China Glaze fall Ready To Wear

I'm not sure the above is the exact name of China Glaze's fall collection, but it was something across those lines. I was poking around on Polish Pick, a month or so ago, and I saw that they still had the fall China Glazes, which I had not gotten around to buying any of. I went back and looked at some YouTube swatches, and I finally ordered three of them. I may not wear them for ages but I'm glad I got them just the same.

These all have fashion or shopping-related names.

I made sure to get a picture of the label of this one to verify how it's spelled!

So here's Aut-umm I Need That:

This is the one I knew I wanted from the beginning. Dark brown with... stuff in it. Shimmery-shifty stuff.

Then I also got Swatch Out:

This is officially a copper color, but it almost looks like it's somewhere between copper and gold, here.

And Pay It Fashion Forward, which I wore like a month ago (I'm very behind on getting pictures up - as usual!):

Deep purple shimmery thing. I don't think I got very good wear on this, if I'm remembering right, but that is probably bad prep on my part rather than anything wrong with the polish.

There are more polishes that I could definitely have bought from this collection. I just picked my top three and I may get more if they're still around later. I think that Mustard The Courage was the one that got the most buzz but that's totally not my color. (That said, I did order Caramello from KL Polish since it will be my last chance and it's their bestselling color. I'm not sure it's as mustardy as MtC but it's definitely somewhere in that ballpark. We'll see how I like it!) I liked Central Parka but I have similar things. If I buy more it might be one of the mattes, next.

Here's Jess's swatches:

This is just a random picture that I ran across - just a bunch of China Glazes:

So Jelly on the right of the front row, maybe? I think this was probably when I was doing favorites a year or two ago.

2018 favorites: Princess Penny, Pisces

Here are two KL polishes that were in my top 20 for 2018, Princess Penny and Pisces:

Princess Penny is a copper pearl:

(Here's the original post, which was written during the 2017 baseball playoffs and stops in the middle to talk about the Astros.)

and then Pisces, from the LE Zodiac collection, is a water color, naturally:

It's a metallic aqua.

NOTD: Golden Hour

Here is the first of my Ciate polishes I've tried - this is Golden Hour:

Clearly the name is a bit misleading, since it's much more of a rose-gold than a regular gold! (Almost coppery, really.) This is only one coat plus a bit of touch-up to the tips. I also tried the Gelology top-coat which came in the Mini Mani set, so I'll have to report back on the wear. It shows my ridgy nails off a bit too much but other than that I like this a lot.

(Added: I know I added something to this manicure after I took this picture, but I had completely forgotten what. I finally decided it must have been Rustling Leaves, the flakie top-coat in fall colors. But apparently I didn't get a picture of that!)

Insta-pics

I've been trying to remember to post manicure pictures on Instagram, lately. Before the last month or so they have been pretty few and far between. I haven't just been posting the same pictures that I put on this blog - instead, I've been taking pictures where I'm holding the bottle. That seems to do better with Instagram's square format. But I'll try to remember to put some, at least, of those pictures up here, too.

The Less Bitter More Glitter pics I showed on Friday were also from Instagram, but here's a couple that you haven't seen unless you've found me there.

This is Band Geek a couple of days in, I think - you can see some tipwear.

This is Cigars On Ice slapped rather haphazardly on top of Band Geek:

I like both these polishes a lot. Cigars On Ice was a Polish Pickup selection from November, and it arrived about the time that I'd had Band Geek on for several days and it was starting to show some wear, so I patched it up a little and started adding Cigars On Ice to random fingers.

Here's Cookie (no top-coat):

I also wore Juniper right before Christmas, also without top-coat. It's actually considerably rougher-feeling than Cookie. And I guess I was busy running around doing Christmas things because I haven't found a picture of Juniper so far. (It's teal and it's very dark. Go for the mental picture!)

I posted a NOTD picture for Aggie, but I posted the day 8 picture on Instagram, so you may not have seen it:

There's definitely chipping, but on the whole I thought it did quite well.

(Last post of the year! Coming up, multiple posts in which I try to figure out my favorites of 2018!)

KLP Zodiac polishes (LE)

OK, I talked previously about the KL Polishes that I had bought on Black Friday, and I also had talked back in November about two of the Zodiac Collection that I had paid full-price for, because they are limited edition and weren't discountable. So after Thanksgiving and after Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all that were past, I found an e-mail that said, y'know, the usual thing, "FLASH SALE!!!!" and it was (as I recall) BOGO on all KL Polishes, with no exceptions. So of course I immediately thought, Zodiac polishes! because I knew there were more I wanted but I hadn't wanted to pay full price and I originally only bought the two - and so I used the BOGO to buy two more. There were a couple more I was tempted by, but the two I had kept eyeing were Leo and Capricorn.

