As I've said before, I mostly wasn't buying nail polish during my long hiatus last year. But I did start buying some polish again late in the year, so here's a few pictures:
This one was labeled "Sept new polish":
The Zombie Claw polish came from the Breast Cancer Awareness box - I bought a big box of those a couple of years ago, but this year I only bought the one. The other two were September Polish Pickup polishes. So all three of these were presumably limited edition and aren't obtainable any more. For the record, though, the Zombie Claw (which of course is pink, because BCA) is called Hakuna MaTATA (boob joke, get it?). The Nailed It polish was called Love Is Weakness, and it's much more red than this picture would lead you to believe, with lots of flakies. And the KBShimmer is a purple base, also with tons of flakies. (I have swatches of these somewhere and I'll try to get them up eventually!
And then this trio was a Black Friday purchase, I think - all from Lucky 13, obviously. These three are +5 Sparkle (a top-coat, naturally), Wakanda Forever, and The Sky's The Limit.
I thought I'd put the two top-coats from my favorites wheel together. (I'm trying not to still be talking about favorites in February, so that means I can't go one at a time or I'll never make it!) This is Live Love Polish Basilisk:
I really have liked this a lot when I've worn it, but that's only been once or twice. I swatched it with two coats so you can see it better (when I swatched it before it didn't really show up well).
And then I also re-swatched KBShimmer You Dew You, which is a "unicorn pee" top-coat:
So Unicorn Pee is really shifty and beautiful, in general, but I don't think this swatch shows you much, really. The swatch I did before shows more, in this case. (I'm also making a tag called "unicorn pee(ish)" which is kind of a goofy name but there's so many unicorn-pee and unicorn-pee-like polishes around these days that I decided a tag of some sort was warranted!)
I really need to stop buying top-coats for a while - I love them but I don't wear them all that much and I have a ton of them. I really could have put more of these in the top 20 - I also bought a couple of Starrily ones that I really like. So that's four within the past year or so. I need to not buy them and I need to wear the ones I have a lot. Now I could use somebody to remind me of that periodically - it's the kind of thing I say and then forget about completely.
Yesterday I showed my top twenty, and they I pulled out the ones that are no longer widely available from that. There were seven of those, so that left me with a top 13, which I divided into three tiers - two sets of three, and then all the rest. This was hard to decide - I loved a bunch of these. I waffled around and moved things up and down between the tiers several times. (Note that while I always talk about loving greens, I think this is the most greens I've ever had get this far - four, if I'm counting right - Always Be A Dragon, Cactus If You Can, Bitter Buddhist, and Grinchworthy. More greens than purples, for once!)
Top threein alpha order, andI'll come back to these tomorrow!
Always Be A Dragon (Lucky 13)
Cassiopeia (KL Polish)
Galaxy Gang (Starrily)
Second three:
Cactus If You Can (KBShimmer)
Feel The Chemis-tree(OPI)
Princess Penny (KL Polish)
and the rest:
Aggie (Zoya)
Bitter Buddhist (Smith & Cult)
Enchanted (Starrily)
Pisces (KL Polish)
Grinchworthy (China Glaze)
Rustling Leaves (Night Owl)
You're A Mean One (China Glaze)
I was going to put new swatches of the top 3 in this post, but I'm going to put that off until later. Instead, here's selections from the now-eliminated contestants:
Feel The Chemis-tree
You're A Mean One
(Wow, I thought these were pretty close, but they're awfully near being dupes, from what I can see here. I'm going to have to do a comparison!
Bitter Buddhist
Grinchworthy
(note that two of these are from the Grinch collection! I'm going to be sorry later I didn't buy more of those.)
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!)
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.
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.
This is KBShimmer Spaced Out, and I think you can see in this picture that I did get the magnets working properly. Most of these new magnetics are not meant to make patterns the way the old ones did - stripes etc - but instead you turn them in different directions and it just makes abstract patterns. It's much simpler and I like it more.
Spaced Out is a teal green, with purple shift which you only see at certain angles - thus the pictures below.
It doesn't really have as much tip-wear as it looks like it does. I'm not sure why it looks like that.
I just took it off today, and most of the week it looked really good. Only the last couple of days did it start to really chip.
I've had a bit of a checkered past with magnetic polishes. That is to say, I've had trouble getting them to work properly. Some people loved them, but they had a pretty big learning curve, in general, and after a while they mostly all disappeared. Then, suddenly this year, they're back!
Several companies are doing them - mostly indies, this time around - but KBShimmer's multichrome magnetic line, Launch Party, was the first ones I really noticed. I watched jessface90's YouTube swatches (which I'll link below) and decided this seemed different enough from the mainstream magnetics I had so much trouble with, and maybe I'd give it another try. Then a couple of months went by, and finally KBShimmer had that sale where you got a bag of 6 polishes for $49.95. I've already talked about that here. I ended up with polishes from several different lines, including two of the Launch Party magnetics.
