Okay, it's not quite neverending - but this was a really big box. This installment is the dark pinks.
The middle one is noticeably not as dark as the other two, but these are all darker than the other ones we've looked at from this box.
They are There Will Be Time from 6 Harts, Fight Like Hell from 77 Lacquer, and Keep Calm and Fight Cancer from Supernatural Lacquer.
There Will Be Time (from 6 Harts) is the lone creme from this box:
The Cosmetics Sanctuary post that I've been getting my descriptions from just calls this one "a deep purple leaning fuchsia creme" - I haven't tried this one yet other than this swatch, but it looks very pretty.
"a medium raspberrry pink crelly base with copper shimmer and crimson shimmer flecks" - I haven't worn this one yet either, although I've picked it up and admired it a couple of times.
"a blackened magneta with linear holographic, holo micro flakes and purple to red to gold multichrome shift." I wore this one on my thumbs when I did the pastel skittles on the rest of my fingers. I really liked it.
Still a couple of installments to go - the coral-leaning pinks and the things that don't look very pink at all (although apparently they do have pink in them, I'm told). Will I get them all up while it's still October? It's gonna be a close thing, one way or the other.
This is two coats of Mega Strength Sorry Not Sorry (made by Sally Hansen) over one coat of Megalast Through The Grapevine (made by Wet n Wild). I'm not entirely sure if I needed to put an undercoat under this but I decided brighter is better. I really really like this polish.
This is Through The Grapevine on its own:
I posted these pictures on Instagram, and I said there that I feel like I would want a second coat of this if I was going to wear it on its own. For layering, I thought one was plenty. On my monitor, at least, it looks brighter here that it did in real life.
These are last two KL Polishes I have that I haven't shown swatches of already:
To The Stars:
Metallic dark blue, very pretty. It may be a while before I get around to wearing this one but I'm sure I will, eventually. (It's from the winter collection last year, and that seems like the time of year I typically feel like wearing this kind of color!)
and Celia:
a deep hot pink creme. I'm a fan of hot pinks, so can't go too wrong with those.
I think I said that my last KL Polish order would probably be my last, but... no. This might or might not actually be my last order, I don't know - but after this I'd either have to be buying backups or buying things that I never thought I'd want, because I've bought everything that I care about having that isn't already sold out again. They did one restock and that's supposed to be the last one. They don't seem to be in any hurry to get things shut down completely. (Meanwhile, Kathleen is already selling some assorted merchandise, as in t-shirts and stuff, and planning a new polish line - "Lights Lacquer" - which she will have total control over.)
I don't have all the swatches right now for these four polishes. The two I don't have are the first two, To The Stars and Celia. But here is the KLPxOfra set, which came with an Ofra liquid lip as a bonus.
This one is Miami Fever:
I'm not sure this will be flattering on me, but it's a pretty color - sort of a light brick color. (KLP's website calls it "terracotta.")
And then the other one is Havana Nights:
which is a deep brick red. (As of now, this set and the two individual polishes are still available.)
The lip color works on me, which I assume means the nail color will as well. I had one spot left on the wheel, so I smeared some liquid lip stuff on it:
This may just be the color being wacky in this photo, but notice how on the wheel it looks much more berry-toned. I think that part is more or less color-correct and the part where the color is funky is the tube. Anyway, it works on me if I don't put it on too heavily.
I've dragged out the favorites re-swatch long enough, so here are all the ones I hadn't already posted. Here is ILNP Black Orchid:
You can see from the bottle that it's full of holo stuff. It's very pretty in this darker base.
Essence Space Glam:
I've mostly worn this with something underneath. It looks pretty on the wheel but it's bound to have visible nail-line issues no matter how many coats you do, I'm guessing.
Smith & Cult Bitter Buddhist is the rare cream that makes my favorites:
I like it cause it's different. It's green, which I reliably love, but it's a different green. Much more subdued than what I usually wear. (Also S&C comes up with great names.)
I've talked about Cigars On Icepretty recently - I think it was from the November Polish Pickup.
It's really beautiful. I thought about putting it in the top three, actually.
And I think I've covered everything now except the two Grinch polishes, which I've also talked about pretty recently, but I bothered to do new swatches so I feel like I have to show them. this is You're A Mean One:
It's kind of in that shifty unicorn-pee-like territory along with those OPIs like Turn On The Northern Lights, which is something I always like.
More days on the advent calendar. The descriptions in quotes come from the maker.
