I'm The Ultimate Fangirl

Here's another Dollish mini, I'm The Ultimate Fangirl (here over Orly Color Blast Free Spirit):

I've had this polish for, I think, three years or so and I've never worn it. But actually it's pretty cute when you goop it on like this. I liked it in Accio Lacquer's pictures but in person I never quite warmed to it. I've come to think mixed glitters like this are just not really my thing, anyway. But sometime soon I'll have to bestir myself and at least wear it as an accent nail.

Love Me Some Pie

This is Dollish Love Me Some Pie (a mini):

This is from the Ultimate Fandom collection and it's meant to be a Supernatural reference. (I thought of Twin Peaks, first, but I guess Sam & Dean love their pie, too. I watched Supernatural for, like, the first five years - but that still means I gave up on it ages ago.) Anyway, you can see that this is glitter mix in a sort of rosy-pink base, leaning toward a cherry color. This is two coats and three might get it further along towards the bottle color.

This is still on Dollish's website even though it's long sold out, which makes me think there's a chance it might make a return appearance some time.

NOTD: These Are Not The Droids... over Dream

Here's my mani I wore for Rogue One. I kinda love it.

I was trying out the index finger as an accent nail, but then I also put light coats of These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For on each nail. It certainly made Dream look quite different. I don't know if anybody noticed it but me, but it sure made me happy, anyway.

(Oh, and I loved Rogue One. I go on about that at some length over at Livejournal, if you really want to hear it.)

TBT (or TBF): These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For

In honor of Rogue One, today we have sort of a Throwback Friday to the Dollish Fandom Collection of a couple of years ago. This is These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For:

I may have to try an accent nail with this. I'm wearing Dream so it would coordinate really well. Picture from Accio Lacquer (who I would link to except that her website is down).

London, These Are Not The Droids

This is Zoya London (a Pixie Dust) and Dollish These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For:

London is a medium-gray texture (with scattered silver glitter) and These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For (hereafter TANtDYLF) is a mixed glitter in a clear base - the way I figure it, it's silver and blue for R2-D2 and gold for C-3PO. Makes sense, right? (If I remember I'll have to wear this when we go see Rogue One in a month or so.) I think I've tried TANtDYLF over a couple of different colors and I haven't found anything I feel like is ideal just yet. Maybe I need to just try for opaqueness (which seems to be what they did here).

TANtDYLF is not available as far as I can tell. (See the link above; the fandom polishes still show up on Dollish's website but they all say Sold Out. Possibly there might be another run of them at some time in the future? - I'm guessing, but that seems to me like the most likely reason for leaving them on the website.) You can still get London, even though... didn't Zoya say they weren't producing any more Pixie Dusts, ages ago - like, a couple of years ago? They must have produced a lot of them, then, because they're still there. (I haven't poked around to check, but to my knowledge all of the Pixie Dusts are still available.)

CYSBIB,* Tiramisu, Via Sant'Andrea

This is Dollish Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal (which I decided was way too long to put in the title), Sephora Collection Tiramisu, and Square Hue Via Sant'Andrea:

None of these are polishes you can still get hold of, as far as I know. In order: LE, discontinued, LE. I kind of wish I had split these up, in retrospect, but I've got a picture that's actually in focus and everything, so I'm sticking with it. CYSBIB is considerably more orange than the other two, and as you can see on the wheel, it's really shimmery. I really don't have anything else much like it. And then Tiramisu and Via Sant'Andrea are both sort of taupe-ish browns, although Tiramisu is considerably darker.

* "Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal" is a Firefly quote, for people who don't already know this. Here's a nice short video of that bit:

It's from the episode called "Serenity" - not the movie, which is also called Serenity. (It's the name of the ship.) This is the original pilot, as I recall, although when they aired Firefly they didn't show it first.

I bought Tiramisu about a year ago for $1, on clearance. I'm fairly sure these "Sephora Collection" minis aren't available any more, and I don't believe they've been replaced by other Sephora Collection polishes, either. (Oh, huh, there was a Rio neon collection earlier this year, which is now on clearance. I missed that completely til now. But that's the only polish on their website under the Sephora Collection name right now.)

