No-buy?

I announced on Dreamwidth the other day that my New Year's resolution was a nail-polish no-buy. For the whole year. We'll see how it goes, of course, but I'm really going to try. I need to Shop My Stash for real, because I have a ton of stuff I've never worn and a lot more that I'd really like to wear again. It's really not as much about the money as about making myself wear what I've got!

(Disclaimer: treatment products and stuff like that don't count. I can buy base-coat and top-coat if I actually need it, but no cheating and buying stuff like Essie TLC that's base-coat and color.)

I keep meaning to post more here but time keeps getting away from me. I think one problem is that I've been unsatisfied with the quality of my pictures, and it's not something I was exactly terribly fastidious about in the first place. My poor iPhone SE (the old SE, not the newer one) is nearly 5 years old. I think I may have to ask for a new one for my birthday this year! Maybe that will get me kick-started again. (I haven't been posting pictures on Instagram much either.)

Even if I don't have new polishes to talk about, I'm still going to try to post now and then. There are other polish-related things to talk about! (I do have maybe a dozen polishes I bought over the fall - including one of the aforementioned TLC colors - to talk about, too.)

Oh, look, I actually do have some pictures! This is CG Green With Jealousy:

The picture is pretty crappy (and the application is worse, to be honest) but I do really like this polish. This is from China Glaze's Halloween 19 collection. I think I found this on Polish Pick. (One thing I can do even if I'm not actually buying polish is point other people to things I like!)

This is an old polish - Cougar Attack! - over a brown base. One of my fall favorites

This is Succulent Garden, which I know a lot of people love, but it just wasn't terribly flattering on me. It's pretty, though. (I bought it in a set from Nordstrom with Velvetine, which I haven't tried yet. Hopefully that one will suit me better!

more moisturizer

Honest Beauty is not really a company I would have thought to buy moisturizer from (nothing against them - just not on my radar!), but I had a sample - from Ulta? from Wal-mart? I don't know - and I really really liked it. So I poked around and found it for sale at Amazon. I really just wanted to be able to refill my sample but I doubt that that's really what I'm going to end up using this for.

It wasn't cheap - $25 or so, I think - but that's not a ridiculous price, either. In fact, I haven't looked closely at what Olay, etc., are charging lately but I'm guessing it's in that same price range.

Here's the container:

This is "Deep Hydration Face Cream," and I just found that it did a really good job of soothing my skin, especially like around the mouth where it tends to get really dry-feeling.

(I put a "buyer's remorse" tag on this entry, and it's not because I don't like this product - obviously, I really do like it. It's just that my moisturizer habit has gotten to the point that I've told myself I'm on a no-buy status for it. I use a ton of it but I'm still buying it faster than I'm using it!)

Pretty Serious haul

I really really didn't intend to spend any significant amount of money on nail polish right now, but as I mentioned in the last entry, I went kind of overboard on Pretty Serious' website the other day, and that order has already arrived, so I have pictures.

This was what was on the box. As I mentioned before, I did this order on Friday night and it arrived on Monday, so bonus points to them for the mega-quick service. (They do have a US shipper, or that would have really been a miracle.)

I started out intending to look at the clearance polishes again, because there was a code over the weekend (now expired, of course) that knocked another 10% off the clearance prices. Then I put several things into my cart and the next step was that I started thinking about hitting their free shipping limit - which is $50, but that's 50 Australian dollars, not American dollars. I can't give you exact numbers, because exchange rates vary and all that, but I've done this several times and it seems to generally work out that $50 Australian is something under $40 in US dollars. So that's when I went a little berzerk. And I registered with a new e-mail address, because I wasn't at home at the time, and PS sent me an e-mail with more coupon codes. It didn't say anything like "new customers only" which would make me recuse myself from using the coupons. They were like "welcome10" and "welcome 20" and it said that each code would work once per customer. I may have gotten an e-mail before that had these same codes, but I certainly hadn't used them except possibly the lowest-value one (which was $10 off any purchase). Since I already had $50 in merchandise in my cart, getting up to $60 to get 20% off the entire purchase sounded eminently doable. (In fact I think it may have come out a little cheaper by the time I got done, but I didn't really sit and do that math at the time.)

