NOTD: Spaced Out

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.

Queen Of Hearts, part 2

I talked about Lucky 13 Queen Of Hearts a month or so ago. (Read Anya's little note at that link if you didn't before.) This polish was intended to be a magnetic but apparently didn't work out too well. Now that I have a new magnet to try it with, I did actually try it again to see if I could do anything on that score, and well, maybe Anya was right, because I still couldn't get anything to happen on the nail. There definitely is some magnetic oomph of some sort in there, though:

It's hard to tell from this angle, but the magnet is holding the whole (very small) bottle of polish in the air. So clearly the magnetic material is in there, even if it's not doing what it's supposed to otherwise!

Anyway, magnet or no magnet, this is a pretty polish.

KBShimmer multichrome magnetics

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!

KBShimmer's bag of polishes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magnetics:

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

Here is Jess' review of the magnetics:

Charge It Up

This is Charge It Up, one of my handful of magnetics:

It's a nice grayed-out steel blue. I didn't try to put a pattern into this swatch. The only picture I could find with a magnet pattern is this one on Flickr - I don't remember it looking like this with the multicolor effect but this says it's Charge It Up. Obviously this is one I need to try again! On the other hand this is a pretty cool color even without the magnet.

(Note: the link above was missing but that's been corrected.)

Is That Silva?

This is OPI Is That Silva? - which is a magnetic polish from the Skyfall collection. (The other polish in this picture is Trailer Trash, which has already been discussed.)

I don't know where my magnets for all my magnetic polishes are, but there's a picture of Is That Silva used with the magnet that actually came with it somewhere on this blog, and I'll try to track it down and add it here. Here we go:

(that was easy, it popped up right towards the top of all my old pictures when I looked). Honestly, of all the magnetics I've tried, this is the one I've had the best luck with - pretty much the only one I've really gotten to come out looking like it was meant to, I'd say. But this polish may be difficult to find since that movie was, what, four years ago, and this wasn't a really widely-distributed polish at the time, either. (I didn't see it on Amazon just now when I looked.)

Here's an entry where I was talking about the polish and how I applied it. This is the entry where the picture originally was, although I don't talk much more about it there, really.

Lizard Belly, Crocadilly

This is Glitter Gal Lizard Belly and Essie Crocadilly (a magnetic):

This is the Very Neutral Gray-Green section of my stash. Both of these do generally look more green than they look here, as I recall, but just the same they're both pretty grayed-out. I think Crocadilly is a hair greener but color-wise these are pretty similar, I'd say. But Lizard Belly is a holo and Crocadilly is a magnetic so they don't end up looking terribly alike. I am generally too impatient to get good results with magnetics, but when I've fiddled around with this one long enough I've gotten some pretty decent-looking results. (Never what it looks like in other people's pictures, though. Usually it's more like what you see on my swatch, with a patch here and a patch there with the croc pattern. That can end up looking kinda interesting, just the same.) Basically I don't own many holos because I'm too impatient for them, too. I want them to flare up all the time like they do in the sunlight, and of course they don't. Lizard Belly is a super-cool looking green when it does flare up, though.

Glitter Gal is an Australian brand, and I see that Lizard Belly is still available. (I didn't get mine directly from them, but assuming that they're actually shipping from Australia, I can tell you from past experiences with other companies that it typically takes a week or two to the US.) Crocadilly stayed around for a pretty long time but I don't see it on Essie's website so it's presumably discontinued. It might still be findable if you were determined to have it, though.

Feifei, Charge It Up

This is Zoya Feifei and Sinful Colors Charge It Up (a magnetic):

These are both blue-grays and they both seem to me to have a touch of purple to them, although if so it's quite subtle. (It might just be the light.) Feifei is a glass-fleck and Zoya calls it steel blue (although they also call it metallic, which I would not). Charge It Up is a magnetic in a slightly darker blue-gray; I didn't attempt to get pictures of the magnetic effect (for one thing, I'm not sure what I did with the magnets!) but here's somebody else's. I know I did try the magnet on this one once and I was surprised at how much like liked it.

Feifei is a current color; magnetics are way out of style so I'm assuming Charge It Up is long gone.

