Fuchsia Glamour, Reagan

This is NYC Fuchsia Glamour (even though that's not what the bottle says) and Zoya Reagan:

I'll go hunt the links down later, but at some point I found somebody else's picture of a bottle of a very-pale-pink NYC polish labeled Fuchsia Glamour - so just the opposite of mine; this was clearly a case where the labels were swapped. Note that the positioning of the wheel is faulty, here, as well - FG is the bottom swatch in this picture, which probably means I knocked them askew when I was taking the picture, I'm guessing. But it was close enough that I didn't feel like I needed to re-take it. FG and Reagan look closer on the wheel in this picture than they do in the bottle, although I think that's misleading - I went back and pulled out the actual wheel and Reagan is considerably darker. (I might have another go at taking pictures of this after all, later on, just to see if I get different results with different lighting and the new camera.) I also confirmed that Fuchsia Glamour is indeed a bit streaky, although it may not be all that noticeable.

Stash: purple & pink shimmers (plus some strays)

top row:

• unlabeled beige shimmer (mini)
• Winterberry (Sinful) - a great taupe-ish purple, leaning somewhat more to the purple side than the taupe. Really a lovely color, which I've worn quite a lot. I'm linking to Nouveau Cheap's dupe post, but for further comparison, I can tell you that I have Gray Area, which is also in that post, and Gray Area is definitely much more neutral. Also, while Winterberry is definitely a shimmer, I don't think it's as all-out frosty as it looks in those pictures. (Also in NC's SC top 10.)
• Purple Potion (Xtreme Wear) - blue-leaning dark purple with blue duochrome flash (I didn't remember this, so I re-swatched it on a wheel to be sure, but the duochrome is definitely there. Actually it looked like the base color was more of a red-violet, but with two coats it darkens and you can't see that any more.
• Harmonie (Zoya) - this is really an old-fashioned frost. I didn't get around to wearing it this year at Easter, but the past several years, I have - it's a perfect shiny spring more-or-less-pastel purple. By which I mean that it's not really all that pastel, as far as I'm concerned, but neither are many of the "pastels" that float around in the spring each year. It's close enough to pass as pastel, without being pale enough that it's hideously unflattering on me.

second row:

• Fiji (Sinful) - blue leaning purple - unfortunately I had to toss this one because I seem not to have closed it properly! I hate it when that happens.
• Just A Little Dangerous (Sephora by OPI) - dark purple with lighter pink/purple shimmer (also here are comparison swatches with Grape Set Match among others)
• Shopping Frenzy (Sephora by OPI) - bright fuchsia with a lot of shimmer - I keep thinking I see a little bit of coral flash to it. I'm not sure if it's got a little bit of orange duochrome flash in that shimmer, or if it's just my imagination!
• Posh Plum (Xtreme Wear) - red-violet with lots of shimmer
• Blackberry (Petites) - I was kind of surprised to find a link for this, but I did. This is a dark violet-leaning red, and a really, really pretty one. (mani from 2013)

third row:

• Germanicure (or maybe it's German-icure, you see it both ways, and my mini is unlabeled)(OPI) - this almost seems like a marsala-type color, now - reddish-brown, with heavy shimmer verging on metallic
• Departure (L'Oreal Jet Set) - this is marked "perle" - I'd sort of forgotten that they used to mark them like that. Jet Set used to be my favorite polish back in the day, although I don't think this was ever my favorite color. It's a sort of nude/pink shimmer. I think as pale colors go, this one's not too wildly unflattering on me!
• Pink Sizzle (L.A.Color) - sort of a medium-pink - I'd call it rose (more of a true rose, not to be confused with "dusty rose" which leans much more gray)
• Unbreakable Heart (Hard As Nails) - a really nice shimmery red, maybe slightly darker than average
• Magenta Mirage (Color Show Shredded) - remember a couple of years ago when all the polish companies were trying to get some mileage out of the last dregs of the crackle trend by calling it something else? Thus, "shredded" - this is actually a really pretty color and I've worn it a couple of times (which is more than I've worn any other crackle, at least). As I recall, it did tend to crack into large pieces like the picture at the link, rather than smaller ones which would really be more what I imagine for "shreds".

