said was in response to requests for more budget-friendly polishes. So what's on the website right now is a line of six holos, which are $8 but which are also 40% smaller than an average nail polish bottle (that is, they're 0.3 oz instead of 0.5) That's not quite what I would term as a mini, but close. Most people don't use up half-an-ounce bottles, so I'm not saying that's a terrible thing. It's just something to be aware of. The colors are very pretty, but nothing unique. (I just checked and the going price for regular Enchanted Polishes seems to be $16. So you get a little more than half the volume for half the price. Not unreasonable when you look at it that way!)

(Background: I own exactly one Enchanted Polish, and I like the one I have, but I've never been willing to play their signature game of getting people to wait breathlessly for restocks, which is why I only have the one. I'm probably less inclined to cut them slack because that has always annoyed me. Plus bottle size & relative prices have always been something I'm slightly obsessive about. They managed to hit several of my triggers in one fell swoop, really.)


So going on to other topics - here is China Glaze Don't Mesh With Me, yet another polish from the Rebel Collection

I keep buying polishes from this collection and I kind of feel like I ought to have them all by now, but it's a big collection and I actually only have about half of them - exactly half, six of twelve, if I'm counting right. Anyway, I think I showed a mani with this, but this is basically a top-coat, sort of in the vein of Zoya Leia and CG's own Travel In Colour a few years back, both of which I adored. It's sort of a shifty color-changing thing, but more purple than those other two. Here on this wheel I tried it by itself - it took three coats but it doesn't look bad - and then above that I tried it over WnW Black Creme (that's the one that says "BC"). I like this a lot and really I think it's one of those top-coats that you can slap on over practically anything and get nice results. (Seriously, go look at Zoya's website right now, they're selling Leia as a go-with-anything topcoat over both the Bridal Collection and the spring jelly trio. In fact I think I'm getting a back-up bottle of Leia for free because I bought the whole jelly trio - is it called Kisses? I keep forgetting - in the Earth Day promo.)

Dirty Baby

Here's the last of my new S&C polishes, Dirty Baby:

Metallic bits in a sort of a grunged-out black-gray base? Can't really go wrong with that. (Note that I haven't worn it yet, though, so I'll report back when I do.)

Deep Space & Galaxy Gang

This is Starrily Deep Space:

This is a multicolor flakie (mostly cool colors) in a black jelly base with a little bit of holo glitter. How much this polish shows up seems to depend a lot on the light. I put it over Galaxy Gang and a lot of time it just seemed to read as a somewhat-murky dark purple with hints of glimmer. But then when the light hits it right it really blazes up. I'm going to have to experiment some more. On the wheel above this is two coats on the swatch above Galaxy Gang, and one coat over Plummet (a very dark blurple) in the swatch at the bottom.

This is Galaxy Gang:

I'm more in love with this one. It's in the same ballpark as those OPIs with the shifty shimmers (Turn On The Northern Lights and Feel The Chemis-tree) that I have been so crazy about lately. But it's not the same as either one.

Vanity Flare

This is Triple Shine Vanity Flare:

I liked Triple Shine and I was a bit disappointed that Sally Hansen didn't give it a longer try. That said, this is just your middle-of-the-road medium red-violet creme. I'm sure I have several things that are fairly similar - including, apparently, AbsoluteNY Purple Neon, below Vanity Flare on the wheel, except I'm not sure that's the color Purple Neon was when I first got it. That's a question for another day, though. Aha, look, here's photographic evidence, even if the photo is from my old iPhone 4 and is totally crappy. And actually it appears to be Vanity Flare that's not the same color as it used to be - it's considerably lighter.

Stockholm Syndrome

This is Smith & Cult Stockholm Syndrome:   

I've got several things similar to this but these grayish-purple colors always fascinate me. If this has as good a formula as the other S&C I tried (that would be Bitter Buddhist) then I will be really happy to have this.

Added: my intention is to find the other things I have that I think are similar to this and compare. But I'm not sure when that will happen!

Starrily x Kelli Marissa

Here are two of the three polishes that Starrily released with YouTuber Kelli Marissa:

Galaxy Gang is on the left, a purple with scattered holo and some shift; and then Deep Space, on the right, is multicolor flakies in a black base.