Butterflies & Rosebuds, Morning Moneypenny

This is Julie G Butterflies & Rosebuds, and OPI Morning, Moneypenny (which is a magnetic):

These are darker red-violets - not as dark as Fig, as you can see on the wheel, but still definitely on the darker side. It's really not what you expect of a color called Butterflies & Rosebuds - maybe that's the point. Here is a swatch of B&R - I called it a blackened color back then, I notice, which might be true but if so it's not really spectacularly obvious. B&R is a microglitter and possibly that might be a fair description of Morning Moneypenny. It's got some scattered holo bits, I think, and of course it's a magnetic, but I didn't have a magnet ready to try that out here. And I'm not really that into magnetics, let's face it - like a lot of people I had a little flurry of interest where it was fun to play with them, and then I was pretty much over it. But luckily this is also a nice color even aside from the magnet effects.

Butterflies & Rosebuds is still showing up on the Jesse's Girl site as a current color. (Julie G is made by Jesse's Girl.) Morning Moneypenny was part of the Skyfall tie-in colors, and might still be findable, although it's not a current color, I'm sure enough about that that I'm not going to go check on it. I think the magnetics in particular were meant to be LE.

Hipnotic, Burgundy Scales

This is Finger Paints Hipnotic and Funky Fingers Burgundy Scales:

These are more special-finish polishes - a magnetic and a crackle - and both of them have spelling issues, to my mind, although I think that one is deliberate and one is not. "Hipnotic" is the one I think was on purpose - it's a pun, right? The other one I corrected in the title - the label says "Burgandy Scales" which for some reason drives me slightly insane to look at. Anyway, they are actually quite similar colors. I don't seem to have tried the magnet on the swatch (or it had faded out since I did the swatching) I don't know if you can see the cracks in Burgundy Scales in this picture, but they are there - they tend to cluster around the edges, I've found. It doesn't crack all over, like some do. I sort of considered these as destash candidates because I don't wear them much, but I actually like this color and so far I haven't convinced myself to part with them.

NOTDs: AB/black & Hipnotic

This is 2 coats of Aurora Borealis over WnW Black Creme:

This is a picture of my right hand instead of the more normal left - even though I'm left-handed, I almost always take pictures of my left hand. (I'm fairly ambidextrous but that still seems a bit odd, and I'm not entirely sure why that's my habit.) In this case, I took pictures of both but I thought the angle was more interesting on this one. Anyway, AB does what flakies tend to do and shimmers and shifts around depending on the angle and the light. (For example, here's the picture I took on its previous outing, which looks quite a bit different.) It definitely inclines toward green/gold/copper, though, I would say. (And actually in the light I'm in as I write this - fluorescent - I see what might be purple.)


This is a mess of a painting job, but I did think it came out pretty cute, overall. This is Finger Paints Hipnotic - 2 coats - over whatever I had on before that, which I guess was I'm Not Really A Waitress. (Hipnotic is very opaque, so whatever is under it isn't peeking out much, anyway.)

Karen had sent me this polish... man, a while back, I'm not even sure... definitely a year or more ago or probably more like two or three... and I just hadn't ever gotten around to trying it. I really mostly never did get the hang of magnetics, which is probably why I avoided trying it for so long! but this one did decently well, and I like the color. (In real life it wasn't actually as bright as it looks here.) So overall I'm still running at maybe 40% success rate with magnetics, but it's also still a small sample. I need to dig some more of them out and have another go with it. (I do know that the ones I've done the best with - Finger Paints and OPI - are the ones where the magnet design gives you a better look at what you're doing. It's hard to get the magnet close enough if you can't see.)

Nail wheel - black, white, gray

Blacks, grays, and a couple of whites:

1. Bad Chick (Sinful Colors Nail Art, which is why I painted it in stripes)
2. unnamed white creme (Color Theory set)
3. -
4. Wet Cement (Sally Hansen Xtreme)
5. -
6. Gray By Gray (Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure)
7. -
8. Is That Silva? (OPI magnetic)
9. The Symbiote (Chirality holo)
10. unnamed gray creme (Color Theory set)
11. Steely Gaze (Hard as Nails)
12. Gray's Anatomy (Wet n Wild/Fast Dry)
13. Slick Black (Sally Hansen Triple Shine)
14. Starry Night (Sonia Kashuk)
15. Black Illusion (L.A. Girl holo)
16. Jet Black (Hard as Nails)
17. Black Creme (Wet n Wild/Wild Shine )
18. unnamed black creme (Color Theory set)
19. Vibe (old Hard Candy mini)
20. - 

I've added a couple of things in the blank spaces since this picture was taken, so eventually I need to go back and take more pictures of the top side of this wheel, where it was incomplete!