Day 17 - Pepperminty
Ciate just says "light green creme" but I think they put the better descriptor in the name - wouldn't most people call this mint green?
Day 18 - Tempest
"Blue-green shimmer" - guess you can't quibble with that. You can see from the picture that it's also extremely sheer.
Day 19 - Fly Away
"Purple creme" - I'd be inclined to say violet, instead, because of it being on the blue side, but I guess now we are just quibbling.
Day 20 - Cookies & Cream
"Cream nude creme" - even I won't quibble with that one. (I would note, though, that I gave this one to my sister, because I knew I was extremely unlikely to wear it.)
Day 21 - Paradise Lost
Before we had a rose-gold pearl, now we have a "rose gold shimmer." I'll have to do comparison pictures. They are noticeably different, for sure.
Day 22 - Red Hot Chili
Well, ok, it is indisputably a "red creme" - again, they left you another clue in the name, though. This is even more indisputably a chili pepper red, or to put it another way, an orange-leaning red.
Day 23 - Up In The Clouds
"Light pink pearl" - I think this is really pretty, although I haven't worn it yet.
And that only leaves day 24, which was the big day on which we got a full-size polish. I will tell you now, though, that it was a shaped glitter, and I was underwhelmed. But oh well, you can't have everything. (I will of course post that picture when I remember to take one!)
It's a nice blue-gray, from the fall collection a year ago. I wore that for a couple of days and it was chipping in a minor way, and I got the idea that I could patch it up and put Pisces (another KL Polish from the recent Zodiac collection) - I think it worked really nicely.
So this is Pisces over Cozy In There. I suspect that it would look lighter without the other polish underneath, but I really like this. (Maybe I'll keep wearing it this way!)
But then I also had a new polish I haven't tried, and I thought it might work over this. It's a multichrome flakie called Rustling Leaves (from Night Owl). I did it on this one thumb and I really liked it, so I added it to all of them the next day.
This is a limited-edition polish that has been available the last two years for breast cancer awareness month. (I think that Mami Martha is one of Kathleen's grandmothers.) It's no longer showing up on KL Polish's website, so it may not be available until next October, if the pattern holds. I didn't get this last year, but this year I thought it looked very pretty and fresh and decided to go ahead and get it this time.
I wandered by Butter London's website one day lately and saw that Mauvelous was marked down. I usually think BL's polish is too expensive, but I can't resist anything that says Pantone on it, so I bought that and a couple of nail files for good measure.
$10 is definitely too much to pay for a mini, but $5 seems reasonable enough. I can't really say it's anything special, though - it's just a grayed-out purple creme:
Here's a plain gray creme, Xtreme Wear Wet Cement:
I keep buying grays but really I don't wear them much, when it comes right down to it. I do like this one a lot, though. It's a fairly cool medium-gray and it really is pretty close to the color of wet cement. I don't think this polish is current but it was around for a long time so it might be findable on Amazon or eBay. Even if it's not, though, this isn't really a unique color and I'm sure there's something similar around.
I was thinking I had posted at least the bottle pictures of my new KL Polishes that I got, but I looked back and apparently I haven't. (I've been watching planner videos on YouTube - clearly one kind of planning/recordkeeping I need to work on is to do a better job on keeping up with what I've blogged about and what I haven't!!) A couple of weeks ago KL Polish had a "bundle sale" - I know I've seen that promo before, I think they do them a couple of times a year. They had pre-made-up bundles or you could make your own at a discount. Basically I try not to buy KL Polishes at full price since they do have sales quite a lot. (Plus there's that "ambassador" coupon code which you should be able to find in the description box of various people's channels - here's one on Allie's - if there's no other sale going on.)
So this is my "bundle" - there's not a theme to this, it's just random polishes that I wanted and didn't already have.
Matanzas is from the new summer collection (Havana Heat), MIA is from last year's summer collection (which was Miami-themed, I think this is supposed to mean MIA like the airport code), and then Broccoli & Chocolate, which is apparently a very old Mary-Kate & Ashley song? I looked it up so I'll put it at the bottom for other people who are not familiar with this! (I can't be the only one, right?) Anyway, this was from the first KL collection which was in late 2016.
You can't tell from the picture above about Matanzas - it's super-shimmery and doesn't really look a dark as it does here (you can see the swatch for it at the top of the wheel pictured below, actually). But MIA, especially, does look about like it does in the bottle above. It's almost neon (not quite) and pearlescent and has a blue flash. Broccoli & Chocolate, OTOH, is just a plain brown creme. I bought it because it seemed like a cool brown rather than a warm one, but I haven't really tried it out yet.
