Topic Tuesday: top fall colors

This was last week's Topic Tuesday, but as usual, I'm a little behind. I wasn't sure I was going to get an entry up today at all, but then I swatched my KBShimmer magnetics, and that got me rolling, and I ended up digging out most of my fall polishes and doing some swatching. This is going to be kinda quick and dirty, but I know what my favorites are here - the examples are the part that may be a bit wonky.

Favorite fall colors:

1. Copper & bronze - these are totally my favorites, especially copper. I'm going to go with the discontinued Spoiled Cougar Attack (silly name, I know) as my example.
2. Dark browns - there are a lot of good ones. I prefer shimmers.
3. Funky greens - I show China Glaze It's Alive below.
4. Orange - I like red-orange rather than yellow-orange for my skin tone. The holo here is more on the yellow side but if you layer it over the Orly base it all somehow works. (Look at the month of October 17 if you want more examples - last year when the Astros were in the playoffs I wore orange for the entire month.)
   
5. Deeper purples - grape colors are especially nice.

Oh, and I had a wheel already primed to go with black bases, so a number of these pictures are over black. I'm not sure any of these polishes are current but you should be able to find similar things.

Cougar Attack:

I've also got a swatch of Scrangie 2.0 which is sort of a weird bronze-ish oil-slick-ish color, so I'll add that here, too:

Although in this case I'm not sure what the heck would be similar.

Here's It's Alive (an old China Glaze):

This kind of thing is great, but just plain old olive green is fine, too. (I was thinking of KL Polish Chloe, which is a current color.)

Adrenaline Crush

This is Miracle Gel Adrenaline Crush:

Lovely metallic, sort of a bronze, I guess? - not really a rose gold but not too far from that.

This is the polish that I mentioned having bought from HEB with a coupon, and I couldn't remember at the time what it was that I had bought. Miracle Gel is pretty expensive, and I usually won't buy it without a coupon or a markdown, even though I do like it. It's in the same price-range as OPI, which I don't generally buy a lot of either - the tradeoff is that OPI has more of a range of colors and finishes, while Miracle Gel lasts far longer on me. I have more OPIs but maybe I should make a point of collecting the Miracle Gel colors that I like, when I get a chance.

(As I've said before, other people act like they get much better wear than I do from OPI. My nails are weird sometimes.)

Fall Mood

This is Revlon Colorstay Fall Mood:

Around this time last year I compared this polish with another coppery metallic, and the best I could come up with to describe it was "indeterminate fall-toned metallic" - it's somewhere in the pale-copper-to-bronze range, but it also has some little flecks of stuff in it which I think may be what was throwing me off. Anyway, unless you can find it on eBay or somewhere, it's not available, since this is the older version of Colorstay. It really is a lovely fall color, though.

(Note that this is on one nail alone, and on one nail over an orange polish, because that's one of the things I tried while I was doing all those Astros-orange manicures last month. It looked good that way.)

(Come to think of it, maybe that's why whoever named it came up with "Fall Mood" - maybe they couldn't decide quite what it was either!)

Bit Faker

Here's Butter London Bit Faker - which is another polish I missed on my first pass through my stash:

I really love this polish, but then it's the kind of mixed-metal thing that I reliably go wild over. It's pretty simple, really, it's a packed glitter with mixed bits of copper and bronze. As you can see, you can make it opaque really easily (I'm questioning myself there: is this really only ONE coat? But I show the second coat on Knackered, below it, so I was obviously keeping track. I think you can see that I'm a good way down on this bottle, so it's also possible it's gotten thicker.) But I also have worn this as a top-coat; you definitely do have to make an effort to make the coats light in order to do that, though, I have to say.

I bought my bottle of this at Marshall's, I think (if it wasn't Marshall's it was Ross) so clearly it was marked down, and indeed I don't see it on BL's website. I wish I had a backup for this - you can find it around online, but as far as I see you're going to pay something closer to BL's usual list price of $15 than the $4.99 or so I paid for mine. (I'm not taking any credit for my own cleverness here, mind, because I didn't even go looking for it. I was in Marshall's looking for shoes or something and I just happened to see it. The only part where I was clever is that I knew when I saw it that it was something I definitely wanted.)