bottom row:

• Aphrodite's Pink Nightie (OPI) - I've had this one for years. It's pretty close to being an old-fashioned frost, really, but usually I wear this one on top of another pink (usually Japanese Tea Garden, another oldie) and for some reason I like that combination better than just about any other pale-pink I've tried. (This is apparently from the "Greek Isles" collection in 2004. I might not have bought it the minute it came out, but I think it's probably fair to say that I've had this polish for 10 years or near to it.)
• Strawberry Electric (Revlon) - a shimmery fuchsia with slight blue flash
• "Pink Champagne" (NYC Long Wearing) (**mislabeled** - see discussion below) - fuchsia with heavy shimmer, almost a duochrome flash
• unlabeled fuchsia mini
• Crushed (Xtreme Wear) - bright orange with heavy shimmer. (To me many of these older Xtreme Wear colors seem to have the same finish.)

**I'm putting the question of the mislabeled NYC polish down here because it got so long. I picked up this pretty fuchsia one day, and I remember seeing "Pink Champagne" and thinking it wasn't what I'd think of as that color. I wouldn't have bought it if it had been pale pink - at the time I just shrugged and bought it anyway. I thought it was odd enough that I did check NYC's website at the time, though, and Pink Champagne was pictured as exactly what I was thinking, a very pale pink; from looking at the website, I decided then the polish that was in my bottle looked most like Fuchsia Glamour. I had wondered about it in the couple of years since then, but I hadn't found any confirmation for this in previous searches, probably because I searched badly - I think I tried something like "nyc pink champagne" and that brought up so much other dreck (brands of cheap champagne, NYC vacations, stuff like that) that I couldn't find what I was actually looking for. The other day I finally tried "nyc fuchsia glamour" and found that Imperfectly Painted had mentioned this from the other end - that is, she has a bottle of "Fuchsia Glamour" that's pale pink and was presumably meant to be named Pink Champagne. (Apparently the pale one is something that was a bit more rare a couple of years ago, a flakie.) I also poked around on Nouveau Cheap, where this was discussed a bit but if they posted a definite answer I couldn't find it. I think it's pretty clear that it was in fact a mix-up with the labeling, in any case.

NOT Pink Champagne

I was talking in my last entry about buying NYC Pink Champagne, but apparently I only thought that's what I bought. In all fairness to me, I thought that because it was labeled that - but apparently it is mislabeled, because if you look all the way at the bottom of this page, Pink Champagne is there - it is, as you'd expect, a very pale pink. However, the bottle I bought which was labeled Pink Champagne looks more like it might be Fuchsia Glamour, from a couple of rows up. I'm not sure about that, but it's definitely more in that color family. And I like it, whatever it is. (I would never have picked up that super-pastel one, in fact.)

So I wore that polish (whichever it is) for a few days, and then I switched back to Zoya. I'm sort of on a Valentine's Day theme and have been sticking with reds and pinks, and it occurred to me that I hadn't worn Zoya Rory in ages - in fact, I'm pretty sure I only ever wore it once, because it turned out to be one of those colors that's kind of pale for my coloring. So I decided to try putting Kieko under it, to see if that would help. Kieko is a creme that's a pretty similar color family but quite a bit darker - and I do think it helped a bit. At least, I didn't feel like it washed me out as much as I did the last time I wore Rory. (I ought to try swatching these things to really see, but I never get around to it!)

I did snap a picture, at least:

and in fact if you look at other pictures of Rory, like the one in the link above and the one in, say, PolishAholic's blog, they do look quite a lot lighter than this. So maybe layering it did make a difference! (ADDED: I do think some of that is the lighting, though - it's still on my nails right now and it looks lighter than this.)