woo! Pretty Serious!

I got six polishes from Pretty Serious. I ordered these in February, I believe. I knew some of it was preordered and I was willing to wait. They were due in in late March, but there was some problem with the lab and so we waited and waited. (Kaz sent out periodic updates and also offered opt-out options if you were tired of waiting.) But the waiting is over - I now have my polishes and also a $10 off coupon for waiting. I'm perfectly cool with that.

The polishes are in the same order below as they are above, so L-R, this is Throwing Copper, Boop!, An Uzi From Daddy, Purple Monkey Dishwasher, Cybernetic, and Elliott. (Spoiler for the swatches to come: some of these are really awesome.)

 

I had Elliot already, and I put it in my top 5 PS polishes a few months ago. I knew it was being discontinued, so when I saw it was still available, I decided I wanted a backup bottle. (I will have new swatches for these, but here's an old one for Elliot.

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:

I Love You (again)

This is the oddly named Sinful Colors I Love You:

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.)

Pretty Serious discontinued polishes

I got an e-mail from Pretty Serious (and I'm sure a lot of you guys got it too) that listed all the polishes that are discontinued. I just mostly wanted to make sure I can find it for future reference, but if you're interested in any of these, you might check their website to see if there's any remaining stock ASAP. Putting this together with other things they've said recently, apparently they are doing a major refurbishment and will have a new website and new bottles soon. Some of the old polishes not on this list will still be available but they will be in the new bottles once the new website is up.

Here's the list which I just copied-and-pasted:

A Christmas Time Paradox * Acid Burn Opal Flake Top Coat * Araneae

Blue Lagoon Cocktail Crush Top Coat * Chiroptera * Cocktail Bar

Corvus Corax * Darkling Squishy * Daphne's Disco Party

Eat, Drink and Assimilate * Enchanting Evergreen * Fairy Lights

Forbidden Zone * Fossil of the Death Worm * Frogtown

Frosty The Snowborg * Fruit Tingle * Glitz & Glam * Gloomy Kitty

Gluteus Equine * Gruesome Groom * Happy Heart * Badlands Bandit

Cherry 2000 * Dupe * Chariots of the Red Sea * Party by the Pool

Jack Frost Cocktail Crush Top Coat * Love Bite * Mojito

Morning Java * Pina Colada Cocktail Crush Top Coat

The Singing Seed * Strigiformes * Tarnished Tinsel * Under Dunders

Yuletide of the Machines * The Night Before

Added: I have quite a few of these, although there's more I would have liked to have gotten my hands on more of them. I have A Christmas Time Paradox, Dupe, Daphne's Disco Party, Fairy Lights, Fossil of the Death Worm, Frogtown, Party by the Pool, Mojito, The Singing Seed.

Party By The Pool

Here is Pretty Serious Party By The Pool:

This was the first Pretty Serious polish I ever bought - that one came from Llarowe, but mostly since then I've bought things directly from the website. I've always liked this polish a lot - jelly and microglitter, what's not to like? and I noticed lately that it was on clearance, so I bought a backup bottle.

I had forgotten that the original one came in a holiday box like this, but it did - I have photographic evidence from way back in 2013.

(I had to explain to my husband the other day about how Christmas in Australia was in the middle of pool season - he had never thought about that before.)

Darkest Emerald Luxe, Rain Forest

This is Rococo Darkest Emerald Luxe and Revlon Colorstay Rain Forest:

This is another "emerald" that's not really emerald, as far as I'm concerned. It does look more emerald or maybe teal, in the bottle, but on the nail it's very dark and not at all what I'd call emerald. It's very similar to Viridian, in fact. They both sort of look grayed out and blue-green in my swatches, but this one (Darkest Emerald Luxe) a little less gray than Veridian. Rain Forest, on the other hand, is both a bit brighter and a bit more yellow. Both of these polishes have a lot of shimmer. Rain Forest is not from the current Colorstay collection (which is Gel Envy) but the one before that, so it's been discontinued for a couple of years now. I bought my Rococo polishes from Space.NK back a couple of years ago, and a quick search didn't find much for them, so I'm not sure they're still around, either. Definitely Space.NK is not selling their nail polish any more.

(I'm still mulling over the emerald question, so I googled, and here's a company that sells actual emeralds. That's the color I was thinking of - also the color of the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, which is about the same. It's usually got some blue to it but it's brighter than most of these nail polishes with emerald-related names.)

Meow Meow + a tour of H-E-B

I'm wearing RBL Meow Meow, a blackened green glitter, and it's really beautiful but I still think "Christmas green" every time I look at it. Maybe next time I'll put it over black and see if that helps. (Or maybe a lighter green? I'll have to experiment...)

I tried to get a picture of Meow Meow, but the iPhone picture sucked, and it's been too rainy to get decent lighting at home. And therefore I don't have a picture of the new things I've gotten, either. I have a couple of new things via the lovely Karen:

• Smitten Polish Glacial Springs
• Pahlish Electrique (that link says this is a new core color for Pahlish)

I got to have lunch with Karen and Mr Karen last week, and then we had some time left so Mr K went off on his own and Karen and I went shopping, and we ended up at - where else, really? - the grocery store. There's not much else nail-polish-wise that's not available in the Detroit area as easily as it is in the Houston area. Ulta and Sephora locations are pretty abundant at both places, but H-E-B isn't. As it happened, they were having one of their Orchid coupon sales, so she was able to do a little stocking up very reasonably. All I bought was one more discontinued Colorstay, since there was also another Revlon coupon sale. (We got back with still a few minutes to spare, so we did do a quick run through Ulta, also. Neither of us bought anything there, but I think there will be some pictures in Karen's next display post that came from Houston.) Anyway, I hadn't seen Karen in person since 2008, I think - and Mr Karen in even longer than that - so it was really nice to see them both.