(I added tags to indicate that it was in my 2015 favorites.)

Seared Bronze

This is Cover Girl Outlast Seared Bronze:

This one is a mini (aka Glosstini), but this was also available in the larger bottle as part of the core Outlast collection for a couple of years. I believe I liked it enough that I went and bought myself a backup in the big size. I'm pretty sure it's discontinued now but I would think the big bottles, as least, are still findable. (I haven't checked to see, though.) This was originally a Catching Fire tie-in, and it's sort of a glass-fleck in several shades of copper and bronze. It's said to be a near-dupe for OPI Warm & Fozzie, but I never got around to buying that so I can't confirm or deny. (I picked it up and looked at it more than once, I remember, but never quite talked myself into it.)

I had several from this line and I really wore them a ton when they first came out - but nowadays I have so many more polishes than I did a few years ago, and I can't say I've gotten around to wearing any of these in a good while. But it's a lovely color, just the same.

Two Cent

This is Sonia Kashuk Two Cent:

There's not really much to say about this - it's a pretty, coppery shimmer. It looks (from the arrows) like the swatch pointing at the bottle is Two Cent by itself, and the swatch above that is Two Cent over Forbidden Fudge, which naturally looks a good bit darker. (Forbidden Fudge is kind of my favorite layering polish of the moment, had you noticed?) Flagstone Rush, below Two Cent, looks more orange and Two Cent looks more brown, but it's still not a full-on brown, either.

The picture I posted earlier was the very last of the pictures like this that I had stored up. I've been gradually updating my nail polish spreadsheet with a column to show what date I did the entry for each polish - and now I'm to the point where the bulk of them are done and the ones that I missed the first time around show up very easily. Most of those are top-coats and I'll try to get to those gradually, but first I went back and looked for the regular polishes that I hadn't gotten in the first pass. Last night I put The Avengers (the movie, that is) on and sat with boxes and wheels at a table and looked for the polishes still on my list and tried to match them up to my existing wheels, or did new swatches if I couldn't easily find the old ones. (I actually watched the last 45 minutes, the Chitauri War part, twice, so I worked on this for at least three hours and probably more like four, altogether. And yeah, it probably would have gone faster without the movie to distract me, but then I would have been bored and would have quit much sooner.)

So anyway, that's what I'm posting now: retakes. I don't think there's many people watching my progress through this process with bated breath - but I also notice that some of these entries are getting a fair number of hits, gradually. I'm mostly doing this for my own benefit but still it makes me happy to think it's also possibly helpful to somebody else who's googling nail polishes!

Flagstone Rush, Fall Mood

This is Orly Flagstone Rush and Revlon Colorstay Fall Mood:

These are both metallics in fall tones. Flagstone Rush is one of a number of Orly metallics, and I've never figured out whether they all were released together or not. As far as the color is concerned, until I did all this swatching lately I would have said that it was a brown. But when you put it next to the browns, it's clearly more copper than brown. It might be fair to call it a darkened copper, since it's certainly not a bright copper color. (In my defense, I bought mine at the same time that I bought Rage, and it does look very brown next to Rage's rose-gold.) Fall Mood is closer to a copper-penny color, yet I'm not sure I'd call it that, either. To tell you the truth, "indeterminate fall-toned metallic" is what I'd be most inclined to call it - in other words, it's just what the name implies. If forced to pin it down more than that... well, I'm not sure I can pin it down, truly. It's somewhere in the range of lighter-brown/bronze/copper, how's that for wishy-washy?

Flagstone Rush is still a current color, I believe. Fall Mood is part of the "middle years" of Colorstay - there was the early Colorstay that came in two-packs with its own topcoat, which came in a very limited range of colors, then there was this version (which says "Longwear Nail Enamel" on the label), and then there was the current Gel Envy line. The last two both use the same shape of bottle so you have to look at the labeling (and/or the color names) to tell them apart. (Last time I looked, Gel Envy colors had sort of a gambling theme to their names, but I can't say I've paid much attention to them generally.) But anyway, the Longwear version of Colorstay is definitely discontinued. I bought this one at Big Lots and that was a couple of years ago, I think.

