Death Serum + a NeVerMind bonus

This is the last one of the NeVerMind polishes I ordered, Death Serum:

It's a black jelly, which is something I didn't already have.

So I ordered Azazael and Death Serum, and I got those plus a mini matte top-coat, with a note:

If there was a delay I wasn't particularly aware of it, but I'm not going to turn down matte top-coat, which I go through a ton of!

(this is my three-full size NVMs, Azazael, Death Serum, and Le Fay, which was the Polish Pickup polish)

Blackheart Beauty (Hot Topic)

Back in December, we were in the mall and we wandered into Hot Topic - not normally a place I go - and I remembered that they had these polishes in the skull bottles which I've always thought looked cool (hang the polish, it's the bottle I really want) and so I rooted through a big sale bin until I found a couple I liked - they were two for $5. The brand-name on these is Blackheart Beauty.

So I ended up with a navy matte, on the left, and a black holo glitter.

Their names are very descriptive, I guess you'd say. The navy one says - in minute print - BH NAVY VAMP SATIN MATTE NP (I guess "vamp" refers to what the cap says, Vampire Matte. Then the other one is a bit more succinct, it says BLK AB STARGAZER. I think that's their way of saying "black holo" - I know from a past jewelry-marking hobby that AB stands in jewelry for Aurora Borealis, which is a kind of a shifty/shiny coating that gets put on crystal beads (like Swarovski and Czech crystal beads). (See here.) And "Stargazer" is on the cap, you can see it in the top picture. (I'm assuming that both Stargazer and Vampire Matte are collection names.)

For brevity, let's call this one "Navy Vamp":

You can see that it is in fact a satin finish. I definitely don't have a navy matte polish, so that's pretty cool.

And let's call this one "Black Stargazer":

Their descriptive names are quite spot-on (assuming that "AB" means anything to you) - this is a fine holo glitter in a black base. It seems very opaque, too. I've never had any of these polishes before so I'm wondering about wear-time, but they're interesting!

Skittles(ish)

I started out to do a skittles manicure, and I feel like I didn't really do a proper one, because I didn't put a different color on every nail, but oh well, I like it anyway:

The other hand has two orange nails, but this one somehow only ended up with one. I was going to do the colors I talked about in this post, more or less, but I couldn't find a green that had enough contrast to suit me, and instead of just gold I ended up using Witch & Famous, which is a topper, over the black. The Pixie Dusts do work really well for this - the purple one on my thumb is Zoya Carter, and the orange one is Destiny. For black, I used Cult Nails Fetish, which is a satiny finish - but then I ended up with top-coat on most of the black nails anyway. (No top-coats on the Pixie Dust this time.)

I just went poking around on Zoya's website trying to figure out if you could do an all-Pixie-Dust version of this. But there's not really a green that suits my idea of a Halloween green. (If you clicked on the Witch and Famous link above, you saw the one that I had in mind in that picture - it's Salon Perfect Who Ya Gonna Call? - which I think was a Halloween LE that year. It's a texture but it's more like Floam than like Pixie Dust. I couldn't find mine, though.) I have both Zoya Chita, which seems slightly too dark, and Vespa, which seems too light. Anyway, I'm obsessing over this way too much. I may well redo some of this between now & Wednesday, so it'll look fresh, so I may get another chance to experiment.

Various grays and blacks

I'm piling all of these into one post so I can go on and talk about something else next week. I don't seem to have a lot to say about grays and blacks, generally.

First we have Essence Beauty Beats As Long As You Love Me, which apparently is tied to Justin Bieber somehow. I am the wrong generation for Mr. Bieber, but I believe this is one of his song titles, and I seem to remember that he was actually involved in the making of this polish line in some way, as well.

As you can see on the wheel, it's very similar to Wet Cement - maybe a little darker - but it's a shimmer.

This is Black In Mirrors, which is from the famous (or actually sort of infamous) Maybelline Brocades collection. There were other colors in this collection that got a lot more buzz, but this one is my favorite out of the couple that I have.