Here's Leo:

The website calls it "a brightened copper polish with gold glitter throughout." It's very fallish so I guess that means I better wear it soon. Although, I don't know, I'm very partial to copper, maybe I need to quit thinking of that as a fall thing!

And here's Capricorn:

Here the website says "a gorgeous metallic forest green polish with a dark brown flip," and then goes on to add, "Have you seen anything more unique?!" This is weird because my first thought was that it looks kind of like Zoya Irene. I don't think they're dupes because I think Irene is not this dark a green, but it is green with brown, like this. It doesn't matter if they are dupes because Irene is discontinued, anyway. (Maybe Irene was just before its time?)

NOTD: Cigars On Ice (matte)

OK, here is Cigars On Ice on my nails with matte top-coat. Obviously without the matte top-coat it would be much more sparkly, but with it it just glows, and that's why I'm addicted to my matte top-coat!

I need to see somebody else's description of this polish. I think it's copper and gold, or some combination like that, but I'm not sure. I wish Polish Pickup would make an archive of past months!

(I used Lucky 13's matte top-coat. Before that I was using Pretty Serious' and I'm glad I found another good one before PS went bye-bye.) (I can't ever remember which company uses which pun - one matte top-coat is "Matte All The Things" and the other is "We're All Matte Here," I believe, but which is which? I think that Lucky 13 uses the latter but I can't swear to it and if I go look I probably won't even get back to this tonight. It's that kind of night.)

I didn't know anything about the name of this polish except that it had something to do with Beyonce (the theme for November was something like "badass women"). I'll put the song that it comes from below. (That line is not very far into the song.) While I was looking that up I also found some people saying that that's a sexual reference. Which, I guess, y'know, anything can be a sexual reference, in general, and I think the cigar as a phallic symbol goes back to Freud and presumably further, right? (I learned that from Saturday Night Live, not from reading Freud, believe me.) But from context, I honestly can't tell if that's what it means or not.

Anyway, here's Queen Bey so you can judge for yourself!

Band Geek (NOTD + swatch)

Here is KBShimmer Band Geek:

This is messy because I put it on really late at night, but you can get the idea, at least. This picture is rather dark, anyway - the picture at the link above is better. (Or google and you'll get a lot of examples.)

I feel compelled to mention that while I am notably a geek, one thing I was not was a band geek. I was in the choir, instead. (I have called myself a choir geek for years, when the subject comes up, but actually at my school choir and band were not necessarily considered particularly geeky as I remember it, mostly because there were enough popular kids in choir and I think in band too that it gave the rest of us some cover.)

Here's the bottle and the swatch:

It's basically a black jelly with a lot of mixed glitters in various metallics (like the instruments in the band). It's very pretty. I wore the mani above for quite a few days, and over the Thanksgiving break I got sme new stuff in the mail that I slapped on top of Band Geek and they both coordinated quite well - that was Cigars On Ice, which was a Polish Pickup polish, and then Rustling Leaves from Night Owl's fall collection. I don't have pictures of those yet but I like both of them and they both looked good on top of this.

Autumn over black

I don't really have anything ready to post today, but I pulled this out of my folder of swatches and it's an excellent fall polish so here you go:

The swatch here is Zoya Autumn over Black Creme. I actually maybe like it better this way. I do like this polish but I haven't worn it often, partly because (I think) Zoya Cinnamon came out at the same time and I like Cinnamon more. (I was sure I would adore Autumn because it was described as copper and Cinnamon was more brown/bronze, but Cinnamon just has some magic oomph that I never quite understand. I dunno, I guess I like bronze more than I thought.)

Topic Tuesday: favorite drugstore polishes

What are your favorite drugstore nail polishes in your collection?

This is not this week's question; this one was from early October and my brain apparently just skipped right over it at the time. I have a good many drugstore polishes, virtually all of which are at least a few years old. It seems to me that drugstore polishes have fits of trying to do interesting things, but in the last couple of years they've (mostly) given up on that. So I really haven't been paying much attention to them recently. I've bought a couple of Sally Hansens this year and that's about it. (Plus the Essence which made the top 10 and which I'd practically forgotten about!)

But anyway, the question just says drugstore polishes, it doesn't say they have to be new ones. So I went through my spreadsheet and compiled a shortlist. Unsurprisingly, my first try at a shortlist was very long, but I whittled it down to a top 10. (I'll put the long list at the bottom, here, in case anybody's interested.)