All of the names in the 2015 Square Hue collections are street names. Each month it was a different city, and all of the ones I've checked on have turned out to be places where you shop. Via Sant'Andrea is in the Milan collection, and it seems to hold true, there, too, near as I can figure out.

Honey You Should See Me In A Crown

This is Dollish Polish Honey, You Should See Me In A Crown:

This is burnt-orange polish (that's the closest color-name I can think of for it) with scattered gold glitter. Here is my oft-used Accio Lacquer link for this set; you can't see it in my picture but the gold glitter is actually small hexes. A few years ago there was a big rage for hex glitters and I think this was part of that.

Apparently the name is a Sherlock quote; a search got me to this very short YouTube clip:

(It's from The Reichenbach Fall, which is not one of the Sherlock episodes I've seen.)

Redrum, Elfin' Around

This is Dollish Redrum (a mini) and China Glaze Elfin' Around:

For the record, I got this China Glaze polish free from a promotional giveaway. (I haven't been talking about where I obtained my polishes in this series of posts, so I keep forgetting to disclose that. Not that it makes any difference at all to what I have to say about them anyway, but just the same, this, for the record, is your disclosure.) So the China Glaze polish was from the Holiday 2013 set, if I'm remembering right, and it had several polishes with this same kind of metallic formula. There was a red, a pinkish-red, and this reddish-orange. I don't know why they imagined people would want that many sort-of-similar polishes, but apparently they did. I don't think I've ever even worn this one, orange not being my very favorite color in the first place. But if you are more fond of coral-orange colors than I am and would like a metallic one, this is not bad. (I think it's discontinued but hey, if anybody wants it, speak up in the comments and I'll send it to you! It's going to waste in my stash, that's for sure.)

Redrum is a more interesting polish, to me: a rusty-red holo. It does put you in mind of things seen in horror movies, somehow. Unless Dollish has done a re-release for Halloween, this one is no longer available either (and I'm not giving this one up, I quite like it.)

Nuke The Fridge, Walker Bait

This is Pretty Serious Nuke The Fridge and Dollish Walker Bait:

I'm bound to have taken pictures of the bottles and swatches from my usual angle - like the one below - but I can't find them and when I found the wheel and went looking for the bottles to re-take the pictures I could only find Walker Bait. I found every other green polish I own as well, I'm pretty sure, but not Nuke The Fridge. Naturally.

Anyway...

Walker Bait is an olive-green holo. I've never seen anything else quite like it, although there may be others out there.

It looks more gray from this angle but if you look at the picture at the top you can see the green better in both polishes. And if you don't believe me here's Accio Lacquer for a backup as far as Walker Bait is concerned.

Walker Bait is another Dollish Walking-Dead-themed polish (the other one I have is Look At The Flowers Lizzie, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out there were others), and as far as I know this polish was very very genuinely LE and thus is now a true HTF polish.** I've never been terribly sorry I didn't sell mine on eBay but if anybody feels like offering me wads of cash for it, I'd be willing to think about it. This is also the only full-size bottle of Dollish Polish I have. I thought their minis were a better deal so I bought minis, except for this one which was only available as a full-sized polish.

I'm only talking about Dollish in the past tense because I haven't bought anything from them in a while. They're still around. As you may have guessed by now, their specialty is fandom polishes. (Ooh, Zombieland. I shouldn't have looked.)

The other polish in question here is Nuke The Fridge, which is in the picture at the top, and it's the swatch below Walker Bait on the wheel. (added: Here's a better wheel-and-bottle swatch I did later on.) You can see that it looks sort of similar to Walker Bait, except without the holo part. I suspect that's deceptive. I decided not to worry about the missing bottle picture since this polish is still available and there's plenty of other pictures of it around. (Just the same, when I locate mine I'll be sure to photograph it.) This polish is from the Post Apocalyptic Princess collection and it's more of a funky/shifty green than the swatch picture would lead you to think.