There was a year or two when all the mainstream companies were making polishes like this - 2013 is when my spreadsheet says I bought this. I think they were trying to compete with indies, it seemed like. Now all the drugstore brands and even the brands like OPI and Zoya seem to have decided they are better off sticking with the tried and true things - red and pink cremes, for example - and have mostly given up on doing this kind of crazy thing. (Although just when I really think that's true they do something interesting again.) Anyway, all that aside, this is antique-ish gold and silver in a jelly base, it's really fun.

I showed Dirty Baby earlier this year when I bought it, and I'm throwing it in here just because it seems to go with this bunch. I still haven't worn it. But it seems like a fall-to-winter color so I imagine I'll get around to it sometime in what's left of this year.

(It seems like a slightly-toned-down version of Black In Mirrors, really - except I don't think it has gold in there, just silver.)

And then, because I actually used it as a base for this whole wheel, and I don't think I've ever actually done a swatch post for it, here is Wild Shine Black Creme:

This is my go-to black for swatching. I have this old bottle, which is maybe on its last legs (the label certainly is), and I also have a couple of the newer bottles. But I don't really wear it on my nails much.

Starry Night, Black Illusion

This is Sonia Kashuk Starry Night:

I did two posts about "night-sky" polishes in the last week or so, and I said they could be blue or black but I only got around to talking about the blue ones. So here is the main black starry-seeming glitter that I own, and actually I guess I'll throw in the one below it on the wheel, too, although I already talked about it not long ago. I do like Starry Night - it looks more glittery in the bottle, but on the nail the glitter tends to sink down into the polish. But it's still there, and it's pretty. Sometimes a polish where the glitter sneaks up on you is just the thing!

And then here's L.A. Girl Black Illusion, which is a holo:

This is supposed to be a dupe for Zoya Storm, but I never bought that one so I can't testify to that. They certainly look the same in the pictures I've seen.

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.)

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.

Slick Black

This is another one of those discontinued Sally Hansen lines, Triple Shine, in Slick Black:

On the wheel this is #17. This is a great polish and it's one of those I always feel like I should wear more. Triple Shine had several of these great microglitters - this one is a black base with mostly silvery microglitter, I think, but it's hard to really tell what's in there. Anyway, it ends up reading as an almost-metallic dark gray instead of black.

Y2K

Here is Square Hue Y2K, which was in my favorites list:

It's an almost-black base with silver shimmer. It's another favorite that took me by surprise because it didn't really seem like anything unusual at first.

This post shows the 1990s collection which included this polish and Vogue, which was also in my favorites. I liked both these polishes from the beginning, but I would not have said at the time that they would be in my all-time favorite Square Hues.

Graffiti

This is a set from The New Black. The set as a whole is called Graffiti although the individual polishes don't seem to have separate names. I numbered them and stuck labels on them so that some day when they all get separated I'll have a hope of remembering what the heck these are!

I experimented around with combining them in different ways on the wheel. Basically, you've got a black, a dark gray glitter, a lighter gray, a metallic silver, and a glittery silver top-coat, so presumably the idea is that you might layer these.

I have to say I wouldn't have bought this if it hadn't been on sale, and it's one of those things that in retrospect might not have been that great a deal even on sale. As you've been seeing in recent days, I have things that are similar to most of these already. (Black - check. Metallic - check, Silver glitter - check. The two gray ones, the ones I numbered 2 and 3, are the only ones that might be much different from things I already have, and I'm not even sure about those.

Explosive, Glitz Gal

This is Formula X Explosive and Sally Hansen Gem Crush Glitz Gal:

You can see the 75% off sticker very prominently on Glitz Gal, but actually I'm pretty sure I bought both of these on clearance. They're sort of similar in that they both have a lot of fairly bumpy glitter in a dark base. I like Explosive's black base a lot more than I like Glitz Gal's sort of sludgy gray base. Maybe I need to futz around with Glitz Gal and see if it can be redeemed, but I've had it for a couple of years and haven't worn it so that seems like a clear destash candidate if not. I wore Explosive back in January and it was really pretty - and so blingy that I ended up matteing it down. (I do that a lot these days, you may have noticed.)

So given that I bought both of these on clearance, it's unlikely that you can find either of them easily - especially Glitz Gal. Explosive was discontinued more recently so it might be more possible to find. (Check Amazon and eBay, though, you never know.)

