Scorpio & Pisces (LE)

I ordered two polishes from KL Polish's limited edition Zodiac collection - I bought Scorpio & Pisces:

Pisces is of course water-colored, a nice pearlescent thing.

And Scorpio is a blackened red. I just bought the polishes that appealed to me rather than my actual sign or anything.

(I bought one more thing in this order but it's different so I'll save it til tomorrow.)

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.)

EmpoweRED

This is Rococo EmpoweRED:

I bought this, oh, several years ago now - my spreadsheet says 2014 - and once I knew what year to look at I found the haul entry almost immediately, because I knew it was from a bunch of stuff I bought from a 50%-off after-Christmas sale from Space.NK. This was a duo, and the other piece of it was a "toner" that was supposed to darken it. It did darken it some, four years ago, but not all that much. But I knew when I bought this that it was an experiment. I don't know anything about how it was supposed to work, technically speaking, but whatever it used to do, when I tried it again the other day, I couldn't tell that it was doing anything at all, now. (Maybe it lost potency, or something? I don't know.) So while I still have the toner, I'm giving up on trying to get it to do anything (mostly I'm just keeping it because it's a set, you know?) and I just swatched the EmpoweRED polish itself. And on that basis, it's pretty, but it's very basic-red-cream. I thought in some lights that it was slightly orange-leaning, and then here it looks like it could be slightly blue-leaning. So probably in reality it's just neutral, meaning it doesn't especially lean either way.

(I found this entry where I talk about this polish - you have to scroll down a way - and I was annoyed that I couldn't see anything the toner do anything in the swatches back then, too.)

NOTD: Aura

This is Formula X Aura, which (although I know it looks brown on my monitor) is actually a red glitter in a black base:

I'm pretty sure Aura is the only Formula X polish I actually paid retail price for - mostly I waited for them to be marked down - and I found it disappointing. Everybody always complained about Formula X being expensive, and it was definitely on the high side (more than OPI and Essie, anyway) but it wasn't as expensive as Nails Inc or Rescue Beauty or pretty much any luxury brand. I think it was $10.50 or so, wasn't it? - maybe a little more depending on what type of formula it was. It's probably more than I ought to be paying but I buy fewer polishes now than I used to, in general, so I don't feel quite so bad about paying a little more for an individual polish. (See: the ILNP that is now winging its way to me. I'll get back to you on that one later.)

Anyway, I'm tempted to pull this picture down because it doesn't show the color accurately anyway and it kind of looks like there's a bald spot on my middle finger which I totally didn't notice in real life, but eh, maybe you can get the basic idea, at least. It definitely reads as redder than this, but the texture looks about right, anyway.

Formula X is discontinued - I don't know, are they showing up at TJMaxx or any place like that, or did they just sell them all for $2 on the Sephora website? I haven't seen anybody mention finding one since the big clearance sale, so I'm not sure. They might be findable here and there.

Bat My Eyes

This is China Glaze Bat My Eyes, which was a Halloween polish a few years back:

I was thinking I had already posted this picture, but I can't find it and anyway it's the right time of year for this, even if I have. It's a really lovely gold and black glitter (with some scattered flakes of other stuff). I said last year when I wore it that it was almost too elegant to be a Halloween polish, and maybe that's true, but it's also a really awesome Halloween polish. I didn't try to look and see if it was available this year (kinda late for mail order, anyway), but it still was last year so there might still be some bottles hanging around somewhere. This is very textured, for the record - I think I said last year that I pulled out the Gelous for this.

I saw this in Walgreen's:

(The mayor even had two faces, it was pretty cute.)

Put A Bow On It

Yesterday I only found one of the three China Glaze glitters from the Holiglaze collection - I did eventually find a second one. I'm still missing the third one, though. Anyway, here is the pink one, Put A Bow On It:

This is a lovely sort of blackened fuchsia color, very unusual. Kind of a pain to get off but not unmanageable. (This is the kind of thing that I get out the Dip-It for.)

NOTD: Bat My Eyes

This is the only Halloween polish that I've ever said this about: it's almost too elegant for Halloween.

I talked about this polish not long ago and said complimentary things about it then, as I recall. I really do love it. And it is Halloween-appropriate; don't get me wrong about that. It's something you might could imagine Morticia Addams wearing it if she was in an especially festive mood. It's a blackened gold glitter, but it also seems to have scattered flakes of something more orange or bronze.