If you're scratching your head about the fridge thing, well, this is an actual Indiana-Jones-themed polish. Those are not something that's thick on the ground out there. (As for the actual reference, if you've seen the last Indiana Jones movie - I can't keep the titles straight any more but I believe that would be the one with Shia LeBoeuf - you will probably remember the sequence with the nuclear bomb and how Indy survives it. If not, well, go check Wikipedia - or YouTube. It's a funny bit and a funny name although tbh I thought the bit itself seriously stretched credibility even by action movie standards.)

**glossary:
HTF: hard-to-find
LE: limited edition

Look At The Flowers Lizzie

This is Dollish Polish Look At The Flowers, Lizzie:

This is a Walking Dead reference, and if you've watched any Walking Dead, well, it's just as perverse as you might guess. (You can probably find the scene in question on YouTube by googling the polish name, but the scene by itself is not self-explanatory. I had to get my husband to explain what was going on - or rather why that was going on - because I quit watching Walking Dead before the point where this happened.) Anyway, it is really a pretty good match for the colors of the meadow greenery in that scene. It's very sheer and probably needs to go over a pale-green base of some sort. (The two above this on the wheel look like possible candidates.) I do actually like this polish and I wasn't sure I would. But it was part of an LE set a couple of years ago and so is probably not easily obtained.

Live Long & Prosper, Ice Hotel In Hell

This is Dollish Polish Live Long & Prosper (another mini) and Liquid Lacquer Ice Hotel, In Hell:

Neither of these are things you can get any more but you can probably find things like these - pale blue jelly bases with glitters of various sorts. Their glitter mixes are very different but in my nail swatches you're mostly seeing the base and little bits of glitter. Ice Hotel In Hell has coppery bits and large disks in a couple of different colors as well as a mix of smaller pieces; LL&P has silvery bits and little blue ones, and stars. You can tell that I didn't go fishing very hard for the big pieces when I was doing these swatches. This is two coats of each, with no dabbing. I found a Pinterest picture of IHIH which has to be many, many coats to look that thick. And then LL&P is another Ultimate Fandom polish so I will link to that same set of swatches I always link to for that collection.

I think pretty much everybody knows the phrase "Live long and prosper" even if you know nothing at all about Star Trek. What I was wondering was if "Ice Hotel, In Hell" refers to anything in particular. (I know that ice hotels do exist, but Google didn't find me anything for that particular phrase other than this polish. My own previous comments on this polish via Google+ show up down at the bottom of the first Google page, I found when I scrolled further down.) I guess it could be a phrase that referred to something that wouldn't last long, right? But I've never actually heard it anywhere else.

The timing on this is entirely coincidental, but I saw a commercial tonight for the new Star Trek movie, which is apparently out in a week or so - not this coming weekend, but the one after. I hope this one is more like the first of the J.J.Abrams Star Trek movies than the second, because I really liked the first one a lot. (The second one was, well, not as good.)

The Angels Have The Phone Box

Here is Dollish Polish The Angels Have The Phone Box (a mini):

So, most people who know anything about Doctor Who at all know about the blue phone box, and this is a pretty good approximation of that color, usually known as Tardis blue. (Maybe really a bit too bright, but close.) This was from Dollish's Ultimate Fandom collection, and you may have seen that link before, because I have a huge set of these minis, the whole collection of 12 or 13. This one is my favorite, I think - or at least it's the only one where I felt it was necessary to buy a backup mini so I'd have a whole bottle's worth. This is a scattered holo but I don't really care about that. I just like the color.

I'm pretty sure this isn't available any more but you should be able to find something similar, what with all the holos that are around these days.

(Note that this was in my 2014 favorites.)

Added: The link above is dead so here's one of the pictures from Accio Lacquer, for reference:

One Lifetime With You

This is Dollish Polish One Lifetime With You (a mini):

Wow, I suspected this had faded a bit, and I was more right than I knew - at least according to Dollish's own pictures. But it's still really pretty! It was in the lavender ballpark and it still is, it's just a paler one. It's the base color that seems to have faded, so I would wear it over a similar color. It's got mostly small glitter in various shades of purple and blue, and maybe some shimmer as well. The name refers to The Fellowship of the Ring - it's Arwen's line from the movie and it's also the color of Arwen's dress in that movie. (Unless the dress is from the second movie, I forget.)