NOTD: Black Diamond, matte

This is Pretty Serious Black Diamond, two coats with no undies other than base-coat:

It's pretty much opaque with two coats (I did do a little dabbing in a couple of spots), but I think when I wear it again I'm going to put Black Creme under it, just because you can't get this kind of polish to wrap around the tips & sides like I'd like. Considering the type of glitter - i.e., definitely on the chunky side - it does go on relatively smooth, but I did use a coat of Glitter Food under the matte top-coat. If you really like your polish to have a super-glass-slick finish, I would say you might want two coats of Glitter Food (or Gelous, or whatever). But one did well enough to suit me.

I never posted a picture or anything last week, but what I wore all week was Pretty Gritty - by itself for a couple of days, and then after it had (inevitably) chipped a little I patched the tips up and put Jin Soon Gossamer on top. (That's my #1 manicure extending trick, if you haven't figured that out already: use the original polish to patch, then add a coat of some sort of topper - my favorites for this are Gossamer, Travel In Colour (China Glaze), or Bubblegum Punk (RBL), something that changes it up just a little without being too drastic.)

Fetish, Via Montenapoleone

This is Cult Nails Fetish and Square Hue Via Montenapoleone:

Let's talk about Via Montenapoleone first because despite the grand name (which is a street in Milan's shopping district, if you're curious) it's just a plain ol' black, except with a satiny finish. It's not different enough to make much difference to me, though. For layering purposes I'd rather use WnW Black Creme since it's a definite one-coater. If I want a black because I'm in a gothy mood and I just want to wear black, I'd be more likely to pick something like Dovima or Fetish instead. You can't really see Fetish's cool finish here, but it's described as a wax finish. It could also be described as satiny, but more-so than ViaM... it's almost rubbery, which I assume is why the name. Here's somebody else's swatches since mine are failing on this point: Let Them Have Polish!

This is actually the only Cult Nails polish I got around to buying before they went out of business. I wish I had more. And that sort of answers the other half of the availability question (since Square Hue polishes are always LE) - it's a no on both of these, unless you just happen to find them around. I think Fetish was originally released as LE but then went on to become core after that, so it might possibly be findable if you poke around, I don't know.

Dovima, Slick Black

This is Zoya Dovima and Triple Shine Slick Black:

Dovima is from the Matte Velvets (you can see that it says that on the bottle) - as with all the others, this has a lot of shimmer that doesn't necessarily show up much at all if you leave it matte. In this case the shimmer is silver, and you can see from the swatch that it's not quite a full-on black; I'd call it a dark charcoal color. Slick Black is darker but it's a microglitter and also has a lot of silver to it. Neither of these are currently available - Triple Shine is probably gone for good, but the Matte Velvets usually come and go seasonally, so look for Zoya to re-release some of them in the fall. It may not necessarily include Dovima, though - last year they had a bunch of new colors, so who knows what they'll release this year!

Y2K, Starry Night

This is Square Hue Y2K and Sonia Kashuk Starry Night:

Square Hue was doing Decades sets all of last year (i.e., 2015), so of course when they got to the 90s they had to have Y2K. It's a not-quite black with lots of shimmer. Starry Night is a black (not to be confused with Starry Starry Night, which is not) which has a lot of semi-hidden glitter down in the blackness. It's another one of those subtle glitters.

Black Illusion

I've been going through my blue and blue-green polishes, but I decided I was missing some pictures, so I'm going to show you black and gray polishes instead for a few days, and then I'll come back to the others when I get that straightened out.

This is the one and only L.A. Girl polish that I own, 3D Effects Black Illusion:

(The sticker that's on my little notebook was originally on the cap of the polish, but it was peeling off so I stuck it over there instead.) This is exactly what it's supposed to be, a black holo. It's pretty, though, even though I'm not much of a holo fan in general - I think maybe that's because this one shows up more than a lot of them do.

I didn't take pictures of every single black polish, because one plain black creme (WnW Black Creme, for example) looks pretty much like every other black creme. But I took the ones where there were some differences.