One thing I noticed is that almost everything on this wheel is drugstore polish. I think I just don't think it's worth spending money on higher-end for blacks, and I barely buy whites at all. I just haven't gotten around to it with grays, I think, because I do actually like grays. It might be worth noting also that Sally Hansen makes some great grays, which is why there's a lot of those here.

It's barely worth posting the whites, but here you go:



At least you can see the striper. The other one is barely visible at all. (Note that #3 is blank - you can tell the difference between 2 & 3, but just barely.)

I don't seem to have gotten a picture of 4, but as I said, I'm going to have to take new pictures of that part of the wheel anyway. (6) is Gray by Gray, which is a dark gray with an almost-indigo tinge to it.

(8) is Is That Silva? which is the Bond magnetic - I didn't try to use the magnet on this. It's pretty on its own, anyway. (There's a picture of it where I did use the magnet here.) (9) is the Chirality holo - you can see the holo effect in both these pictures, above and below).

(10) is another of those unnamed/probably L.A. Colors polishes - I've never remembered to look & see if there's an L.A. Colors that matches this. It's quite pretty, actually. It's most similar to (12) which doesn't show up well in either of these pictures. (These must be older pictures - later on I got a rhythm of taking 1-4, 5-8 and so on. Or maybe all those blank spaces threw me off.)

(13) is apparently Slick Black, which you notice is not very black at all without a base coat under it. (14) is Starry Night, which is black with little sparkles; (15) is the L.A. Girl holo.

 (16) is what Jet Black looks like with just one coat. I used it a lot in these wheels and it gets pretty opaque, but it takes a good three coats to get there. (Compare with the WnW next to it, although I can't swear that's one coat, because I don't have consistent notes on this wheel on that.)

(18) is another unnamed - I'm not sure if it has a little sparkle in it or if that's just dust - I'm going to have to go inspect this wheel later and see if I can tell! - Possibly it's dust, actually, because (19) is Vibe, which I'm pretty sure is a straight-up black creme. I'll report back if I figure out anything different.

And yay, that is the end of my original set of wheels. From here on out it's all things that I've added since last September, but that's several more wheels worth by now!

Violet & red-violet wheel

I find the color "violet" vaguely confusing. Maybe it's because I'm from Texas and I had never seen a violet growing in the wild until I first went to Ohio to visit my in-laws. (My mother-in-law looked at me like I was insane when I saw one on the ground at the park and said, "What's that?" I had no idea that was how they grew.) Anyway, for whatever reason, I have trouble with the difference between purple and violet. I suspect I'm not the only one. But when a purple starts having noticeable red tones, then I know that's a red-violet. (I also tend to use the term blue-violet for blue-leaning purples, mostly because that lets me avoid the word "blurple" which I think is just an ugly word.)

So this wheel starts with some fairly neutral purples but then shades very much into red-violet.

(more under the jump)

Shades of rose

Let's start off with a picture, which I will explain later on:

Let's see, I haven't posted in enough days that I'm having trouble remembering what I've had on since I last mentioned it. I think that after Ali, I looked around at the other pinks I had that looked neon-ish, and settled on a Revlon I hadn't worn in several years, Strawberry Electric. It looked very "electric pink" in the bottle, if not quite a full-on neon. I didn't get around to taking a picture, but here's somebody else's picture that comes pretty close to what mine looked like: The Blahg.

Aside: I nosed around on Revlon's website, and I don't think they have this color (Strawberry Electric) listed any more, although I'm pretty sure it was available not too too long ago. They seem to be changing a lot of colors to one-word names like Scandalous - which I showed here not long ago - and Delicious. I do notice that they still have Cherries in the Snow, though. It's supposed to one of their oldest colors, I read somewhere, going back to the early years of Revlon in the 1930s. This piece talks about Revlon lipsticks, but it includes a picture of an old ad for Cherries in the Snow. I'm pretty sure I have owned Cherries in the Snow somewhere along the line, but I would like to try it again sometime. Although I am totally awash in nice reds these days.