Because Accio Lacquer seems to have gone to the great beyond (or at least forgotten to renew their URL), I snagged some of her pictures that were at Dollish's link:

Jewel Tone, Deadly Nightshade

This is Color Craze Jewel Tone, and Dollish Deadly Nightshade (a mini):

These two glitters have a similar color mix (purple with some blue) but manage to look more or less completely different just the same. Jewel Tone is smaller glitter in a clear base; Deadly Nightshade has larger glitter mixed in (well, I might call it medium-size, really - it's not big glitter) in a tinted base.

It's really late as I write this and I just don't have the energy to look it up, but my guess is that Jewel Tone might be a current color, but Deadly Nightshade is not. I think they sell LAColors somewhere like Dollar Tree nowadays - which is someplace I rarely go. You can usually guess the Halloween colors from the names, and yeah, Deadly Nightshade is one of those. And I don't think it's available any more, although I could be wrong!

NOTD: Nailkale & more

I've been distracted by other things and haven't posted here much for a couple of weeks. But I'd better catch up on recent manicures or I'll forget completely, and that's the whole reason for this blog's existence, really. I fill in with other stuff, but remembering what I've worn is really the main purpose here, to me.

So when last heard from on the manicure front, I was wearing the remnants of my Valentine's manicure, as detailed here. I did eventually get that off with Dip-It, but what I didn't say there was that it wasn't until several days later, because I put something else on top of it instead, first. I believe I was thinking about jellies - so that the lace stuff would show through, see - but what I ended up with was Excuse Me I Blurpled, several coats of it, which did not let the lace effect show at all. But it did look pretty, so hey. Then a couple of days later when that chipped, that was when I got out the Dip-It.

Here's the Blurpled:

I actually am wearing this again now, over OPI Give Me Space (because I should have known better than to buy a holo, because holos just are not really my thing), and it doesn't look as good over dark blue as it did alone. (It's kind of like when I kept buying pastels because, y'know, pastels are pretty - despite the fact that they just don't look good on me. I keep buying the occasional holo because they look pretty in the bottle, or in somebody's pictures, and then I am always disappointed when I get them. I'm hard-headed, I guess, and it just takes me several wasted purchases to get certain things to sink in.)

(Added: I said I didn't like Excuse Me I Blurpled as much over dark blue, but actually in some lights it looks really gorgeous. I should also know by now never to judge anything only from how it looks in my living room.)

I have been doing a bunch of swatching to nail wheels which I mostly haven't posted yet, and one thing I was looking at were the sort of transitional grayed-out purples.

So this is more or less in order from most-gray to most-purple. The OPI mini is Tickle My France-y, and then we have NailKale Windsor Mews and Zoya Odette. (Interestingly, these seem to be an exception to the pastel thing I mentioned above - they do look pretty good on me despite being pale.) I got the NailKale set for Christmas and hadn't worn it so I did a whole mani with Windsor Mews. Later I added SOPI It's Bouquet With Me, and mattified it. I really liked that. I am all into the matte lately.

It's Bouquet With Me was a "Jewelry Top Coat" - SOPI had a whole line of these - and it's a holo glitter. It's sort of purpleish-pink, which is why I thought of it, I guess. Without the matte top-coat it's too sparkly for me, usually, but matted down it's just fine. (I think I was using Matte Me Crazy this week.)

(On the strength of a couple of tries with NailKale, I like it. The base-coat, especially, does seem to do something beneficial for your nails, and it lasts well.)

After that, I also matted-down Dollish These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For:

(I enlarged this so you can see the gold in this a bit. It did show up more in real life.) I'm not sure if Wet Cement was really the right undercoat for this, but it's not terrible, at least. TANtDYLF is mixed glitters with silver, gold, and blue (C-3PO and R2-D2's colors together, I assume), so I didn't know what to pick. Anyway, I tried it before without the matte and I kind of hated it, so I did like it much better this way. I'll have another try with finding the right undies for it, though!