As for why I decided I was missing some pictures, it's because I looked at this wheel and realized there was a whole section of blues I hadn't shown:

I've shown a few of these, but there at least four I haven't, so I'm going to have to figure out what's going on there. I'd been planning to work the black and gray polishes in eventually, so this seemed like as good a time as any.

Stash: black, white, & gray

I did pictures of most of the rest of my stash back in the spring and early summer, but I broke down at the end and there was some stuff I didn't ever get around to doing, mostly black/white/gray and then silver. And of course my stash is growing, and all of those won't fit into my shoebox-sized boxes that I was using before, so this one is b/w/gray, and then we'll have to see if I can shoehorn all the silvers into one box next!

I tried to put most of the blacks toward the top and gradually get lighter, with the whites on the bottom left - I have far more blacks and dark grays than I do lighter things, as usual with me.

Left to right and top to bottom:
Top row: Square Hue Via Montenapoleone (from last month's Milan collection), Triple Shine Slick Black (glass-flecked), Cult Nails Fetish (a rubber finish), Sonia Kashuk Starry Night (black with silver glitter), Wild Shine Black Creme
Second row: RGB Slate, L.A. Girl 3D Effects in Black Illusion (a holo)
Middle: Hard As Nails Steely Gaze (which is the unlabeled one under the RGB - it lost its label at some point!), Color Show Clearly Spotted (from the Polka Dots set), Orchid Steel Guitar, Hard Candy Vibe (an older formula - it's a very shiny black), and next to that and under the Orchid bottle is an unbranded and unlabeled black - but I have come to think that set is actually L.A.Colors
Next to the bottom: Square Hue Parizska (gray with silver glitter, from the brand-new Prague trio); under that is an unlabled white (also probably L.A.Colors) and Chirality Symbiote (a holo), then the gray with the label turned backward is Essence Beauty Beats in As Long As You Love Me (this is a Bieber polish, but I promise that's not why it was turned backwards!!), and then finally Outlast Midnight Magic, which is from the group of glass-fleck type polishes that I was talking about yesterday - it's a black base with a lot of blue and metallic shimmer to it
Bottom row: China Glaze Texture in There's Snow One Like You (a white textured glitter which I have had no luck getting to go on where it looks decent so far - I tried last year and I'm sure I'll try again this year now that the holidays are rolling around again), Sinful Colors Nail Art (basically a striper) in Bad Chick, Xtreme Wear Wet Cement, and finally 2 Dollish minis, I Want To Believe (from Ultimate Fandom Deux, it's a blue-gray with scattered glitter) and They're Hereeee! (a holo glitter from last year's Halloween collection - it reads awfully gray in the bottle but as I recall it went on much bluer than it looks here)

As you can see, I'm not big on whites - I do wear light grays a fair bit, though. And some of the silvery ones are pretty much in the dove-gray sort of ballpark as well - I pulled all those today too so hopefully I'll be able to get those up soon.

The Red and the Black (and the gray)

I had to go look up "The Red and the Black" after that phrase popped into my head - I knew it was a book and I knew I associated it with French class, but that's all I could remember about it. It is French, by Stendhal. My school had a language program where you started French or Spanish in junior high and could continue all the way through high school, if you wanted to. So we got to the point along about junior year where we were reading novels. I didn't read that one but what I remember is that it was reputed to be especially hard going, at least in French. (There also a "Red and Black" song in "Les Miz" as some people may know. I'm not sure about whether there's any real connection between those two.)

So anyway, that is where the title came from. The reason that title popped in my head is because I have the missing bits of the red wheel and the black/gray/white wheel to show you. I'm starting with the red one because all I am going to show you IS the wheel - somehow my previous picture went missing. It's not really even necessary because I had partial shots of the wheel, but somehow I feel like it's incomplete until I post it! So here you go:

The interesting thing is how similar they all look, in this shot, even though many of them are actually not! (Although honestly, I think if I have something I could stand to destash, it might be a few of these reds!) Here's the list (under the jump), so you won't have to be trying to read my writing:

Nail wheel - black, white, gray

Blacks, grays, and a couple of whites:

1. Bad Chick (Sinful Colors Nail Art, which is why I painted it in stripes)
2. unnamed white creme (Color Theory set)
3. -
4. Wet Cement (Sally Hansen Xtreme)
5. -
6. Gray By Gray (Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure)
7. -
8. Is That Silva? (OPI magnetic)
9. The Symbiote (Chirality holo)
10. unnamed gray creme (Color Theory set)
11. Steely Gaze (Hard as Nails)
12. Gray's Anatomy (Wet n Wild/Fast Dry)
13. Slick Black (Sally Hansen Triple Shine)
14. Starry Night (Sonia Kashuk)
15. Black Illusion (L.A. Girl holo)
16. Jet Black (Hard as Nails)
17. Black Creme (Wet n Wild/Wild Shine )
18. unnamed black creme (Color Theory set)
19. Vibe (old Hard Candy mini)
20. - 

I've added a couple of things in the blank spaces since this picture was taken, so eventually I need to go back and take more pictures of the top side of this wheel, where it was incomplete!

One thing I noticed is that almost everything on this wheel is drugstore polish. I think I just don't think it's worth spending money on higher-end for blacks, and I barely buy whites at all. I just haven't gotten around to it with grays, I think, because I do actually like grays. It might be worth noting also that Sally Hansen makes some great grays, which is why there's a lot of those here.

It's barely worth posting the whites, but here you go:



At least you can see the striper. The other one is barely visible at all. (Note that #3 is blank - you can tell the difference between 2 & 3, but just barely.)

I don't seem to have gotten a picture of 4, but as I said, I'm going to have to take new pictures of that part of the wheel anyway. (6) is Gray by Gray, which is a dark gray with an almost-indigo tinge to it.

(8) is Is That Silva? which is the Bond magnetic - I didn't try to use the magnet on this. It's pretty on its own, anyway. (There's a picture of it where I did use the magnet here.) (9) is the Chirality holo - you can see the holo effect in both these pictures, above and below).

(10) is another of those unnamed/probably L.A. Colors polishes - I've never remembered to look & see if there's an L.A. Colors that matches this. It's quite pretty, actually. It's most similar to (12) which doesn't show up well in either of these pictures. (These must be older pictures - later on I got a rhythm of taking 1-4, 5-8 and so on. Or maybe all those blank spaces threw me off.)

(13) is apparently Slick Black, which you notice is not very black at all without a base coat under it. (14) is Starry Night, which is black with little sparkles; (15) is the L.A. Girl holo.

 (16) is what Jet Black looks like with just one coat. I used it a lot in these wheels and it gets pretty opaque, but it takes a good three coats to get there. (Compare with the WnW next to it, although I can't swear that's one coat, because I don't have consistent notes on this wheel on that.)

(18) is another unnamed - I'm not sure if it has a little sparkle in it or if that's just dust - I'm going to have to go inspect this wheel later and see if I can tell! - Possibly it's dust, actually, because (19) is Vibe, which I'm pretty sure is a straight-up black creme. I'll report back if I figure out anything different.

And yay, that is the end of my original set of wheels. From here on out it's all things that I've added since last September, but that's several more wheels worth by now!

Black-based nail wheel

This whole wheel is over 3 coats of Hard As Nails Jet Black:

1. Diamond Love (Orly) (2 coats)
2. Groupie (Orly) (2 coats)
3. Disco Ball (Xtreme Wear) (1 coat)
4. Fairy Dust (e.l.f.) (1 coat)
5. Fairy Dust (Khroma) (1 coat)
6. Tilted Halo (Ulta)  (1 coat)
7. Pearl Wisdom (Orly) (1 coat)
8. Let Me Go (Sinful) (2 coats)
9. Mist You (SH Salon)
10. Jailbait (old Hard Candy) (1 coat)
11. Gray's Anatomy (WnW)
12. unnamed very pale pink shimmer
13. unnamed slightly less pale pink glitter
14. Slick Black (Color Show)
15. Big City Dazzle (NYC)
16. Strobe Light (Xtreme Wear)
17. Two-Timer Stars (Maybelline)
18. Amethyst Couture (Color Show Brocades)
19. Jewel Tone (L.A. Colors)
20. Jet Black alone (Hard As Nails) (3 coats)

(detail shots under the jump)