Celia & To The Stars

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.

NOTD: Lapis Of Luxury

This is Marc Jacobs Lapis Of Luxury over KL Polish Yzma:

This mani is a little ragged, because Yzma was a little frayed before I slapped this on top of it, but I really love the color. Yzma is sooo dark that it's really too dark for my taste, that was why I decided to add something on top. I don't really love the ones that look black. Neiman Marcus sent out those $25 off a $50 purchase coupons again (try NM25) and I can't resist those. This is from a set of two "fall 18 fashion week" polishes from Marc Jacobs - I got that and then I bought a Clinique blush. I've done the swatches on the polishes so I'll get the pictures of those up soon.

Yuna

 This is Zoya Yuna:

This is a pretty unusual polish. Zoya's description: "a full-coverage warm grey with copper and gold liquid metal." This is from the Ignite collection which I think was in 2014. I really don't remember seeing anything else like this, certainly not from a mainstream polish.

(I was talking the other day about picking and choosing polish, and how I only very rarely buy full collections. I didn't buy the Ignite collection all at once, but I have gradually gotten all six of them. This is the set with Sansa, India, Teigen, among others.)

More night-sky polishes

Last week I showed some of the "night-sky" polishes (that is, dark blue or black polishes with glitter). The ones I showed were the showiest of the blue ones, but here are some that didn't make the first cut. This is Zoya Indigo:

Per Zoya: "a dark indigo blue shimmer with a pinch of holographic microglitter. A dramatic polish that resembles the night sky."

Here is Give Me Space, a plain-old blue scattered holo from an OPI holiday collection a couple of years ago (2015, I think):

This is a creme, but it's one that I like to use as a base for glitters. It's actually more teal than blue but it's so dark it's hard to tell.

This is Cynthia. Zoya says it's "a smoky, blackened peacock teal with soft warm undertones. A very uncommon shade of blue for a subtle but funky look."

(Both of these Zoyas are current colors. I'm not sure about the OPI, but I would guess that it ought to be findable even if it's not technically current.)

KL Polish (+ gift)

I've ordered a lot of stuff lately - you may have noticed - but the cool part is that I've gotten a lot of bonus stuff for my money - mostly expected but even some unexpected ones! The main surprise ones were the little box of hand-care stuff from Zoya and a Colourpop lippie from KL Polish.

The bottle labels are below, but in case you can't read those, this is Charmed, Mindy, Casino Night, and Alyssa is the liquid lipstick, which is the Colourpop Satin formula (which is my favorite). This is not the color I would've picked, but y'know, you can't have everything. If I don't seem to be using it, I'll give it away. And it was free, so how can you complain much?

Charmed is from the new spring collection (Ethereal Garden) and the other two polishes are from the winter one (which is Winter Glamourland). Charmed has a shifty "flip" thing going on - everything else in the collection was pretty much pastel, which has never been my thing. I did already have Cassiopeia from the winter collection, and there were some cremes which I wasn't very interested in (red, green, and gray, specifically). I pick and choose my polishes all the time, but Kathleen seems to have been building up a core collection with a lot of cremes, and I just don't buy a whole lot of those. So Mindy and Casino Night are the two that were left that I was interested in, and unless I get a sudden itch to have a super-dark green creme or something (which seems unlikely since I already have things like that and rarely wear them) this is probably all I'll buy from that collection.

I did want Mindy, though, which is a berry/wine color. And then Casino Night is a gold glitter, and while I don't need it, because I already have a lot of metallic golds, I was tempted and I gave in on that. It's sort of similar to Das Esspensive XXV, which I have - the first one, from last year - but that is more champagne and this one is gold and I think has more holo glitter. I'm going to have to get them next to each other and check on that. (Maybe when I put up my swatch on this.)


I think that everybody who was on KL Polish's mailing list got a 10% off coupon. They've recently raised their prices and Kathleen said in a video that the idea was that 10% off would get the price down to the old price, more or less. (They were $8.50 and now they're $9.50. So 10% off would be 95 cents... so it went up a nickel, as long as you have a code. - And see below for a place to get one if you don't!)