I think a lot of what has changed since the last time around is the magnet. I always had a lot of trouble keeping the magnet out of the nail polish but at the same time close enough to work. It may also be that there is more magnetic material in these new polishes:
(This is the magnet sticking to the bottle on its own. I'll probably save (Lucky 13) Queen Of Hearts for another entry, but I'll tell you now that that polish is in a very tiny bottle and I actually was able to pick the whole bottle up with this magnet.)
Also, I should tell you since I'm linking Jess that I have a slightly different magnet than she does, although they both came from KBS - and they cost the same. The one I got is dual-ended - it has a circle on the other end, which seems to get you curved lines. The other end is a rectangle and seems about the same as the one in the video below.
This is Just A Phase:
Jess calls it a pinky purple gold green. I'm mostly seeing the pinky-purple right now but I haven't ventured outdoors with these yet, either.
This is Spaced Out:
When Jess turns her bottle under the light, you can see teal, purple, and yellow-gold. I can definitely see the colors separate on this one - parts of the nail are teal and others are purple. Again, I haven't seen the gold so much so far.
Anyway, here's Jess' video, below. I have gotten interesting results from my experiments so far and I'm looking forward to trying it out as a full mani!
I rarely wear polishes more than a week - I usually do my nails at the start of my work week and try to keep them for exactly a week (usually layering something over the existing polish if I have wear, rather than starting over from scratch). This is the first time in a long time I've had something at the end of the week that I thought was fit to carry over another day. It's looking kind of ragged now, since I washed my hair the morning before I took this.
It doesn't look too great up close, but all things considered I thought it was rare enough to be worth commemorating. (Here it is a week ago.) Other people brag about getting all these long-lasting manicures, but I guess I'm hard on my nails - it's very rare for me.
(added: day 8, when that picture was taken, was Wednesday. Now it's Friday and I'm still wearing it, so I'm now on day 10. I can't tell you how unusual that is for me. It's a bit more ragged, but still not bad, considering how long it's been.)
This is two coats with no top-coat. I wore it to work that way last night, and it was fine (it had a minute amount of tipwear but nothing significant), but I decided this morning that it was not quite opaque, so I added a third coat and Seche Vite on top. I do like it better that way but it was perfectly wearable yesterday too!
(I don't know if you can really see the pale-pink flash in this picture, but it is noticeably there in real life.)
KBS describes it as a "Holo Flake Shimmer" so it's got a little bit of everything going on (well, everything except outright glitter, at least). "This soft green shade is inspired by one of the best water conserving plants, the cactus. A soft pink shimmer and micro holo sparks, soften up this prickly polish." I haven't worn it yet but I think it's really beautiful.
(Added: I ended up wearing this the day I posted this entry. Picture is here.)
My husband loves puns - he thinks KBShimmer's polish names are great. Anyway, you can see the glitter in the bottle better than on the wheel - it's packed with holo glitter. (I may have to try all the new KBS pictures again - there's far more glitter than you can see even in the bottle, I'd say.)
Added: I talk about Starry Starry Night below, but I just found this post with a comparison with the old version of SSN (waaay at the bottom of the post) and they're close. Carpe Denim looks, well, holo-ier, but otherwise awfully similar.
I have a number of these kinds of polishes - the one I thought seemed immediately most like this was Zoya Dream:
Dream is noticeably more indigo-blue and somewhat lighter than Carpe Denim, but I feel like CD has a bit of that indigo-blue to it too. And it's got a heavy dose of holo but it's not as showy.
Then there's Starry Starry Night (the 2.0 version, the re-release):
(The polish on the left is YSL Bleu Cobalt, which is essentially the same color but lacks the glitter.) I really liked Starry Starry Night a couple of years ago when it first came out - I know everybody says it doesn't hold a candle to the original one, but I never had that. But since then I've gotten Dream and maybe SSN doesn't seem so great in comparision. At least, I didn't particularly think about that, until now, but I haven't worn SSN much.
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:
#squadghouls, from the collaboration collection last fall
Band Geek, which is from a reissue collection called Throwback
Cactus If You Can, from what I believe was last spring's collection, Wanderlust
Carpe Denim, which I think is a core polish - it originally came out in fall 2015
and then two from the Launch Party collection which are magnetic multichromes, Just a Phase and...
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.
This is KBShimmer Witch Way? - which I think may have faded.
This is still available from KBS - I thought it was discontinued. You can see how much brighter it looks in their picture. It is a jelly so of course it gets darker as you layer it, but I feel like this used to be brighter than this.** (scroll down for more on this) (Search for this polish and click on the images and you'll see a pretty big range, but nothing quite as faded-looking as my swatches.)