As mentioned above, infant Olsen twins - I can't believe I'm posting this but I've seen the name of this polish for ages and now that I've finally bought it I started to feel like I needed to understand the reference. (Luckily I didn't find it catchy enough that it'll give me earworms, or at least I hope not!!)
This is another Crayola color from Insta-Dri, Razzle Dazzle Rose:
I bought one Crayola polish from the first collection Insta-Dri released (Cerulean blue) and I liked it fine but I didn't ever get around to buying more from that first collection, or from the pale-colored spring collection, either. But more keep popping up - is there a summer collection? - and I saw this bright pink and I decided to try it out. All of the Crayola + Insta-Dri polishes are cremes, I believe, and cremes are just not really my thing, but still, I feel the pull to have a couple. It's really pretty but I haven't worn it yet, I'm sure when I do wear it I'll end up putting some shimmer top-coat or something on top of it, but hey, that's what cremes are for as far as I'm concerned. I do have some other bright-pink cremes so maybe I'll do some comparisons later, too.
I'm sure I have some other things that are close dupes to this red-violet creme, but nothing on this section of this wheel is close, at least, and this stands out and looks really beautiful here, to my mind. I haven't seen these around in a while - I think I bought this at Ulta, but HEB also carried them for a while. I believe they were $1.99, although these are fairly small bottles (8 ml?) so they're not as cheap as you tend to think.
I mentioned the SquareHue Scuba Hawaii collection, and this is one of those polishes, Ikaika:
(I kept forgetting how to spell this until I started thinking of it as two repeating words, ika-ika - although I don't think that's how it's pronounced.) This is just a purple creme, but it's somehow an exceptionally lovely one.
Here's somebody else's pictures, for comparison. And here's the box (which I also showed yesterday, but nobody's paying me to show this, just for the record. I just still had SH on my mind, I guess. Actually I've been wondering if SquareHue is about to go out of business, since they discontinued the subscription model. They said that they were just going to sell from their website, but nothing new has appeared and it's been several months, that's what makes me wonder.) Note that it's now on sale
(added) as I guessed, SquareHue has now announced that they are shutting down.
Real quick, because I am a procrastinator par excellence and I need to go work on my taxes - I had what I thought was a really promising theory about these polish names, but I think I must have been wrong. When I talked about Akamai I noted that it's a word meaning "clever" in Hawaiian, and it turns out that Ikaika means "strong" - so I was just sure that the third polish must be some other adjective that can be used to refer to a person, like, I dunno, "small" or "fast" or something. But no, in a quick search I didn't find anything like that. (It's Nani, which just sounds like a nonsense word, really. But I love that polish!)
I liked Triple Shine and I was a bit disappointed that Sally Hansen didn't give it a longer try. That said, this is just your middle-of-the-road medium red-violet creme. I'm sure I have several things that are fairly similar - including, apparently, AbsoluteNY Purple Neon, below Vanity Flare on the wheel, except I'm not sure that's the color Purple Neon was when I first got it. That's a question for another day, though. Aha, look, here's photographic evidence, even if the photo is from my old iPhone 4 and is totally crappy. And actually it appears to be Vanity Flare that's not the same color as it used to be - it's considerably lighter.
So I bought several things from HB Beauty Bar, one thing from ILNP, and then a couple of polishes from KL Polish. I showed a Cassiopeia mani already but here are swatches for both of them, Cassiopeia and Lumiere.
Kathleen's polish names are kind of all over the place, I think deliberately, but she mostly sticks to one or two words or a short phrase (offhand, "That's What She Said" comes to mind). So here we have Cassiopeia, like the constellation, and Lumiere, presumably after the Beauty & the Beast character. These are not from the same collection - Cassiopeia is from the Winter collection, and Lumiere is from the Colourpop collab - do you call it a collab when it's sort of with yourself? What it is is colors to match the lip colors that she came up with for CP previously. Anyway, here's Lumiere. I know I watched the video for the Lips & Tips/KLxColourpop collection when it came out, and she said it's harder to match the colors up than you'd think. What looks good in a lip color isn't going to look as good in a polish, necessarily - or in some cases the pigments don't really match up well. I don't have any of the lippies so I don't really know how well she succeeded.
Honestly I have to say that I'm not in love with Lumiere, as a color - it's pretty much just your basic dusty rose.