NOTD: Blue Email and Smoothies

This is Apple Berry Smoothie over Blue Email (these names!):

This looks darker here than it really is - it's pretty bright. It's more cyan, really. I think I talked yesterday about Blue Email being bright, and Apple Berry Smoothie toned it down some but not all that much. It's one coat of Blue Email and two of Apple Berry Smoothie. I saw some very slight bald spots, so I don't think you can call Blue Email an official one-coater, but it's close.

guide to what's what (both above and below), so I won't have to keep typing it:
Apple Berry Smoothie - Rimmel Cocktail Colours, from a couple of summers ago
Blue Email, Purple Neon - Absolute NY
Rockstar Pink - Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear
Love Me Some Pie - Dollish Polish, from the Ultimate Fandom polishes

I did a mani before this that I liked, but all the pictures sucked so much that I'm not even willing to put them up - I used my new bottle of Purple Neon (which isn't very neon, as I think I said in the previous entry) for a base, and I put Rockstar Pink over that, and on some nails I also put Dollish Love Me Some Pie. I wasn't too crazy about Love Me Some Pie by itself, but with Rockstar it looked cute. I'm pretty sure Rockstar Pink is discontinued because I saw it on a CVS clearance list lately; I need to poke around and see if I can find a backup bottle because I do really like it a lot. (Although actually my bottle is almost full, still, anyway - I just don't remember to wear it a great deal, obviously.)

And now the blue mani is chipping, so next up is red, in the 4th of July spirit. (I'm not going to attempt nail art like I did a couple of years ago, although it wasn't a total disaster.) I'm thinking I'm going to do the India/Ruby Pumps combo that I did a while back - although now that I look at it again, it's awfully dark. I may do it anyway, though. I'm not going to attempt another picture of the coming mani, since it's probably going to be a repeat, but I'm in the process of taking the blue mani above off, and I have to say, that for a cyan blue, it didn't stain very much. It did stain a little, because it's cyan (I do have to say that I have no idea which of the two polishes to blame for this) but only a little. The last cyan I wore was Zoya Liberty, which stained pretty badly, and before that the only one I ever remember wearing was Cabo Cruise, the Fergie polish, which stained like a mother****er. I've been skittish about cyan ever since.

She's Beyond Kelp! and other recent manicures

This is KBShimmer She's Beyond Kelp! - which is one of their recent series of awesome duochrome flakies:

I'm holding my fingers at an angle here so you can see the blue-to-green flash. At right angles it just looks bright green. This was kind of a booger to apply but not too too bad. It's thick and it's prone to leave bald patches, but two thick coats - with a little extra dabbing - was enough (and there's no way you're getting thin coats with this stuff anyway!) - and this is without top-coat at all. I did have on Colorstay base-coat.

This is one of the Dollish Ultimate Fandom polishes that I've had for almost a year now (I just looked and I got them in June last year) - this is One Lifetime With You, which was the Lord of the Rings polish. If you're a geek like me you kinda take this reference for granted. Hmm, I think I have an old LJ icon that went with this, I'll look. Anyway, it's the color of Arwen's dress in Fellowship of the Ring.

(Did anybody besides me out there read The Secret Life of Dolls? Because if you don't know what it is, this isn't going to make much sense, probably. But I'm putting it in anyway, because I'm having a Geek Moment.)

(I used to know the words to "Aniron." And they're in Elvish. That kind of geek moment.)

Anyway, I bet Accio Lacquer has a picture of the dress in question. Here ya go.  (Added much later: that link is no more, but I'm sure it's something you can google.)

Getting back to nail polish... well, it's pretty but that is four coats above. So a little thinner than I find acceptable, for normal use. (It's also possible it's faded some in a year. I had issues with fading with another Dollish Polish, so who knows.)

And then I got nail mail and the aforementioned four coats of polish got covered up with two more coats of Witch Way? because I couldn't resist trying it. And it was really pretty, but it didn't set very well on top of all that and I ended up taking it all off again. (And then put on the other KBShimmer, which is the one at the top. Which gets us back around full-circle.)