I was wondering if the way people define "drugstore" brands has changed. You can buy several of the brands I think of as "salon" polishes - OPI, Essie, etc. - in drugstores and that's been true for several years. But I did not include those here.

In alpha order by brand (with links to the ones that aren't pictured here):

• Essence Out of Space Stories - Space Glam (the only new-ish one here)
• Insta-Dri - Chop Chop Copper
• Nicole by OPI - Cinna-man Of My Dreams
• Salon Perfect - Who Ya Gonna Call?
• Sinful Colors - I Love You
• Sinful Colors - Nail Junkie
• Spoiled - Cougar Attack
• Xtreme Wear - Disco Ball
• Xtreme Wear - Pumpkin Spice
• Wet n Wild Fast Dry - Dancer Is The Best Reindeer

A lot of fall-toned colors here. Chop Chop Copper:

Cougar Attack (over black):

Pumpkin Spice (which as you can see is a top-coat):

(Also, I believe that's Cougar Attack in the swatch underneath P-spice here. You can see that it looks a good bit different than over black.)

Nail Junkie:

Original (not-at-all-short) shortlist:

• Bonita Salon - Peonies Gone Wild
• Color Club - Hot Couture
• Color Club - Nail-Robi
• Color Club - Snow-flakes
• Cover Girl Outlast - Pyro Pink
• Cover Girl Outlast - Seared Bronze
• Essence Out of Space Stories - Space Glam
• Insta-Dri - Chop Chop Copper
• Insta-Dri - Cocoa A Go Go
• Insta-Dri - Jet Set Jade
• Insta-Dri - Quick Jeanius
• Jesse's Girl - Fire Fly
• Jesse's Girl - Glee
• Julie G - Butterflies & Rosebuds
• Julie G - Sugar Plum Fairy
• L.A.Colors (Color Craze) - Jewel Tone
• L.A.Girl 3D Effects - Black Illusion
• L'Oreal - Jolly Lolly
• Maybelline (Color Show) - Black In Mirrors
• Milani - Purple Gleam
• Nicole by OPI - Cinna-man Of My Dreams
• NYC Crystal Couture - Ruby Queen
• NYC In a NYC Minute - Fruit Punch
• Revlon - Hypnotic
• Revlon Colorstay - Fall Mood
• Revlon Colorstay - Rain Forest
• Rimmel Cocktail Colour - Apple Berry Smoothie
• Sally Hansen CSM - Mermaid's Tale
• Sally Hansen Diamond Strength - Private I
• Sally Hansen Miracle Gel - Adrenaline Crush
• Sally Hansen Triple Shine - Slick Black
• Salon Perfect - Who Ya Gonna Call?
• Sinful Colors - Gilded
• Sinful Colors - I Love You
• Sinful Colors - Kissy
• Sinful Colors - Nail Junkie
• Spoiled - Cougar Attack
• Studio M - Slammin' Red
• Xtreme Wear - Disco Ball
• Xtreme Wear - Pumpkin Spice
• Xtreme Wear - Rockstar Pink
• Wet n Wild Fast Dry - Dancer Is The Best Reindeer
• Wet n Wild Fast Dry - Teal Of Fortune
• Wet n Wild 1 Step Wonder Gel - Peri-wink-le Of An Eye

#squadghouls (NOTD + swatch)

I was all set to do a skittles mani - I figured I could just keep it for 10 days and re-do individual nails as needed - and then I looked in the box where I put my fall polishes and I found #squadghouls, from KBShimmer, which I almost forgot completely. I would have been mad at myself if I had remembered its existence after Halloween!

#squadghouls is a dark swampy green jelly with copper glitter in it. Right up my alley. (If I'd realized how right-up-my-alley it was, I would have bought it last year when it first came out!)

The ones above were in my car, in late afternoon indirect sunlight. This last one is crappy but I present it just for contrast - it was taken in my living room:

Added: I realized I had never shown the swatch of this, so I'm just chucking this in at the bottom. I don't think anybody really cares about seeing the swatch for its own sake, but for completeness' sake I'm putting it in here.

NOTD: Geological Wonder

(NOTE: my cuticles are a mess right now, sorry. Definitely don't look at the large version of these pictures if that's going to bother you!)

Man, I love this polish.

This is Rogue Lacquer Geological Wonder in full early-October sun (which is still pretty powerful, here in Texas). The reason I love this is not because of the holo-ness that you can see here, though - I love it because of the copper flakies, which you can't really see above, or not very well. It shows up better in the picture taken under the fluorescent lights at work:

Also the base color is sort of indistinct here, but it's a dark teal. It looks more green on the nail where in the bottle I read it as more blue. Here's the other hand, in case you can tell more there.