Added: I forgot to say that this is two coats, no top-coat, in the picture. Late last night I added 2 coats of Gelous just mostly to smooth it out. It's quite textured on its own. Even after the two coats of Gelous it's not completely smooth, but it's close enough that it doesn't bother me. I was toying with the idea of mattifying it, but so far I haven't. I'll report back if I do.

As I said then, Bat My Eyes (from China Glaze) is apparently available for the Halloween season again this year. Go forth and get one of your own; you won't regret it.

The last RBLs

RBL has gone out of business, so these are presumably the last ones I'll have (unless I buy them on a secondary market, which I am usually too cheap to do). So let's talk about the ones I bought from the clearance sale. Two are from the last Blogger Collection (I think it was 3.0) and the other one is from the "A Poem" collection, which I think was a couple of years ago now - looks like it was early 2014, making it almost exactly two years ago, in fact.

Here's two of the three I bought; the other bottle is MIA at the moment. I like this picture because you can see the glitter in Small Dim Summer Stars. (I did find other pictures that had all three bottles & those are below.)

I've got most of my polish sorted by color in a variety of containers at the moment, as I've think I previously mentioned, so it's not terribly surprising that I have trouble laying my hands on something specific. This isn't the greatest lighting but here are all three:

L-R: Makeupwithdrawal, Peachypolish.com, Small Dim Summer Stars

Hmm, you can see the colors better in this picture, actually:

Peachypolish.com - here's the blogger's own description: "...my collaboration polish with RBL!  It has a deep purple-toned burgundy base with loads of pink, gold and blue microshimmer.  It ends up looking a bit metallic-y because of all of that shimmer.  I was inspired by berry color palettes.  Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, etc." I am big on berry colors myself, which is why I figured I would like this one.

Small, Dim, Summer Stars - here's RBL's own description (again, bear in mind that this is from the collection called "A Poem"): "Lost in the woods on a moonless, un-illuminated night, they stumble through the darkness. Looking up at the sky amid the fragrant forest...they appeared, countless tiny stars embedded in the dark sky... This sweltering silvery black base hammered with multifaceted and spectacular green, blue, pink, shimmery, glittery twinkling stars will bring you back to that summer night long ago, full of wonder and beauty."

Makeupwithdrawal - blogger's description: "It's been one of those colors that I feel like I've always been looking for, but I can never find. My perfect shade would be almost if Piu Mosso and IKB 2012 had a child. Not quite as inky as Piu Mosso or as creme-like in its finish, but with some of IKB's vibrant jelly-like properties (but more purple). I picture it containing large gold particles instead of Piu Mosso's fine, coppery shimmer. In fact, perhaps even bigger than the gold flakes in Naked Without Polish, but sparse enough to not overwhelm the base color. I am imaging a color that is regal, guilty of hubris (that is, if a color could even be accused of such a thing), something simply exquisite like a lapis lazuli gold filigree necklace." (It's definitely got particles in it; I'm not clear if they're quite as big as she was dreaming about!)

Here's my swatches; I'm overloaded with Christmas-gift polishes and haven't even gotten around to wearing any of these yet. I expect to love them when I do. (I was very late to the RBL party but I became a big fan toward the end of it. It might be better for my budget that they've gone away!)

A little Zoya on top

First of all, I was looking at Fuck Yeah Nail Art, and thinking, "Y'know, I really don't love most nail art," and then suddenly there was TOTORO NAIL ART. Now that I can get behind.

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What I really intended to talk about was how I'm back on my kick of layering something shiny and Zoya over everything. First, I had on Emerald City for St. Patrick's Day, and I decided to put Maisie on over that - two coats, it looked great. In some lights it was just glittery emerald, but since Maisie is actually blue-green, it picked up the blue in others.

Then last night, I finally decided to take that off (because as I learned with Chloe last summer, multiple coats of Fleck Effect wear like iron, it was barely even starting to wear), and I tried that new SH Complete Salon color that I bought a couple of weeks ago in my Walgreen's haul, Black and Blue. And I liked it, except it's kind of boring in low light, it just looks gray. In the sunlight it has a sort of a duochrome blue-black flash to it, but you can't see that in low light. And it occurred to me that what it looked like in low light was FeiFei - steel gray. So I put a really light coat of FeiFei on top of it, and now I'm happy. (At least it's easy to make me happy!) (It looks basically the same, color-wise, but now it just shimmers a little.)

(Ooh, some great Zoya layering ideas here. And I have a lot of those colors. Chloe over Roxy, I never thought of that one!)