I'll link Kelli's video below; she says the idea is to be able to do a galaxy manicure with the three polishes. The third one is a holo topper, and since these were $15 each I felt like that was the one I could best do without. Getting two of them was a stretch, much less all three. (Starrily does have a low threshold for free shipping - it's $25, so two of these are enough to get shipped for free.)



I'm wearing Galaxy Gang now, but the picture I have totally doesn't do it justice. I'll put it down at the bottom anyway.

These are my first Starrily polishes; they came extremely well-packaged, in little individual boxes inside bubble wrap inside a small mailing box. Here are the small boxes:

Very cute!

Bad picture of Galaxy Gang:

Butterflies & Rosebuds

This is Julie G Butterflies & Rosebuds:

I think this is the only Julie G polish I own which is not a texture. We don't have Rite-Aid stores around here, and I don't know of anyplace else (brick-&-mortar) that sells Jessie's Girl/Julie G. (You can buy it from their website, but I've never gotten around to buying more. This color is a core color so it's still current, though.) This is a great color - I notice on the website there they just call it "fuchsia shimmer" but it's much more complex than that makes it sound. I have a ton of fuchsia shimmers but this one stands out because it looks blackened. It's similar but not a dupe to The Last Petal, which I saw in some people's top polishes of 2017. (I was surprised when I looked at the pictures of both of them - I would have said 'til I looked that The Last Petal was darker.)

Feel The Chemis-tree

I thought I had posted this one a long time ago, but I can't find it so here is OPI Feel The Chemis-tree (from the holiday 2017 Love OPI XOXO collection):

It seems to have the same pigment that Turn On The Northern Lights (from the Iceland collection) does, but in a different-color base. TOtNL is blue-violet, and this one is plummy red-violet.

(For the record, I did post a manicure with this but apparently never posted this picture.)

NOTD: Rainbow Wishes

Well, after the pink Hot Couture mani crashed and burned, I had one more work day to go last week, and I wanted to do something that at least hinted at being pastel. Given that I'm not big on pastels, in general, the couple of weeks before Easter are usually the only time that I wear pastels very much. And what I came up with wasn't really pastel, but it was sort of in the ballpark.

I showed a swatch of this a couple of months ago - it's NailsInc Rainbow Wishes, which was in the Sparkle Like A Unicorn set. Here's the swatches for comparison:

By itself it looks pink, but over black it looked blue-to-purple shifty like it does in the bottle. I didn't really want to use black so I put it over a navy-blue instead, Orchid Playmaker. And I really like how it turned out. It's maybe more blue than purple, but the purple highlights are still there. Very nice.

Added: after I took this manicure off, I decided to try Rainbow Wishes alone, since it looks quite nice in the swatch above. But I didn't like it too much. The shift does still show up, but two coats are still very sheer and too much nail line shows for my taste. Sometimes that doesn't bother me but this one did. I really like it with the undercoat so why waste it wearing it alone?

Layered NOTD part 2: Hot Couture

I showed this one yesterday but I was falling asleep when I wrote that and kind of stopped in the middle. So continuing on from where I left off, this is two coats of Look At My Bow! and two coats of Color Club Hot Couture:

and I put matte top-coat on it. I'm not sure whether to blame this on having tried to finish while I was sleepy, or on too many layers. So here's the layers:

1. Cuccio base-coat
2. Look At My Bow!
3. Look At My Bow!
4. Hot Couture
5. Hot Couture
6. Matte All The Things

Hot Couture is a pale-pink top-coat with a lot of sparkle, and it's pretty thick. So I'm inclined to think it was putting the second coat of that on which caused the trouble. You can see here that the top nail, in the picture, is messed up, and it's not really wear. After I took this - or maybe it had already started on the other hand before this, this polish just started peeling off in big chunks. By the time I got home from work it had peeled completely off three nails on my left hand. The right hand (pictured) didn't ever get any worse than this. It was almost like I used peel-off base-coat, only I didn't. Anyway, it was really pretty while it lasted and I'll have to remember to give this combination another try this time next year!

(Hey, it's baseball season!!)