Here's that video:

She also talks about what x-free (5-free, 7-free, whatever) means, and various other questions. Also note that they have a list of KL Polish "ambassadors" there in the description box, and those people will have permanent 10% off codes, as I understand it. So if you don't have one already, that's where to get one.

Blue-Ya!

I have two swatch pictures of China Glaze Blue-Ya! and I'm posting both of them because the color looks a little different on each:

I have the one above marked as one coat so I guess that's the difference. Below it's two.

Also note on the one that says "BC" (for WnW Black Creme) with a line over to Blue-Ya, that is Blue-Ya on top of Black Creme. (So in case you're having trouble reading on a cell phone or something, it's Blue-Ya over Black Creme at the top, and Blue-ya - two coats - alone underneath that.) It's... interesting over black but I don't think I would wear it that way. Anyway, Blue-ya is that very shimmery formula that I like so much and so it's right up my alley.

(Actually, if you look back at my manicures, I rarely wear anything over black. I swatch a lot of things that way to see what they look like but I think black is very messy to take off and I don't really ever wear it IRL. I pull out the really dark blues or a charcoal if I want that effect, usually. Those tend to be easier to deal with.)

Wicked

This is Essie Wicked:

This is a very old Essie color, but it's still current. It's Essie #249 and I think it originally came out in the (late?) 90s when Chanel Vamp/Rouge Noir was all the rage. I got my bottle from KarenD a few years ago so I don't know exactly how old it is, but this is one of the few colors that's been steadily in production all that time. Anyway, very dark & vampy and all of that - almost black in some lights, which makes it different from the rest of this wheel. (The other dark swatch at the top of the wheel in this picture is Ignite, which I talked about the other day, but it's not actually near as dark.) You can see in the bottle that Wicked has some magenta highlights but it's a creme, not a shimmer and you definitely don't see any flash like that on the nail. Essie calls it a "sinister red" which I find sort of comical but Essie always seems to be drawn to the dramatic.

Added: a piece from Byrdie with lots of info about Vamp/Rouge Noir - which dates back to 1994, originally. It seems to me that I've seen a late 90s date for Wicked but I haven't been able to find that again. Finding historical info on nail polish (and I mean, well up into the 00s, even) is often really difficult.

There are a lot of dupes for these, I believe, but the only one I have that I think is really close is Revlon Vixen. This blog post is a couple of years old, but shows several of them.

Victoria

Here is NailsInc Victoria (a mini):

I don't really have a lot to say about this one - it's just a dark-red creme. But it's pretty.

Added: it finally occurred to me to check - this is still a current polish. I checked Sephora because I know they carry NailsInc, but I'm sure there are other possibilities as well. (Mine came from a set I bought at Sephora, which had a full-size NailKale base-coat and several minis, but I don't think that set is around any more.)

Dark Side Of The Moon

This is Deborah Lippmann Dark Side of The Moon:

It's a nice vampy eggplant color - they call it a cream but it seems to have jellyish tendencies to me. Anyway, very pretty - I think I got mine as a freebie from beauty.com - they used to do that from time to time. A gift with purchase, I guess you'd call it. But I just checked and it's still a current color.


In today's installment of the Orange Nails saga, I have had on Destiny again (orange pixie dust) with Y'all Come Back Ya Hear (orange jelly) on top, but I got kind of bored with that and decided to push the walls of my self-imposed constraints just a bit - so now I have Zoya Kaufda on top of all of the above. It looks very nice and I'd still say it matches the orange in my Astros t-shirt just fine. Kaufda leans more towards the "burnt orange" end of the orange spectrum, but with all that lighter stuff underneath, I think it keeps it from looking so dark. (I was intending to start with Orly Retro Red, which is basically a red-orange, but I couldn't find what I did with it. I don't think it's much different from all this other stuff I've been wearing anyway. (If you're not following baseball, but are interested in knowing: the Astros and Dodgers are tied at two games each, now. So there will be one more game in Houston and at least one in LA, maybe two if needed. Tomorrow in Houston, then a travel day, then game 6 in LA on Halloween night, and if the same team hasn't managed to win both of those, then there will be a game 7 to decide it all on Nov.1. And then I will paint my nails some Halloween color even though Halloween will be over by then. I've been saving It's Alive for that!)