I do have a couple of previous manis to talk about real quick, but I have no pictures for these. After the last NOTD post - which was a couple of weeks ago - the next thing I wore, apparently, was Teal The Cows Come Home (which is LynB) with Flake Your Booty on top. This was only moderately successful because Flake Your Booty doesn't seem to show up very well on a light background. But Teal The Cows Come Home is pretty, even if it's not what I'd call teal, really (but then I am judgmental about color names - as far as I'm concerned it's too light to be teal).

And then for most of the last week - up til Arwen's dress reared its head a couple of days ago - I had on Pretty Gritty again. You know I like it because I didn't put anything but HK Girl on top of it. (No flakies, no Travel In Colour or anything, I mean.)

I'm sure I will have more on the subject of nail mail to say before long. (I think I have another thing or two on the way, as well.) But this has gone on long enough, so I'm stopping.

(Oh, for the record, no disclosures necessary here. I paid full price for all this stuff.)

2014 favorites (less #1)

I did a top 10 but I don't have fancy pictures or anything, because I think everybody who knows me knows by now that that's not how I roll. (I would have taken some sort of pictures if there had been sun today, but no dice on that. I will see what I can dig up out of the Delicious Color archives, though!)

I have never done a top 10 before, and given that, I decided that it didn't make any sense to limit it to polishes released this year only. Because of that, my criteria for inclusion is not when it was made or purchased, but rather that I wore it for the first time in 2014. (I did pull several older releases out of the list and put them into an Honorable Mention category, though - see below for that.)

This is 2-10 - #1 is coming tomorrow. In alpha order by brand:

• China Glaze Travel In Colour
• Cover Girl Outlast Violet Flicker
• Dollish Polish The Angels Have The Phone Box
• OPI Alcatraz... Rocks
• Pahlish Pyrite
• Serum No 5 Yule Light Up my Life
• Sinful Colors Gilded
• Zoya Carter (Pixie Dust)
• Zoya Teigen

Yule Light Up My Life:

The Angels Have The Phone Box:

Carter, without top coat and with:

Honorable mention (older polishes which I just wore for the first time in 2014):

• Barielle Elle's Spell
• China Glaze Glitter All The Way (former holiday polish inexplicably in Mardi Gras colors)
• Kleancolor Sparkle Purple

Glitter All The Way:

Sparkle Purple:

Other nail products I loved in 2014:
Chick cuticle oil (works great, but mostly I love it for the scent, tangerine-ginger)
Orchid-brand nail polish remover (for the weird pump-action bottle)
Nailthins decals

Orchid remover:

This was rest of my shortlist:
Bonita Peonies Gone Wild
Chick Hipster Chick
Chick Once Upon A Time
Jade Vestido De Gala
Julie G Butterflies & Rosebuds
Lush Lacquer Ho Ho Holodays
Nyx Enchanted Forest
Orly Intergalactic Space
RBL Meow Meow
Serum No 5 Sunset Flare
Square Hue Vaclavske Namesti
Urban Decay Vice
Zoya Posh
Zoya Yuna

Black Friday & NOTDs

So Thanksgiving is over, and theoretically everybody is out shopping today. I'm at work, and they certainly aren't here. I don't mind being at work because I couldn't imagine going shopping today. (We used to, but that was way back before all this Black Friday madness.) Anybody know of any spectacular sales on nail polish that I should know about? If it's something I can buy online or something I have til Sunday or Monday to buy, that's different. I did bring yesterday's paper with me so I can look at the inserts - I didn't remember until last night that they had thrown it, although I vaguely remember hearing them throw it at 3 in the morning. We aren't supposed to get the Thursday paper, we subscribe for Wed & Sun only (and I mostly only wanted it because it came with the online access) but when I heard it land I remember thinking that was bound to be what it was. They want maximum distribution for all those ads.