On the other hand, the only other dusty rose I can think of offhand that I have is a Rimmel one that I've never really been all that into. And I do have Zoey, which was from KL Polish's first collection a year ago - but that seems to me to be much more neutral. I didn't pull out Zoey to compare, though. (On KLP's website: Lumiere, Zoey. Definitely similar, but Zoey is more tan-looking, and not as pink. Less saturated, I guess?) Anyway, I'm sure I will wear this, even if it ends up mostly getting used for layering.
It's a very-dark-brown holo - like a night-sky effect.
Added: KL Polish does have a promo going - I don't see it promoted on the website but I'm pretty sure it was running through the 30th. It's "Make Your Own Bundle" - put three polishes in the cart and you will see it. It's three polishes for $19.95 - I assume you do still have to pay shipping. It shows up as the 3rd polish having a huge discount. I put three in my cart but I couldn't quite make up my mind to hit the checkout button. If it had been running before I bought these two I would have been on it like a shot. (The three I put in the cart were Mia, Mindy, and Casino Night.) Partly I backed off because I was thinking that Kathleen's birthday polish is bound to show up soon, and would I rather have that? And I won't know the answer to that til I see it!
Added (2) (in case anybody happens to be looking): I got an e-mail with the birthday polish and it goes on sale Feb. 1. It looks like golden glitter and holo glitter. (I think the video is probably on YouTube, either on Kathleen's channel or the KL Polish channel, if not both.) Honestly, I don't think that sounds like something I really need, unless it looks really fabulous when it's swatched. I have gold glitters out the kazoo. (But then, I'm pretty sure I said that last year, too, and then I went "well it's champagne" and bought it anyway, and I'm not the least bit sorry.)
Added (3): here's the video, and apparently it's a sheer topper, which does make a difference. Still, I'm waiting for swatches, for sure.
There's not much to say about it, really: it's a drab olive-green creme. And yet I'm definitely drawn to this color. I'm looking forward to trying it out.
I bragged to my husband because I had only bought one polish out of the OPI fall collection. "I never buy whole collections," I said. Then - I think it was later the very same day - I looked at the KL Polish fall collection and (take a guess!) I bought the whole thing.
I had taken a picture of the six KL polishes in my stash, but now my stash for this brand is doubled. This collection comes in a cute box and everything (although I didn't get a decent picture of the box so far, you can see it here):
Left to right, the colors are Princess Penny, Cozy In There?, Mozart, Prince Cornelious, Wishbone, and Chloe. I'll put Kathleen's video at the bottom; for one thing, she goes through the origin of the names. I do have to mention that Cozy In There? is a Walking Dead reference that I actually understand. I quit watching after, like, season 2 but that's actually a reference from very early on, where Rick is stuck in the tank and Glenn is talking to him. I guess it's practically the first thing Glenn says, right? (I believe this is the 3rd Walking-Dead-themed polish I have - the other two are Dollish, Walker Bait and Look At The Flowers, Lizzie. Which seems excessive for a show I quit watching years ago, but oh well.)
In fact the one Dollish set of minis is the only time I've ever bought an entire collection in one shot, until now. I think there are some Zoya sets of six that I've accumulated all of over the years, but I never make any effort to be completist. That's just not me, generally.
So I wasn't intending to buy this whole set, really I wasn't. But there was the metallic! And... the other metallic! and that dusty blue! and the drab green! The neutral one (Wishbone) and the purple one (Mozart) were the two I might have skipped, but then I realized that Wishbone was actually a sort of a bone-color, a gray, and I don't think I have anything remotely like that, and by the time I got to Mozart, I was like, well, if I'm getting five I might as well get all of them, since there's a price break on the set. And it turns out I like Mozart more than I thought from the pictures, too - it's dustier and a bit darker than it looks in the bottle, I think. I thought it was a dupe for things I already had, but it doesn't seem to be.
There's a whole set of swatches, of course, which I'll post later, and I'll put the wheel picture at the bottom, but let's finish the stash since we've already got half of it here anyway. Here's the older half:
This is in release order. L-R, this is Zoey (the only polish I bought from the original set of six), then Das Esspensive XXV (which was LE), then That's What She Said (from the spring collection) and then three from the summer collection, Ocean Drive, Porter Miami, and Magic City. There's no question of a favorite here, it's Das Esspensive. Prince Cornelious might give it a run for its money, but surpass it? I doubt it.
