More mini mani polishes

More Ciaté polishes (I believe this is days 3-7 on the advent calendar!)

 

The silver bottle in the second picture above is the Gelology top-coat, by the way. I haven't worn any of these yet, I've just been swatching as I open day by day. So I'm not going to try to comment individually on them. The color descriptions are Ciaté's - it would never occur to me to call that color "mink"!

Prima Ballerina (mink creme, 1 coat)

Purple Rain (purple shimmer - I would call this a top-coat, really, but this is two coats on the wheel)

Iced Frappe (pink nude creme, 1 coat)

Golden Hour (rose gold pearl, 2 coats)

As I mentioned before, the early days of this seemed to be heavy on the nudes - however, (as you can see on the upper part of the wheel above) there are brighter colors later on!

Queen Of Hearts

This is a little Lucky 13 mini, Queen Of Hearts:

This came with the order I did a month or so ago, but somenow I didn't get a swatch picture taken at the time. I had ordered one mystery polish with that order - that one was The War Doctor. But I also saw something on the website about a free mystery polish with every order so presumably that's what this is.

This is a pretty hard-to-pin-down polish - purplish and shimmery and something more complex that I can't really identify. Luckily Anya did send me a little more information along with the order!

I googled "Lucky 13 Queen of Hearts" and didn't find any polish pictures so that leads me to think this must not have gotten beyond being a prototype. I'm sure I'll try it out (although probably without a magnet) and anyway, it's a cool thing to have as a collectible, in any case!

Added: here's some more experimenting - with an actual magnet, and another swatch, too.

(I was talking yesterday about having more polishes than I could reasonably wear, and one way I've decided to deal with that is to be frank with myself about the fact that I'm only keeping some things as collectibles, and designating a separate place to keep those. That doesn't mean I can't wear them if I decide I feel like it, it just means the pool of polishes I'm actually choosing from on a day-to-day basis doesn't necessarily include them. It's a bigger chunk of my stash than I would have guessed - older drugstore stuff, discontinued brands, indies that were LE - and getting them out of the way while still acknowledging that I'm not actually getting rid of them is actually more freeing than I would have thought!)

Stop, Razzmatazz

This is two minis that I've had for some years, Orly Razzmatazz and Hard Candy Stop:

I bought both of these in sets. The Hard Candy one I got over 10 years ago, I know; and the Orly somewhat later - maybe five years ago, or a little more, shortly before I started this blog. I ordered both of them online. The Orlys were a set of four - you can see them here. The Hard Candys were a set of five - there were two very dark ones, a black and a purple, and a silver - which was a mini of Trailer Trash; I also have it in a regular size. The fifth one is Scam, which is a bright pink microglitter. (I really love it and wish I had gotten it in a full-size bottle.)

These two colors are very similar but you can see (I hope!) that they aren't identical. Razzmatazz is pinker, and the glitter in it is smaller and has more of a tendency to sink down into the polish and vanish, on the nail. Stop is more obviously glittery, in person, and on the nail it has a slight texture. (I think one coat of top-coat would get rid of it, though. And Razzmatazz reads as more pink. Stop is more neutral-colored: just a plain fire-engine/stop-sign red.

I thought I had pictures of both separately, but I can only find Stop:

(I guess I swatched it twice, because you can see that the wheel is different.) I do have pictures of the labels on both bottles, for what that's worth:

Hot Stuff

This is Orly Hot Stuff (a mini, in this case):

I really like this color - it's a deep fuchsia, which is something that's surprisingly unusual. (This is a discontinued color, but I think there are some things that are close - Zoya Dita comes to mind.)

Whatever Lola Wants, Naked

Here are the last two Midnight Garden polishes - both of these are still available as individual polishes, as well, I believe. I think both of these are shades that have been around for some years, for that matter. And both of them are sheers.

Whatever Lola Wants
Created with Kelly Ripa
"sassy sparkling lilac/lavender" (sheer shimmer)

Naked (sheer)

"clean bare beige"


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I Feel Pretty, Fools Rush In

Here is Lippmann I Feel Pretty:

and Fools Rush In (both minis, from the Midnight Garden set):

These are both right in my wheelhouse because they're mid-toned, not too dark and not too light. They're the kind of colors you see referred to as pastel sometimes (especially around Easter) but they're really not, so much. (I use the term "semi-pastel" sometimes for borderline colors, but honestly I'm not sure these are even that close. These are just plain mid-tones.)

The labels both have the same number on them, so maybe that number indicates the Midnight Garden set, I don't know.

Deborah Lippmann Midnight Garden set

I would wait to show this "Midnight Garden" set til I had better pictures, but it's an exclusive to the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale, and it is still showing up as available on Nordstrom's website, so I thought I'd go ahead and mention it in case somebody's not already aware of it. The sale continues for the rest of this week - until the 6th, which is Sunday. The set is $29 and ships for free to the US (and if you have one of those $10 Nordstrom Notes they've been giving out to promote their rewards program still sitting around, which I did, that gets it down to $19).

Added: I happened to notice that the minute the Nordstrom's sale ended, this popped up on Deborah Lippmann's own site. So you can still get it - still $29.

These are mostly not new polishes, so if you have a lot of Lippmann you are probably not interested in this. But if you're like me and you don't, it's a pretty good deal.

It's five mini size polishes - left to right, they are Love In The Dunes, I Feel Pretty, Whatever Lola Wants, Naked, and Fools Rush In. Naked and Whatever Lola Wants are current colors but the other three don't seem to be. (I don't believe any of them are new, though, either.)

It is valued at $60, the box says, which seems a little high - do they really sell their 0.27 ounce minis for $12? (I suppose they might!) Let's compare this instead to the price of five full-size polishes - at $18 each, that would be $90. So getting the half-sized ones for a third of that price sounds like a pretty decent deal to me.

(I'm outing myself as a closet hard-rock fan here, but I keep wanting to type "Wicked Garden" for the name of this set, after the Stone Temple Pilots song. I've had to stop myself a couple of times. At least now I have that song for an earworm instead of the pop song I had before.)