Here's what I've had on my nails - but unfortunately I didn't get a picture at all of the first one, and the picture on the 2nd one is of limited use. -- As I said I was going to at the very bottom of the last entry, I put on I Volunteer As Tribute (over black) on Wednesday night, so I had it on when we went to see "Mockingjay" last night - not that anybody except my husband noticed. It looked great, though - it's glitter in what I think is meant to be fire colors in a black jelly base. (Here's Addicted to Lacquer's pictures, but I don't know how she got coverage that good with 3 coats - she must have dabbed it on, which I didn't do. Mine looked pretty but much more sparse than that, and of course my base made it much darker.) And then by last night I had banged that up, so now I'm wearing Zoya Carter, the purple Pixie Dust, which is also gorgeous. I'm not wearing top coat, so if it's banged up tonight I'll probably just patch it up and put top coat on to stretch it through tomorrow.

Here's Carter under the fluorescents, and as usual, in this lighting it looks much too blue. Carter is a dark purple base with sparkles that look almost fuchsia, so the overall effect shifts much more red-violet than it looks here. But at least you can see the sparkle pretty well.

One thing about Pixie Dusts is that they do patch up really well - which is good because they take a long time to dry, and I for one am prone to forgetting that and messing them up before they dry completely!

Oh, and if you're wondering, Mockingjay was really good. I never really thought the first two completely lived up to the books, but this one is much closer.

Trying the Untried: It Rubs The Lotion On Its Skin

I was wearing It Rubs The Lotion On Its Skin earlier this week - I had also posted a bottle shot of  it recently (2nd picture down, at that link). I know I took an iPhone picture of it the other night so unless it didn't get saved somehow it should be around here somewhere. It's really pretty - and really similar to those other two that were in the same picture, which is wonderful since those are both discontinued. So is this one, I'm pretty sure, but at least I have a full bottle of it. (Note to polish companies for next fall: there need to be more polishes with a brown base and copper glitter. I at least will buy it like a shot.)

OK, I unearthed the phone picture and it's not great but at least you can get the idea.

This was after I'd had it on for a couple of days, so there's some wear, but not too bad. It's prettier than it looks there, but I don't think it quite has the full Pumpkin Spice level of goodness. (Bear in mind that that's just saying it doesn't measure up to my all-time favorite polish. This is by no means a slam! Also, I did actually grit my teeth and throw P-Spice into the trash, finally. I guess I am a hoarder at heart, because it pained me to do it.)

(Note: I've fixed the link on my indie polish page now, but Different Dimension has switched to using Big Cartel, apparently - when I bought mine they were on Etsy. In any case I looked and I didn't see this polish listed any more.)

In unrelated news, I was poking around old entries and I clicked on a link which took me somewhere I wasn't expecting: apparently Beyond Polish is now Sleek Nail. I had not bought anything from them under either name, before now, but they had some older OPIs for half-price, so I bought a few - I think it was two from the Texas collection plus Here Today Aragon Tomorrow, which I've wanted for ages. With shipping it was about $16, so that's less than the price of two at full retail even counting shipping (which I do when deciding whether something is a bargain).

I took this picture the other day because I happened to notice that there was a similarity between these which I wouldn't have expected:

That's Honey You Should See Me With A Crown (Dollish), Teigen, and This Is Halloween (LynB). The first two definitely have gold glitter in them, and it's harder to pin This Is Halloween down because it has so many different colors in it, but I suspect there's some gold in there, too. There's kind of a progression from right to left from peachy to more fuchsia. I think it was the winter sunlight (well, autumn, but we've had some pretty wintry weather already) that made me notice this.

I've got another Ipsy bag that I will take a picture of when we have some sunlight again (and I remember before this early early sunset we have this time of year!). That's the one with Guys & Galaxies in it, which I believe I already mentioned. I went rooting through my stash yesterday looking for seasonal stuff - I'm starting to think about Christmas, although I'll probably wait at least until Dec. 1st to really start trotting out the Christmas stuff. (And much later than that on things like red-and-green glitters!) In the meantime I'm wearing Elle's Spell over Zoya Jem (man, my fingers want to hit that G and write "Gem" instead every time) and playing with whether to mattify it - it's gorgeous either way, really. But actually it's hair-washing day so I'll probably have to start over after I do that, anyway. I don't know what I'll do next! (Added: oh, yes, I do, too, I have I Volunteer As Tribute still unworn, and there won't be any better timing for that one!)