So here's what I ended up with:

I love their cute colorful boxes.

Here's the labels (although reading that green one, in particular, may be iffy, depending on your monitor):

Going L-R on the picture above, there's A Christmas Time Paradox, which is basically more or less a Tardis-blue metallic. It's full of silver shimmer, though, which makes it somewhat different than my several other Tardis-blue polishes. Daphne's Birthday Party is just a mixed glitter in Happy Birthday mode, but I've never had one of those that I really liked and it seemed like a good time to give it a try. Then the other Daphne polish is Daphne's Disco Party, which is a matte glitter which I already had but I decided I needed a backup - I've gone through well over half the old bottle one way and another. Then, let's see, Mojito is a topper, basically, I think, a white that shimmers green. And Fairy Lights I'm wearing now and it's not at all a dupe for the Mojito-type things - instead it's a shimmery off-white which comes very close to being opaque after three coats. If you're very choosy about the VNL issue you might want to put a white or off-white undercoat on first. But after three coats and a matte top-coat I'm very happy with what I got. (I did order PS's matte top-coat but I didn't try that yet, I just grabbed my old standby Matte Me Crazy instead. And let's see, then we have The Singing Seed (from the Museum of Naileontology collection) plus Matte All The Things, their version of matte top-coat, and Cute Cuticles Purity which I think is meant to be the non-irritating version of your basic cuticle goo. (Added: I have now tried out Purity and I really like it. I don't have another one of PS's cuticle oils to compare it to, but compared to the several I already own, it feels super-light, like it just practically disappears immediately into your skin.)

I'll have individual swatches up later.

NOTD: No-Buy

This is Pretty Serious No-Buy:

The bottle looks more brown than it really is, but what you see on the nail isn't too far off. I thought at first it was going to read more orange than it actually does - in fact, it reads very true to what it actually is, which is a red with heavy gold shimmer. I am supposed to be on no-buy status for reds, because I have so many, but I bought this one anyway because it was something different, and I can't say I'm sorry.

(From the Serious Business collection.)

Buying habits and bottle size

I just noticed that Colores de Carol, in addition to having a really lovely and colorful new blog header, has a new tagline - " 'I have enough nail polishes' - said no woman ever." Very cute and apropos.

In fact, I said that very thing last summer, although obviously I wasn't serious about it, because I then proceeded to double the size of my nail polish collection in six months. Actually maybe what I said was that I didn't think I really needed any more, in the sense that I had all the major color groups covered. Only then I decided I needed this polish and that one, and somehow it snowballed. Need is a very fluid thing.

I am contemplating this partly because somewhere in my recent orgy of clearance-sale purchases, I hit 300 polishes, according to my spreadsheet. Last spring/early-summer, when I was doing that first set of stash photos, I know I said I had 100-odd full bottles, plus a bunch of minis. A lot of the things I bought in the interim have been minis, and I'm not going to try to figure out the mini-to-full-size ratio,** but anyway, I was under 200 total when I made the spreadsheet back then, and now I'm over 300. So a lot of buying has gone on. (I did get the dozen China Glazes for free, yes. And I did some swapping with Karen, who is a very generous swap-buddy and I definitely got back more bottles than I sent her. But I paid for all the rest of 'em.)

Which is to say that I need to slow down. I'm trying not to say the words "no-buy" out loud, because I tried that last summer and it didn't go well. I should've known, really. (Try to tell me I *can't* do something, and it rarely ends well.) But I think some slowing down should be doable, hopefully.