Anyway, I don't think Strawberry Electric is anything like that old but I'm pretty sure it's one that's been around a while. And it's, well, kind of blah, really. I mean, it's okay, but it's just a frosty medium pink, not really what I would call "electric" at all.

So, as I do, I put a coat of Chloe on top of it. Then I decided that the problem was that rosy-pink - which there is nothing wrong with, per se, but which I am just not in the mood for lately - and Chloe was not going to change it enough to make me happy. So I put a coat of Reva on top of it instead. Problem solved (by making it more or less a whole other color, but oh well.)

What I didn't do was put top coat on top of Reva, so that didn't actually last very long. I took that off, and then I got immersed in nail wheels (much more on that to come) and completely failed to do anything about my actual nails for a whole day. I did think to take a picture of my bare nails, though - imperfect cleanup and all:

I will add that I did go back and clean them up better after this - there's a lot of pink left down in the edges, here, if you look closely. If you did look closely, you also saw that something a couple of weeks ago stained my nails quite a bit, although I've certainly had much worse staining than this! If I think of it, I'm going to look back and try to figure out what it was. I know it was before last weekend, so it wasn't Knees Up.

I am starting to get kind of fond of this shorter nail length. I have so much trouble with peelies that it makes life easier to keep them pretty short, anyway. I'm never consistent about it so I'm sure I will let them grow out at least a little, but I may start thinking of this sort of length as the default.

Anyway, I eventually put on Morning, Moneypenny, which was the picture at the beginning. I got much better results than the last magnetic I tried, but still iffy since it's really hard to tell what the pattern is. Is That Silva? is still the only magnetic that I'm prepared to call an unqualified success. (I still have one more that I haven't tried, though - the Finger Paints that Karen sent me. It seemed kind of like a fall color, so I was saving it for later.) Anyway, the color of Morning, Moneypenny is quite nice. It looks like a dark-pink shimmer in the bottle, but the magnet brings out even darker tones, so that it barely looks like a pink at all, in the end.

And I have been playing with nail wheels since they came in the mail the other day, and here is a preview (I wouldn't recommend trying to read my writing, it's a mess):

The translating of that will probably figure largely in the next entry. (I did green first, on the right, and then the blue-green one on the left. And I've pulled out all my metallics to do next.)

Assorted purchases, and more green polish

I should note first that I posted an entry on Thursday about a mani that included Jesse's Girl Glee, and never linked it on Twitter like I usually do, so some of you probably missed it. That's here, if you're interested.

(Saturday)
Last night I put on the Pretty Serious polish that I got at Llarowe, Party by the Pool. And it's gorgeous. Now it's a jelly, and it has the usual jelly problems - it's streaky, it's really hard to apply evenly, it takes forever to dry, etc. And it took 4 coats to get it the way I wanted it to look, but it's worth it. (I've already managed to mess it up, so there probably won't be a picture. Plus it's been cloudy all weekend so my usual natural-light pictures would be even worse than usual.)

The Lacquerologist (who is a professional nail tech) has a good piece about Vinylux, which is something I've been wondering a bit about. I might have to try out a color or two at some point. It seems like a good compromise between regular nail polish and gel.

I looked at Incoco's website the other day because somebody (Karen?) linked to it - that might've been on Twitter, actually, rather than on her blog - and now it's the ad on practically every website I look at. They do have some pretty designs, I gotta admit, but I just have not given in to the nail sticker thing yet. I can buy a whole bottle of nail polish for that price, and get far more than just one or two manicures out of it.

(new mani and some stash additions after the jump)

Possible spoilers for Karen, and lots of coats of glitter

Here is Shelby topped with Big City Dazzle, not that you can really tell much about the latter: 

I can't remember at what point in the process I took this picture, but I was in experimenting mode, and after some FIVE coats of BCD, I also later pulled out one of the Color Theory pink glitters that I had never tried, and added a couple of coats of that, on top of the rest. There's so many coats of nail polish in this mani (ten, I think, counting base coat) that it's a wonder it hasn't just peeled off in sheets. So far so good, though, and as far as I can tell all the Color Theory added was some extra shinyness.


