And my favorite polish of 2018 is...

Here's the top three, to remind you (with descriptions that come directly from their respective websites:

• KL Polish Cassiopeia ("This divine dark gray polish features silvery multi-dimensional glitter for an eye-catching shade that's out of this world.")
• Starrily Galaxy Gang ("Purple, blue leaning base with intense copper shimmer and holographic sparkle")
• Lucky 13 Always Be A Dragon ("Emerald green linear holo with rose/copper/gold color-shifting shimmer.")

It occurs to me that (1) all three of these polishes are things I wore in the first half of the year, although (2) Cassiopeia wasn't even in the first half top 10, I don't know why. It didn't speak to me in late June, apparently, but when I went back and looked at the pictures, it did. I've never made a rule that said I couldn't change my mind, anyway! And it's not that the things I wore in the second half aren't beautiful. I had two of the Grinch polishes in the running, I know, and Cigars On Ice coulda been a contender, too. (And Aggie was great, and I almost forgot to even put it in the top 20 because I left it off the initial list!)

But anyway, the three above were the ones I picked from, in the end. (I was going to show new swatches for these here, but I decided to wait and do that next week.) So let's get on with this.

The winner is... (**drumroll**)

Always Be A Dragon

This is part of a collection called "Always Be Yourself." It goes with that saying you see around on social media: "Always be yourself. Unless you can be a dragon, then be a dragon." I think I saw this first with "unicorn" instead of "dragon" - but there are many versions. Besides the dragon one, there are polishes for Always Be A Unicorn, Always Be A Princess, Always Be Batman, and also Fairy, Mermaid, Phoenix, and Angel, plus Always Be Yourself.

I looked to see if there were videos showing this collection and I didn't find any; however, I did find a blog post with swatches (in which this one is all the way at the bottom). I'm pretty sure there are videos by the makers of both the runners-up that talk about their polishes, so I'll add them below.

I've been doing this enough years that I'm starting to forget what all my past favorites were, so here those are, for the record:

2014: Lynnderella Orchid of the Year

2015: RBL Pretty Gritty

2016: Pretty Serious Poltergeist Puddle

2017: ILNP High Tide

2018: Lucky 13 Always Be A Dragon

(Chronologically speaking: purple, purple, purple, blue-green, green. For what that's worth.)

It's interesting that I've never picked a truly mainstream polish - it's not like I have anything against them, I wear Zoya and China Glaze, especially, all the time. I've had lots of them on my shortlist - I almost put Feel the Chemis-tree on this top 3 and then didn't. Another OPI (with a really similar formula), Turn On the Northern Lights, was in the top 3 last year. It's just now that I'm getting a large enough sample size that I see the pattern there.

In fact if there's a pattern in those 5 picks it may be that I like the middle ground between mainstream and indie. RBL, Pretty Serious, and ILNP are (or were) all lab-made polishes, right? Lynnderella is hand-made as far as I know, but it's an indie that's been around a long time. ("Lynnderella drama," anybody?) Lucky 13 isn't as old as Lynnderella, to my knowledge, but I bought my first polishes from them back in 2015, so they've been around a while, too. Which is not a knock on newer indies - actually I suspect that what I'm seeing is a bunch of brands that are really good at playing around with colors and formulas, which is what I really like.


(I also want to point out that there's several 2018 favorites collabs now out there on YouTube, and I have not watched any of those or anybody else's favorites, I have no idea what anybody else is saying about 2018 besides what they've said prior to the last few weeks. I've been writing and revising this off and on for a couple of days, and it's set to post in the morning now, and I am saving it and not coming back to it once I've seen other people's picks. I'm not allowed to change this after that except maybe to fix a typo or something, and if I have comments about what other people say, I'll come back and say it in a different post!)

Here's the videos I mentioned above. Galaxy Gang was a Kelli Marissa collab with Starrily, and here's Kelli:

And here's Kathleen talking about her KL Polish Winter Glamourland collection:

(Cassiopeia is the last polish she talks about - I tried to set this where it will go right to it but I'm not sure if it will work. If it doesn't work and you want to skip to it manually, it's just after the 11-minute mark.)