(Also here is my swatch post, for the record.)

In case you like the idea of the copper flakies but you think this is too dark, I ganked a picture from Rogue Lacquer so you can see the other colors. As you can see, this one is the darkest by far.

(I like this so much I'm tempted to get another one!) Added:  I should point out that while I keep referring to the flakies in this as copper, they're actually sort of mixed metals, I think. In the dark base the copper shows up the most. I don't know if that would be true of the lighter colors.

And I'm pretty sure I posted this before but here's Jess' swatches, too:

(Hmm, Jess must have done much thinner coats than I did, her swatch of this doesn't look near as dark.)

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.)

KBShimmer's bag of polishes

I have some new polishes from KBShimmer. As I'm writing this, the special that I got is still available, but it may end at any time. (added: As of Friday a.m., it seems to be gone.)

I got the impression that the quantity on this offer is limited by how many bags they have. The bag in question is a nice-sized, seemingly well-made multichrome cosmetic bag that looks like this:

(It doesn't look terribly multichrome in this picture, but it definitely is.) It's just big enough to hold six bottles of polish in their boxes, and that's what you get here. It's $49.95 including the bag. Most of their polishes are $10, I think, so compared to that you're getting a polish and the bag free, basically. I didn't have that many KBShimmer polishes so I grabbed the opportunity to expand my collection!

 I chose these six polishes - except for the two magnetics they're all from different collections, I believe:

1. #squadghouls, from the collaboration collection last fall
2. Band Geek, which is from a reissue collection called Throwback
3. Cactus If You Can, from what I believe was last spring's collection, Wanderlust
4. Carpe Denim, which I think is a core polish - it originally came out in fall 2015
5. and then two from the Launch Party collection which are magnetic multichromes, Just a Phase and...
6. Spaced Out

Here's my new wheel that I started for these - but I didn't have a magnet when I did these so you can't tell much about the two magnetics. I'll get better swatches of those later on.

Actually hopefully I'll get better swatches of a lot of these, because you can't see the glitter on several of them, either.

L-R: Cactus If You Can, Carpe Denim, #squadghouls, Band Geek

(I keep wanting to call that last one "Band Camp" instead of Band Geek. I guess I'm thinking about the movie American Pie there.)

Magnetics:

Spaced Out is the one that reads basically purple, and Just A Phase reads more or less as teal.

Here is Jess' review of the magnetics:

NOTD: Princess Penny, matte

This is KL Polish Princess Penny, with Lucky 13's matte top coat:

I really love this. You can see how ridgy my nails are in this picture, but in person I didn't feel like that showed up much. The above picture is under fluorescent lights, and then here's indirect sunlight:

This is pretty without the matte topcoat, too, but I love it more this way. It's an unusually pale copper color, and it almost reads like a nude. (I'mna wear this one more day like it is, and then I'm likely to try something layered over it. I haven't decided what.)

Throwing Copper

Here is Pretty Serious Throwing Copper:

This is a taupe-ish brown with copper shimmer.

"When the drama comes crashing down, you'll still be a pillar of the town with this polish that will sear the iris of your old bad eyes. Waitresses will be all over you, and you alone will be the top of the list for everyone's white, discussion."

If that makes no sense to you, go here and look at the list of songs. (Kaz and I were obviously listening to the same stuff in the mid-90s - I knew what this was talking about immediately.)

Kaufda

I know I've talked about Zoya Kaufda recently, but apparently it's never gotten a post by itself so I'm rectifying that today.

Zoya described it this way: "Shiny, warm molten copper with rich orange-red undertones and golden frost. A fitting shade to match the changing fall leaves." I say described and not describes because this is a discontinued shade. Which is a shame, because it's a really nice polish that mostly got ignored. Zoya has so many polishes that they just can't all be famous, I guess. I think I picked this out because I wanted something coppery without being too yellow, and this works well with my warm-colors-averse skintone. It really is a perfect autumn shade.

This was around for years, so even though it's discontinued, I imagine it's findable if you decide you want it bad enough. I think it's so old it is just called a "Classic" - which, near as I can tell, means it pre-dates Zoya's 12-a-season release schedule that they have been doing for the last 10 years or so. For that matter, it's Zoya #195, which I think means there's only a handful of polishes still in production that are older than that. The new polishes that are coming out are in the 900s, I just checked.

It just occurred to me that I haven't bought any Zoyas since the Earth Day sale, I'm pretty sure. Nothing has grabbed me. It's not like I don't have a ton of Zoyas already so I don't know why I feel bad that I haven't bought more. (I did have about 80 Zoyas but I gave some away when I went to visit my relatives earlier this month so I'm probably back down to the low 70s.) (Wonder what they're doing for Black Friday?)