I hadn't been in Ulta in months, so there were a lot of things I hadn't seen, like the OPI Nordics and the new Zoya colors. The Nordics were pretty but there wasn't anything I felt all that tempted by. The Zoya Ignite collection, on the other hand... well, I know Zoya has sales, and OPI is rarely on sale, so it's much more likely I will own some of these Zoyas eventually than it is the OPIs. (Particularly India and Sansa, to be specific. So pretty.)

New purchases + Sparkle Purple again

These pictures are a bit blurrier than I'd like but they're all I have. First of all, here is what I think is a much more color-correct picture of Sparkle Purple:

It still doesn't capture the very-red-violet flash of it, but it's closer, anyway. Also note that I have been wearing this since last weekend and the tip-wear is still awfully minimal. Of course I have who-knows-how-many coats of polish including at least two of topcoat, so it ought to wear like iron, shouldn't it?

As for purchases, this is Llarowe + the one RBL + the Revlon that I already talked about:

top row: Chick Cuticle Oil, Briarwood (A England), Nail-Robi (Color Club)
bottom row: Hipster Chick, #601 Shuffle Green (Dear Rus), Rain Forest, Meow Meow (Rescue Beauty Lounge)

I think the Revlon was either $1.33 or maybe only 33 cents after the coupon, I'm not sure which. (My receipt is not at all illuminating on this question, I looked.) The Dear Rus was $2 and the Chicks were $3. The others were full-price.

What stood out to me when I looked at these polishes, and what you've probably already noticed yourself, is the prevalence of green here. I love green, but my goodness, I really do get carried away. One thing about it, though, the three dark greens don't look anything alike - maybe in the picture they do a bit, but in person they don't. Shuffle Green is very gold-flecked, Rain Forest is a glass-fleck shimmer and Meow Meow is more of a full-on glitter with black mixed in. (Here's Kellie Gonzo's pictures of the RBL collection, which show it looking quite different.)

The others... well, Briarwood is one of those polishes every nail junkie knows about, and I just hope I love it as much as everybody else seems to. (Partly the Llarowe order was a "try new brands" thing for me - all of those except Color Club are new to me.) Nail-Robi got a lot of press back last spring when it came out, too, and it looks really beautiful. And the cuticle oil is... well, it doesn't say on the bottle but I believe it was tangerine-ginger, was the scent, and it smells divine. So on the whole, without having actually tried any of these polishes yet, I'm pretty happy with these purchases. I am going to have to spend the entire fall and winter wearing dark green every other manicure if I want to go through them all, though!

Happy happy joy joy

Birthday presents I have already gotten (and my birthday is not even here yet):

1. Deborah Lippmann Shake Your Money Maker
2. Deborah Lippmann Mermaid's Dream
3. Deborah Lippmann Let's Go Crazy

Yeah. Aren't I lucky to have a sister who works for a... well, I don't feel comfortable saying exactly who she works for, but still, aren't I lucky? It's a major luxury retailer, shall we say. So she asked what I wanted, I (of course) said nail polish, and I sent her a list of possibilities and this is what I got in the mail today. These were inside a little makeup bag and there was another one full of various skincare samples, which I haven't even delved into. She of course did not have to pay retail, although I don't actually know how much of a discount she gets, I didn't ask. Anyway, she really could not have gotten anything I would like more, because before today I owned exactly ONE Lippmann and that was not a glitter. So I was definitely coveting these.

If the sun ever comes out again and stays out for long enough to take pictures, I will have some more pictures. It's almost May, so we are overdue for sunny weather. Other than for picture-taking purposes, I don't really mind. I figure we'll have plenty of sun soon enough. (I actually had a coat on one day last week - that's pretty much unheard of for this time of year in these parts.)

I don't think I've talked about the current manicure, which is Revlon Bold Sangria with Jin Soon Gossamer on top. Bold Sangria is a Colorstay color that I've been eyeing ever since the now-departing Colorstay line was released - what was that, two years ago or more? So I saw it and I figured that I should grab it while I can. I also bought a couple of Sinful Colors at Walgreen's this week, since they were having their annual (?) 99-cent Sinful Colors sale. They seem to have it once or twice a year, I'm not sure, but I know it rolls around periodically. I'm really tempted to go tomorrow and grab a couple more. I also made a super-quick trip into Big Lots (which is actually the only kind I ever make, I check out the cosmetic aisles and I leave again before I can find anything else I "have" to have!) and I found a bottle of Rain Forest in the plastic bins with stray SOPIs and other discontinued stuff, and again, I was like, well, I know Colorstay as we have known it is going away, so I should grab it. I have a bottle of Rain Forest already, but that's the (very rare) color that I don't think buying a backup for is unreasonable, especially for $1.50.

I also bought some more variations of those Epielle makeup-remover wipes, because they come in a couple more scents - green tea, aloe vera, and one that doesn't say anything and so I assume is unscented - and I'm still experimenting with those. I've been using the cucumber ones and I don't have the issues that I had with the citrus scent, so apparently it's mostly that one scent that was the problem. (Which was a shame, because it smelled fabulous. I love citrus scents.)

(I've also ordered a couple more things online, but I will let you be surprised about those. One of them is something that I didn't think was available any more, so we'll see what I get!)