Cougar Attack

This is Spoiled Cougar Attack:

As I said before, I bought Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice (which is a discontinued polish) for something like $14 including shipping on eBay, and only after that did it occur to me that I might still be able to get hold of Cougar Attack - which is also discontinued - and I did in fact find it available on Amazon. I actually got two bottles for about what I paid for the one of P-spice. These polishes were both originally in the same price range ($2.99-ish) and were both originally released as LE polishes, I believe, but Cougar Attack was later a core color, thus it's not as rare. Anyway, I'm glad I now have lots of coppery glitter and I can feel free to waste it to my heart's content (more or less).

(And yes, I'm aware that "Cougar Attack" is a pretty dumb name for a polish, but the polish is awesome so I ignore the name issue.)

You can see in the picture above that Pumpkin Spice doesn't look much like Cougar Attack either in the bottle (which is the one partly visible on the left) or on the nail (which is the one above CA on the wheel) - however, they come out looking surprisingly alike on the nail, if you're willing to use up enough of the bottle of Pumpkin Spice putting on enough layers to get it tolerably opaque. This is basically how I went though the first bottle so fast, and I'm not going to make that mistake again.

This is my old bottle of Cougar Attack and one of my new ones:

The old one isn't quite as low as I was thinking it was, really, but obviously I've used quite a lot of it. It does take 2-3 coats to get opaque, but that's much better than P-spice's 4-5. This time I will be saving Pumpkin Spice for layering, as I showed back here, and Cougar Attack can become my go-to coppery glitter once again.

Added: Just because I have it, a picture of the label:

Brown, bronze, & burgundy

I tweeted about Square Hue Vaclavske Namesti the other night - I thought it was brown when I was putting it on, but apparently it's actually a plum. Either way it's extremely pretty. Then yesterday I somehow managed to chip it getting in and out of the car; I'm not sure how I did that but after 10 days of driving and hotels I was getting pretty crazy. (We're home now and I feel much better after a night in my own bed!) So anyway, today I patched it up and then I added a coat of Sonia Kashuk Two Cent on top of it, which as you might guess is a really pretty copper-penny color.

Here's those two bottles:

You can see the plumminess of the Square Hue here pretty well, but still I think it's fair to call it poised equally between plum and brown. I've got other fall purples that are that way, really. And Two Cent is a nice shimmery copper which is warm without being so warm that it is unflattering on me.

I pulled out a bunch of fall colors earlier when I was fiddling around with the grays and silvers and blacks, so here are some other selections from my stash. This is my VERY favorite fall staple, coppery glitters:

I don't think any of these are available any more, unfortunately - I love these and they are always seem to be LE so basically, if you see a brown-and-copper combination and you like such things, you would be well-advised to snatch them up! (and then tell me about it so I can go hunt them down too) - anyway, these three are Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice, Spoiled Cougar Attack, and Different Dimension It Rubs The Lotion On Its Skin. (Yes, it's a Silence of the Lambs polish, isn't that awesome?) I have been nursing Pumpkin Spice along for several years now and I think it's about to give up the ghost - I keep adding thinner and I don't think it's budging, so that one may be destined for discard soon. It pains me but there's no point in keeping it if it's not useable, is there? Cougar Attack is really similar but I'm already halfway through that one as well.

Here are some more things in a coppery vein:

This is Dollish I Volunteer As Tribute - which I haven't tried yet because it looked so very fallish that I was saving it - and then Hard Candy Crush On Lava and N-OPI Cinna-man Of My Dreams (a texture).

And here are some burgundies: Zoya Jem, Carly, and Katherine (which is a jelly):

and some more: Violet Flicker (another one of that glass-fleck bunch which I keep talking about lately), Dark Side Of The Moon, and Bold Sangria:

Then here's some gold/bronze ones (which I almost forgot about):

This is I Only Shop Vintage, Gold Digger, and All About You.

and here's a lot of these fallish things spread out on my bed:

Let's see, things in that picture which I haven't already talked about include several unidentified dark reds, some older browns like Forbidden Fudge and Decades of Shades, and then some stuff I've worn fairly recently like Chick Once Upon A Time, A England Briarwood, and Dollish Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal. I really love fall colors, can you tell?