**It's becoming relatively meaningless, I think, in any case. The concept of a full-size bottle being 0.5oz/15ml seems to be going by the wayside. However, minis just seem to get smaller - I bought some minis lately that were 4ml, or about .13 oz. It's enough for a couple of manis, I imagine, but boy, that's tiny. I'm trying to at least start paying more attention to how much I'm buying as well as what I'm buying, but it's easy to get seduced by the pretty colors and the glitter and forget to look!


So remember how I said I sorted my polishes by brand, then after I took the pictures, I was re-sorting by color? Well, here's what that looks like:

Basically I commandeered every big plastic bowl that we have in the house, and most of my polishes are just sitting in those. I still have a few more pictures to take, then I can start breaking this down and resorting within these rough categories, too. The purples (top picture) are in a big purple bowl meant for Halloween candy; then the middle picture is sort of fall-colors-plus-red-plus-gold, and that's in a bowl with a Christmas design, and the blues and greens are in a big green plastic bowl that I think is Tupperware, and was probably one of my mother's. (This is not everything, as you might can tell, especially since pink is notably absent - this was just the pictures I snapped because I thought it was all slightly comical.) (Also I am slightly proud of my bowl-to-polish color coordination!)

Sooki & Fairy Dust, & a red I wasn't supposed to buy

I was intending to wear fuchsia this week, but when it came down to it, I found myself completely unable to settle on anything, and I ended up with red instead - Zoya Sooki, with Fairy Dust, which is a flakie, on top of it. (I know there are at least two more Fairy Dusts from other brands. This is the e.l.f. one.) It actually looks really good and it's wearing well, but I had a hell of a time getting it on right. For some reason the Fairy Dust did not want to dry - I don't know if something in its formula wasn't playing nice with Sooki, or what, but I redid several nails before arriving at something that was wearable. Sooki is cherry-red and the Fairy Dust seems to give it sort of a gilded, slightly gold-shifted finish that's quite nice. I don't know if this flakie is a little gold-shifted itself - it doesn't look like it in the bottle, if so - or of it's picking something up from the color underneath. But I like it.

The picture picked the gold up really clearly where the sun was hitting it:

I have to 'fess up - I bought something. It was a L'Oreal jelly, and I would have specifically have made an exception for those if I had had any idea I would find them. I had only seen them once, and that was at the Rite-Aid in Ohio, and they were kind of expensive and I passed them up and have been sorry ever since, because I have not seen them anywhere else. And then they appeared at the grocery store yesterday. I restrained myself enough to only get one, the red one (I think it's Jolly Lolly) but since I have gone on and on about my no-buy status, I feel like I have to confess. Since it's still July, I'm still not going to make it count as the one thing I said I was allowed to buy in August, but I think I'm going to try to restrain myself from buying anything at all nail-related for the first half of August, because going anywhere near nail polish is obviously too much for me. (I only found the jellies because I went back there to get acetone.) If I behave, then I can still buy that one thing that I promised myself later in the month.

(I know this all sounds terribly silly but I know myself and I'm a chronic impulse buyer. I have to be realistic about this or I'll just be buying everything in sight again.)

I went nosing around on Sephora's website and looked at their new store-brand stuff:
Sephora "Color Hit" polishes - some really pretty colors here!
Also, Sephora X glitters and Sephora X top coats.
And a whole gel system, too.
(I haven't been in Sephora in ages. I'm a little worried about what may happen when I finally step foot in there.)

Giveaway spotted:
Imperfectly Painted has a giveaway of a whole set of Cult Nails polishes, open until August 10th. I decided not to enter because those colors all look too warm to be flattering on me, but they're really pretty just the same. Go enter!