Dovima

This is Zoya Dovima, a matte velvet:

I figure this is kind of in the Halloween wheelhouse, because it's a near-black and very elegant. It looks charcoal-colored in some lights and black in others, but it's beautiful all of the time.

(To my knowledge this is not currently available. Zoya usually releases some mattes around the holidays every year but these older ones have not been re-released the last couple of years. They do have some other colors and a matte top-coat available.)

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.

Teen Spirit

Here is China Glaze Teen Spirit, from last fall's Rebel collection:

I have a couple of other polishes from this collection but for some reason I didn't pay any attention to this one at the time. But it's lovely, in a Turn On The Northern Lights vein (though they aren't dupes) - it's a deep purple with a lot of flaky stuff in there.

The Rebel collection was supposed to be a callback to the grunge era, as I understand it, so a Nirvana reference seems like a must. (I have always loved Smells Like Teen Spirit, myself, although I was nothing like a teenager at the time that came out.) I didn't check to see if this polish is technically still in production or not, but I just bought this recently so it should be findable.

Ninja-lish-ious

This is Pretty Serious Ninja-lish-ious, which was a limited edition polish a while back:

This is #18 on my wheel, here, a navy jelly with mixed colors of glass flecks in it. Really beautiful. I don't think I've worn this yet, and I definitely need to remember to make that happen soon. It's very fall-appropriate, too.

I don't know what I did to mess the label up like that - it definitely didn't come that way. Ninja-lish-ious is named for Alicia, who is the US warehouse manager for Pretty Serious. I've never had any direct interaction with Alicia, but I've gotten numerous packages from Pretty Serious in the past several years, and they have always come very promptly and contained exactly what they're supposed to contain - presumably due to Alicia. I have no idea if the warehouse is an actual warehouse or if it's, like, Alicia's spare bedroom or something - but either way, they system they've got going works, and works well. (I would point out that I've never needed to interact with her directly, because I've never had an issue I had to contact her about. That kind of speaks for itself, I think.)

For better swatches, because mine seems kind of unhelpful, really - see KellieGonzo. Also, have I mentioned here that Pretty Serious' new website is up? (In fact, yes, earlier this week, but to repeat: the US version is here. No country drop-downs! Slightly different bottles! Some new polishes! Yay! And no, unfortunately this particular polish is not there. I point you to the words "limited edition" way up at the top of this entry. It's gone away already, I'm pretty sure.)

(Added, if you're like me, you're going, well, that's all well and good, but what's #17? I wasn't sure myself, and I went on a hunt through my tags to figure that out. It turned out to be a Pretty Serious that is still available - BSOD. Always a favorite. And 16 is Elliot, which I thought would still be available, but which I didn't see at a cursory look.)

And as always when I gush about things, I feel I have to remind you that no disclaimer is necessary here. Nobody gave me anything or has paid me anything. I just really love this brand.

Comparison: dark blues

Dark blues, mostly cremes:

Here is the whole list of blues in numerical order (including the ones I already talked about), so this picture starts with #7:

1. Cerulean (Insta-Dri)
2. Robyn (Zoya)
3. Peri-wink-le Of An Eye (WnW 1-Step Wonder Gel)
4. Mesmerize (Essie)
5. Pacific Blue (old formula - SH Xtreme Wear)
6. Intrigue (Revlon Brilliant Strength)
7. Blackout (Revlon Super Top Speed) (this one is not actually a creme, but it's so dark that it's hard to tell what it is. I think maybe it has some paler blue shimmer in it.)
8. Midnight Cami (Essie)
9. Plummet (Insta-Dri)
10. Nail-robi (Color Club)
11. Cynthia (Zoya)

The brand-name is completely gone from my bottle of Blackout, but here it is from Kaz. Her bottle says "Super Top Speed" and that does ring a bell with me.