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!)

Princess Penny (+ orange polish & baseball)

This is KL Polish Princess Penny. I forget what Kathleen said it was named after... something involving Mary-Kate and Ashley? Again, I'm totally the wrong age.

Anyway, this is a really pretty bright copper-penny color, and I'm dying to try it. I don't think it will pass for Astros orange, though, and oh yeah, THE ASTROS ARE IN THE WORLD SERIES!! (Sorry, I can only resist for so long.) So I'm sworn to wear bright orange, or something that can pass for bright orange, until at least this weekend. (If the Astros sweep the Dodgers, it'll be over Saturday. Or, uh, y'know, the other way around, I suppose. I'm not that ready to stop wearing orange, thanks. Either way it goes until November 1 at the longest.)

Right now I'm wearing sort of a gumbo of oranges - I keep adding more stuff. I started with Nani, added a flakie top-coat, and then yesterday added Jade VIP, which is orange microglitter. Then it was chipping last night so I added Revlon Fall Mood (which is an old Colorstay polish) which isn't properly orange either but I sort of dry-brushed it around on top of the existing mani so that it covered up the chipped parts but it still reads as orange. If I'd thought of it in time I guess I could have done that with Princess Penny instead, but oh well. Anyway, I'll do something new tomorrow or Tuesday, I'm sure. I've still got a couple of orange things I haven't used, so we'll see what I can come up with.

Back to Princess Penny: it's available here, or in the box set - I got an e-mail saying the box set was nearly sold out though. (I don't know why they're telling me, actually - it's not like I'm going to go buy another one!)

Limeña

This is SquareHue Limeña, from July's box:

It's a red with (I think) coppery shimmer. It looks vaguely orange some of the time, I guess because of the copper. It's very pretty but I'm not sure how flattering it's going to be on me.

(Here's my original "unboxing" post.)

July SquareHue: Marinera

I have to be honest and say that the first thing I thought of when I saw this name was tomato sauce - which is actually not spelled the same - marinara is the sauce, in case you're like me and you're not quite clear on this. (I did know immediately that that was surely wrong, just because it doesn't have anything to do with dancing, and that's what SquareHue's theme is for this year.) So it turns out that the marinera is a couples dance that seemed very familiar to me but I'm quite sure I could not have told you was from Peru. I hate to admit to this much ignorance but I figure I'm better off getting it all right out there up front. (I saw a reference to this dance as being from coastal Peru, so I'm clinging to the word "marine" to help me remember how to spell this. I'm usually a good speller, but those seemingly-interchangeable a's and e's are definitely giving me trouble.)

Anyway, this is the box I got:

Like last month, I only got two out of the three polishes; the third one was described as a straw color so I was pretty certain right away that it was not going to be something I was interested in. (After all, straw is pale and yellowish and I am not a fan of pale colors or of yellow colors, either.) The two polishes I did get are Limeña, a warm red with coppery shimmer, and Norteña, a dark plum creme. Both very pretty. I did more proper swatches and I'll get those up later. (As far as the names, Limeña just means a woman from Lima. Norteña means "northern" and applied to a person it'd presumably mean a northern woman, since these words are both feminine forms, but it seems to particularly refer to the style of music that goes with this dance, as best I could determine.)


Next month's dance is the flamenco, and the three polishes were a pearly dark olive, a "light terracotta" which doesn't sound like my thing, and another red. As much as I'd like to see the olive color, I decided to skip the August box since I wasn't much interested in either of the other two. (Maybe I can find somebody to swap polishes with - if anybody ends up with that flamenco olive and doesn't want it, let me know and maybe we can work something out!)


I noticed that SquareHue's polishes now say .45 oz where I thought it used to say .5, and that turned out not to be my imagination. I pulled out an old one to compare. (If you want to know, I think the purple polish in this picture is Baby Baby Baby, from the December 2015 collection, next to Limeña.)

Basically, the exterior of the bottle seems to be exactly the same size, it's just that the interior of the bottle is hollowed out a bit more in the old version of the bottle than in the new. I looked at several bottles to make sure that's what I was seeing, and the shapes varied a little but the interior of the new bottles seem to consistently be a little shallower. The difference is only, what, 1/20th of an ounce, so it doesn't take much. (It doesn't particularly bother me that they're smaller, I was mostly just curious to see where the difference was.)

(I am trying to remember to write SquareHue - one word - instead of Square Hue, two words. I mostly became aware of that because Google has corrected me a couple of times. My tag is still two words, though, if you decide you want to look up what else I've had to say about them!)