I'm really kidding about the spoiler business in the title, because Karen has had the box I sent her for our swap for several days now, and although she's been terrifically busy this week, I gather, still, I assume she's had time to open it by now, and it's "safe" for me to post my picture of what I sent her for my half of our swap:

(I didn't crop this because I thought you might be interested to see what I've been taking my pictures on lately. It's the lid of a plastic box. Hey, it works!)

So this is (L-R across top row & then the bottom):

• Funky Monkey
• OK 1 More Margarita
• Morning, Moneypenny (in its box - this entry has pictures of my bottles and magnets unboxed, if you are curious about the contents)
• Fantasy Makers black mini (which was just a bonus thing; I suspect Karen may already have one but I found it and thought it was cute, so I threw it in)
• Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
• Hot Mess
• Is that Silva? (in box)

She picked out the Orchid colors, from the pictures I took. She sent me five names, thinking that would be more than enough in case they were out of something, but then my HEB store decided to start its BOGO sale early and I was able to get four of the five for half-price, and they didn't have the fifth one. I mentioned hunting for something for her, a few entries back, and that was the elusive fifth polish, but I went to all of the other stores near me and didn't find it. It was "It's Definitely You Not Me" - which is a very packed-looking glitter that you can see in one of the pictures here. But meanwhile she realized I had mentioned finding the Skyfall magnetics, and I ended up buying those for her instead of worrying about more Orchids. We figured out what I ended up spending over and above the cost of the four Gumdrops she had already bought me, and she is sending me something equivalent. I trust her to come up with something cool. (She offered to send money; I offered to let her send money if coming up with the "something cool" was a problem, but she said it wasn't, and I figured I'd really rather have the surprise!) (Karen and I have known each other for more than 10 years now, I guess, and although we rarely meet in person since we live in distant states from one another, we have shopped together - and made quilts together - over the years, and I figure she knows me well enough to come up with something I'll like.)

Is That Silva?

I remember reading about the OPI Skyfall polishes when they came out, but somehow I completely missed the fact that there were magnetics along with everything else. Or maybe it's more that I just ignored them. I haven't been that hot to try magnetics, and then I tried the Essie one (mostly because I liked the fishnet pattern) and it didn't work well at all. But the OPI one with the little pincher-shaped tool did a much better job of controlling how close your nail got to the magnet. I found it did the best when you laid it down on the table and stuck your finger inside and let it sit there a minute like you would with something like a UV light. Except for this it just takes a few seconds. As shown here, the magnet that comes with Is That Silva? is diagonal stripes. As PolishAholic notes in her entry, the wider part of the stripe comes out quite transparent - I did put a thin coat on and let it dry first before I did the thick layer that I put under the magnet, but in any case I don't object to visible nail line as strongly as a lot of people seem to, so it probably wouldn't have bothered me anyway. (I may get a picture of my own eventually, but not tonight. It's been a long, long day.)

Other notes:

• The glitter is really pretty in the sunlight but not overly flashy. Really the total effect is elegant and fairly subtle, considering that there's glitter and stripes involved!
• I'm not sure what the actual retail price is meant to be for these - PolishAholic, as linked above, thinks it's supposed to be $17.50, which is fairly outrageous. I couldn't find them at all on OPI's website - does that mean they're discontinued? - even though the regular Skyfall colors were still there. I did poke around on eBay and Amazon and found prices to be kind of all over the place, but in general anywhere from $9-18. If it's discontinued, it hasn't gotten all that hard to find yet, I'm guessing! But in any case, apparently I got a bargain, because I found it at my grocery store, stuck up on a top shelf, for $7.99. If they still have any left when I finally get back home, I'm totally buying another color.

English rose and crocodile green

Pictures, to go with the last entry (which I don't think I linked anywhere so you may not have seen unless you're checking here regularly).

Rimmel English Rose - this is about 4 or 5 days in, I think, so there's some noticeable tipwear, but on the whole I was quite happy with it.

Essie Crocadilly, which just looks bumpy:

Honestly, I think in real life it looked better than this. Some of the bumpy effect is just the lighting. But it was not by any means the kind of overall magnetic pattern I wanted.

Since I'm posting this on St Pat's Day, I guess I should note that I've had on two more green polishes this week: earlier in the week I wore Zoya Irene, a mossy green, and the last two days I've had on Sally Hansen Xtreme Emerald City, which is pretty much what the name implies, a very glossy emerald.