Here's Blackout close-up (#7 on the wheel):

You can see the fill line here, I've worn this a fair bit here and there. (Let's face it, I'm more likely to wear things more that are not cremes. It's just a fact of life for me.) (Also, as I mentioned in the Revlon stash post, all of the Top Speed line is now discontinued.)

I talked about Plummet and Nail-Robi yesterday, so I won't talk about them again; instead, here is Zoya Cynthia.

It looks almost greenish next to its violet-leaning neighbor on the wheel. I think what it is is super-dark indigo. (Zoya calls it "blackened peacock teal" which also implies that there is a little green in there.)

And I don't seem to have a picture of Midnight Cami on its own, but here's the group picture:

I am going to have to come back later to talk about Midnight Cami because it is also not a creme and I hadn't worn it in so long I'd forgotten that. Obviously I am terrible at identifying cremes from not-cremes. :)

Dupes!

This is a subset of the dark-blue cremes post that's coming tomorrow, but I unexpectedly found two polishes that are basically dupes and I wanted to show those together. It's Insta-Dri Plummet and Color Club Nail-Robi:

It's hard to see with these dark colors, but these two are number 9 and 10 on the wheel, and on my monitor you can just see that these two look different from the other dark blues, and like one another. These are both blurples, basically - in different lights they may look like a purple-leaning navy or a very dark blue-leaning purple. I've seen them both called purple but to me they look more blue if you don't look closely. I guess it's just a trick of the light, because if you look up swatches, they look more blue in some people's pictures and more purple in others. (ALU had a post with other dupes for Plummet, not including Nail-Robi. Zoya Pinta was one of them.)

Legend

Last two Formula X polishes, but apparently I only have a new picture of one of them.

Legend:

This was part of a line called Shifters, which did not seem to mean that they are true duochromes, but rather that they have multiple colors of microglitter to make them shift color. You can see some heavy shimmer or microglitter in the bottle here. I also found this entry with a lot of pictures of it. Looking at it in the bottle (in person - I have it in front of me now), I see a lot of what looks like cool-toned microglitter, and the base looks like it might be a dark plum. (This is why I'm having so much trouble picking favorites, I think. These are very complex polishes!)

I said that another of these polishes was too dark to wear in the summer - but I actually have Legend on right now, even though it's just as dark. I like it but I don't think it's going to make the favorites cut.



I was thinking I had taken a new picture of Hyped but apparently I didn't reswatch it. Maybe that was because I mostly did the reswatches in order to pick a favorite, and I didn't really feel like Hyped was eligible. It's a really pretty almost-neon pink (or maybe raspberry) with a satin/matte finish, but it has pretty serious wear problems, as I noted in this entry. That's enough to throw it out of competition, in my mind. (I went back after I wrote this and swatched Hyped - I'll have that to show another day.)

Who Are You Wearing?

The big bottle here is OPI Who Are You Wearing? which was in my OPI favorites (the little one is for comparison purposes, I'll talk about that in a minute).

I talked about this way back in June but I didn't have a picture where you could see it very well. Of course this is a very dark polish and it's hard to see well even in the best pictures - but anyway this picture is better than the old one. The mini is one of the most famous OPI polishes ever, Lincoln Park After Dark. Obviously superficially they're very similar - at least, you really can't tell much difference  at all in the bottle. On the nail there is a pretty noticeable difference - Who Are You Wearing is blue-violet where LPAD is more of a neutral leaning toward red-violet. I also think that Who Are You Wearing is even darker than LPAD, by a little bit. But for some reason I like it more. I like the blurple aspect of it, and I also think I had this before I ever saw Lincoln Park After Dark and maybe that's why I've never particularly cared about the latter.

I got a bit snippy about LPAD in my "unpopular opinions" post a month or so ago - that's in the answer to the first question, there - and honestly, this polish has pretty much the same issues I was talking about there. Maybe it's more obviously shimmery than LPAD? I can't put my finger on why I like this better, I just know I do.

(But unfortunately Who Are You Wearing is discontinued, probably because it's so similar to LPAD, I'd guess.)