So I re-swatched it alone and also tried it over black:
It pretty much looks the same as the swatch above when it's alone, and over black you can't tell anything except that there's glitter. Actually I always thought it was best over another purple, anyway (which I didn't think to try when I was swatching, of course), so I guess all this doesn't make that much difference! (If I remember to try it over purple, I will be sure to report back.)
**I was thinking I might have gotten this from a blog sale, but apparently I just got it from KBS, back in 2015 - and then once I knew it existed, I was able to unearth an old mani pic, and... wow. Uh, yeah, it's faded. (Probably my own fault, I used to think the indirect sunlight in my bedroom wasn't strong enough to fade polishes. Pretty sure I was very wrong about that.)
Basically it's a top-coat now! which is ok, really, I love top-coats.
This is KBShimmer You Dew You over So Jelly, which are both from the "Unicorn Pee" collection (which was limited edition and was gone the last I looked):
I've had this on for a couple of days and I washed my hair yesterday, which is doom for most manicures, so this did pretty good, only the one chip! I've worn So Jelly before, but this time I put You Dew You over it, which is just the same pigment in a clear base. It looks really beautiful.
This may have been one of the first multichrome-flakie collections - at least, I remember everybody being completely obsessed with these when they came out. Here is the whole collection from Popsugar, but as I remember it, absolutely everybody who did swatches was swatching these. I'm not sure this was called a limited edition collection, but I checked and it's definitely not currently on the website. Anyway, you can't really see the blue too much here, but this one is a shifty flakie that flashes green-to-blue when the light hits it right. This is one of only a couple of my polishes where I've had people completely drop what they were doing to exclaim over it.
(2) I got an e-mail from KBS announcing that they have done a big redesign - of their logo, website, etc. Their new collection is multichrome magnetics - good lord, magnetics are coming back around again? (What's next, crackles?) I don't have the patience for magnetics but they do look pretty tasty, I have to admit.
(The new logo is cute but has somewhat less personality - really I like this one better.)
I think I mentioned that I'd bought another Unicorn Pee polish - that would be KBShimmer You Dew You:
This is You Dew You over black (probably Black Creme, but it's been a while so I'm not entirely sure of that). You can really see the coppery-reddish tone of the pigment here - it's supposed to shift around but you don't see that here. In my living room light it seems to shift to green at a steep angle, and I think there's also supposed to be some gold. There are a lot of flakies (the ones with much larger flakes, that is) that have a shift like that, seems to me, so I'm not really sure what's supposed to be so rare and magical about it. But in any case it's really beautiful so I'm not seriously complaining.
This collection went in & out of stock on KBS's website but it wasn't there when I looked this week. If the pigment is really as rare as all that I'm guessing it won't be back.
(KBShimmer also sent along this nail polish charm as a freebie.)
Here is KBShimmer So Jelly, one of the Unicorn Pee polishes:
Unicorn Pee is the official-unofficial name of the pigment providing the shimmer in these polishes. (Surely if you order it from a wholesaler or whatever, that's not what they call it, though.) It's called that among nail polish fans because it's supposed to be very rare - and it is officially the name of KBS's collection. So Jelly, as you might guess from the name, has a jelly base in dark red and then that pigment, which is really beautiful. In the jelly base, it just glows.
As usual, crappy picture, but you can see the shimmer so that (to me, anyway) makes up for the very obvious defects! (Clarification: I meant the defects in the picture, not the polish.)
This is KBShimmer So Jelly, which contains the (so-called) "unicorn pee" pigment which is very hard to find and thus much prized among nail polish junkies. I had never actually seen it in person before, but it is really beautiful and I'm glad I tried it out. This is part of a set of 4 polishes but they are all now showing up as out of stock on the KBS website. (I checked because I was going to order another one.) Anyway, this has a dark raspberry-red base (you can see at the base of my nails what it looked like on the first coat) and then the unicorn pee stuff shows up as a sort of coppery-red shimmer. You can't really see it in all lights but it gives the polish a lot of depth even when you can't really see it. When you can, it's quite awesome.
Added: for the record, since I've been on a kick of mattifying practically everything lately - I did not put matte top-coat on this one. I think I used my dwindling bottle of BL Hardwear, and it came out nice & shiny.
This is KBShimmer Excuse Me I Blurpled, which was on my 2016 favorites list:
It's a dark blue-violet (or blurple) jelly with various blue and purple glitters. It's been around for several years, and I've always heard people talk about how much they love it, but until I actually tried it for myself I didn't see what all the fuss was about. (I had to poke around to see where I bought this - I was thinking it was straight from KBS but no, apparently it was in with a bunch of Lynnderellas in a blog sale purchase.) I think this polish was still available until fairly recently but apparently it is no longer.
(Added: here's the previous swatch post, for completeness' sake, but it doesn't really say much.)