Problematic, and not

I've tried two things lately that were problematic: the Essie magnetics, and the Revlon Neon nail wand. I poked around and found other people making the same complaints I did in both cases. With the neon thing, it was just really hard to get even coverage. I finally gave up and just went with sort of an ombre effect where the tips were a lot darker than the rest, and it ended up looking okay. I really like the color (Ultra Violet), but getting it even is a bitch. With the magnetic, I couldn't get it even in a different way: I couldn't get the magnet to work right. I only got the all-over effect on one nail, although I eventually got a distribution of patterns that looked okay, and I ran with that. I loved the color (Crocadilly, a very crocodile-ish gray-green) so it's not a total waste even if I never get the magnet to work right. I know some of that may be a learning curve but it seemed like some of it might be the magnet, too.

I bought my first-ever Rimmel London polishes the other day because they had a package deal where you buy the Lasting Finish Pro nail polish and get the base coat/top coat for free. They claim it lasts up to 10 days, and I'm not going to make it even a week, but still, for me that's pretty good. I've had it on since Thursday, I think, and it's Tuesday now and it's just now starting to chip. So not bad at all. The color choice was not fabulous, but I picked up English Rose, which is what you would expect, an old-style (to my mind) rose-colored cream - but old-style is not necessarily a bad thing. I liked it, on the whole. It's more coral-leaning than some rose colors.

The other thing I've worn in the interim is another color from my last Walgreen's haul, the SH Xtreme Wear Pacific Blue. It's an odd color, because it does look very periwinkle in some lights, but not so much in others. So it shifts from a purple-leaning blue to a more pure cyan-ish blue depending on the light. But I liked it. And it's very pigmented, a near one-coater, although I ended up using two. The texture of the wet polish really felt more like paint to me than like lacquer.

ADDED: Pictures of the Rimmel and the Essie in the next entry - here.

Purple season

Like a lot of people, I have a tendency to do my nail polish in seasonal colors - orange in the fall, red and green in December (up until Christmas, at which point I go on a glitter binge if I haven't started before then, that usually carries over well into January), pink and red up til Valentine's, green in March, etc etc. And of course there's sort of a gap here between Valentine's and the point in March when I start thinking about St. Patrick's Day - especially in a year like this one when Mardi Gras has already gone by. I'm not Catholic, and I don't even drink much, nowadays, so Mardi Gras and St. Patrick's Day have no particular meaning for me, but still, they're strongly associated with certain colors, and I like that part of them.

Well, anyway, in the last big entry I said that maybe I'd try purple when Valentine's Day was over, and that's exactly what I did. I did Milani Purple Rush, which was one of those shimmers I talked about in that same entry, and then I did Revlon Plum Attraction, which leans more red-violet. Then I did zigzag off into some other colors, which I'll get to, but while I'm on the purple theme, I also went on a Walgreen's binge today, thanks to a $5-off-$20 coupon, and came home with 4 polishes, 3 of which are basically purple. I spent $16 and I decided that that was close to being half-price off of retail for all of this. I got two of those Revlon nail art wands (which are $8.99 but were buy-one-get-one-half-off AND had a manufacturer coupon for another $1 off). One is from the "Moon Candy" line and it's Orbit, a dark purple undercoat and a lavender-ish glitter. The other one is one of the neons with the white undercoat, in Ultra Violet. I also bought Sally Hansen Xtreme "Pacific Blue", which is a periwinkle and looks pretty purplish to me. (The 4th one is also Sally Hansen, CSM Black and Blue, which is what it says, a blackened blue. I can't call that one a purple.)

The non-purple things I did in the last two weeks were Essie Crocodilly, which is a magnetic polish, and which may have an entry to itself later because the metallic part didn't turn out so well. But I love the gray-green color, anyway. And over the weekend I slapped a couple of coats of Let Me Go on, on the way out the door to work one day, and then added a couple of coats of FeiFei on top of that. (Let Me Go is so sheer that I don't think it made much difference to FeiFei. It just looked the same as it usually does.)

Now, what do I do next? It's going to be purple, I know that, but one of the new purples, or something I already have? I'm not sure myself what the answer is!

(ADDED: The next thing on my nails is, apparently, SH Salon Plum It, a very dark purple, with SC Winterberry on top of that. Which comes out as a very elegant, slightly grayed-out purple. I like it.)