Carly (and Carly vs. Jem)

Here is Zoya Carly:

Here's Zoya's description: "Carly by Zoya can be best described as a very rich, bold, red-toned dark purple with iridescent red and silver metallic shimmer and a dense foil finish. The bold color and sparkling foil finish make Carly like gift wrap for your nails."

When I swatched my top 10 Zoyas, I thought that Carly and Jem looked awfully much alike, which is why I'm comparing them here. The description of Jem is "a dark, red-toned purple with subtle gold and fuschia flecks. A bold, vampy shade that has just the right amount of sparkle!" (I had also talked about Jem back in February.)

So those descriptions do sound somewhat alike - dark, metallic, red-toned purple. The colors in the shimmer are different but it sounds like the base colors are fairly similar, in fact. However, if you look at the links to the polishes, Zoya's pictures look nothing alike - and the picture of Carly looks nothing like my swatch above, really. But this bottle is probably somewhere close to five years old and it's certainly possible it has darkened in that time. I can't say I remember it ever being as bright as that Zoya picture, though.

So here are my bottles and swatches together, for the record (in my living room, lit with daylight-fluorescent bulbs):

Jem on the left, Carly to the right in the bottles; on the wheel, Carly is #9 and Jem is #10. They are similar but they are certainly not dupes, since Jem is definitely darker. I never thought for a moment that they were true dupes, actually - it was just that they looked more alike here than I remembered (as I said before) so I wanted to take another look at them together. For practical purposes, what I'm seeing is that Jem is basically a darker version of Carly. You can see a little bit in the bottles, above, that the shimmer is different - gold in Jem, silver in Carly - so in other lights it's possible they may look more different. Mostly I'm not picking that up on the nail, though.

Jem

Here's Zoya Jem, which for some reason I missed in the first round of these swatch posts last summer:

Zoya describes it as "a dark, red-toned purple with subtle gold and fuschia flecks. A bold, vampy shade that has just the right amount of sparkle!" And I think that description is pretty much spot-on.

It's one of the earlier Zoyas I bought, I think, Jem came out in fall 2011 (in the Mirrors collection) and my records say I bought it in 2012. I remember people really going on about how wonderful it was, and I think my records are probably right in that I didn't buy it right away. (When I say "my records" I mostly mean my spreadsheet, which I didn't start until later, I'm pretty sure. The further back you go the more I was guessing, but it's really 2010 and before where it's shakiest.) Anyway, once I finally bought it I fully agreed with the chorus that it's awesome. It's dark enough that you can't always see that underlying purple, though - for example, I found this post from 2012 where I refer to it as a burgundy. (Which isn't all that far off, actually.)

Parizska

This is Square Hue Parizska:

This is from the Square Hue Prague collection, back in late 2014. The whole collection is here (scroll down a bit for that). This is a fun polish, charcoal-gray with a pretty heavy scattering of silver glitter. I loved it when I first got it but I haven't actually gotten around to wearing it much.

(I may "only" have 600-odd polishes - which is peanuts compared to really serious polish people - but that's still enough to go nearly two years without repeating even if I changed my polish every day, which I don't. So unfortunately I just can't get around to wearing everything. I started this project with the stated goal of using it to destash, but so far I really haven't destashed much. I'm going to have to circle back around to that part of the project eventually. Not that Parizska would be likely to be on the destash list in any case, but destashing other things might mean I'd get around to wearing it a little sooner!)

As far as availability, well, as I've said repeatedly, all Square Hue polishes are LE. I have been linking to Square Hue's single polish page for some polishes, but they've redone the website in the past couple of weeks and that page seems to have disappeared. I haven't gotten around to testing one of my old links to see if it still works, I'll have to try that! (Added: the answer is no, they don't work any more. They just give you a broken link, or at least the one I tried did.) (The good news is that they've gone a lot more flexible with their subscriptions. They announce the colors a month ahead of time and you can choose to buy all three or pick from any two, or you can choose to skip that month. I haven't resubscribed yet but that flexibility makes it more likely that I will resubscribe at some point, for sure.)