No-buy update, and some deals

Deal alert:

• This one is good until tomorrow morning only, and I doubt that anybody who doesn't read my Twitter (and thus has theoretically already seen it already) will see it here in time, but I feel compelled to post it anyway: Hautelook has what appears to be the whole Orly SmartGel system at a substantial discount. The polishes are $7.50 and they have the LED lamp for half-price, and remover and a lot of other bits and pieces too. I didn't stop to figure out whether it would be everything you need because I am trying to resist buying it, but it looks like it might be. (Ooh, they have Rage, too. Rage isn't flattering on me - see here for my experiments with it last fall - but I know a lot of people adore it.) (Edit: I apparently left the link to Hautelook off the first time. That's now corrected.)
• A different Nordstrom Butter London deal, but still a good one (at least if you like pink): basecoat and top coat and Trout Pout for $27. They must just be switching the deals out as they run out of stuff. Which is smart. (Ooh! and Essie fall collection minis! And... more stuff that I'm trying not to look to closely at. There are some Lippmann sets in there, too.)

Since I keep blathering on about my no-buy thing - and I did successfully resist the Hautelook OPI sale last week - I will tell you what I've decided. The new rule is, I can buy one or two things a month, starting in August, but the Butter London I've already bought counts as one of my purchases for August, meaning I can only buy one more. I thought of saying I couldn't buy anything else at all in August and I decided that sounded like a rule that was made to be broken. I have a much better chance at sticking to it if I allow myself to buy one more thing. (And no, a Lippmann 3-pack does not count as one thing. ONE thing, ONE bottle of nail polish. I'm speaking mostly to myself here, you understand.) This time of year, I imagine that's likely to be something from one fall collection or another.

I am still wearing Hot Cinnamon but it is definitely starting to show tipwear and I imagine I'll change it out tonight. When I put Hot Cinnamon away, I put it in the box with the fall colors (i.e., oranges and browns), instead of with the rest of the reds, because I decided that's really what it is - a very red-leaning dark coral, I guess you'd say. The reds that look best on me are neutral or cool reds, and Hot Cinnamon is just not one of those. I still like it, though, and I'm sure I will be wearing both it and Sugar Rush a good bit this fall. (Question: if I still wanted to look for a cool-leaning version of this, what options are out there? Zoya Chyna?) (and that's an affiliate link, fyi)

As far as what's next, I imagine it's time for another fuchsia, but I haven't narrowed it down further than that yet. I will of course report back later.

In which I find an excellent bargain

I placed a Nordstrom's order that includes a nail polish; however, the nail polish is incidental to what I ordered so I decided this is not breaking my no-buy vow. Besides, it won't be shipped until after the end of the month, which is when I decided the absolute no-buy period ends. Yeah, I know, I'm grasping at straws, but I don't care. I am a sucker for a good deal, and this was a really good one, relative to the normal prices for Butter London - which is, according to BL's website, $19 each for the top and base coats. For that matter, Nordstrom's also has a set of the two alone for $25, which is also a really good deal, if the other one wasn't better. They all say 0.6 oz, which is normal size as I understand it! I looked because I keep wondering what the catch is. (The remover in the first set is a purse-size, but everything else seems to be normal size.) So anyway, I'm looking on the regular nail polish as being essentially a freebie, along with the nail care items which I have previously established are not included in the no-buy. And it is a pretty color (it's Thames, if you didn't follow the link and want to know). It looks rather like a foil version of Henley Regatta, really, but that's a good thing. I feel like I am totally awash in blue-greens these days, but I keep wearing them - and goodness knows, compared to, say, purples or pinks, I have an extremely small number of them. (Added: I notice looking again today that Nordstrom's page in fact calls Thames an emerald green rather than a blue-green at all. It's meant to be a color-of-the-year thing, apparently.)

Today's mani is Essence Break Through, which is a very nice red-violet. (Here are swatches from Polish Me Please - as usual, I may get a picture of my own but that won't be until later.) It's very thin but it went on well and was opaque in three coats. And I've had it on for 24 hours and it's holding up well so far.

P.S. I almost forgot to credit Polish Insomniac for pointing me towards the Nordstrom's deal in the first place. She posted a slightly different version of it two weeks ago (all the same stuff plus another polish of your choice for $36), and I didn't see that post at the time, but when I went to the Nordstrom's site today I found the one I posted instead. I would have been fine with either version!