Fruit Punch, Juicy, He Loves Me...

I tend to want to put up swatch pictures in seasonal groups - thus my recent spate of "Christmas in July" posts. And of course bright pinks are a good thing for summer and even into fall - although here in Texas we're a long way from fall. (Usually in late summer we get more rain, though, which cools things off part of the time. We just hope we don't get as much as we did last August - by which I mean the hurricane-aided kind of rain.)

This group are all discontinued, I think. This is NYC Fruit Punch:

It was one of my favorites for a long time. I love microglitters. This one mostly reads as fuchsia but it's got bits of other colors in it as well.

This is Zoya Juicy:

Zoya doesn't discontinue a lot of polishes, but I don't think this one really caught on so that seems to make sense. It's sort of a crelly-ish formula, a bit sheer. This was from the Candy collection, which I think was released in 2007. Also, if you look at this picture it does look like the color has changed a bit - it looks more red. But it could just be the light.

This is Orchid (which is a store brand) He Loves Me, I Love Him Not:

(I'm not sure about the punctuation on that name, and I can't really read the bottle very well to be sure.) This is another microglitter, pretty similar to Fruit Punch, really, except less multicolored. This one is more just fuchsia.

Purples: Celebutante, Prince St

This is an old Ulta Salon polish, Celebutante:

It's not anything really unusual but it's a really pretty middle-of-the-road purple creme. (This is some years old and I don't think Ulta makes this line at all any more.)

This is a sort-of-similar shade of purple with some shimmer, NYC Prince Street:

I think I paid about 75 cents for this when you could still get NYC at CVS. (Can you get NYC at some dollar store somewhere or is it true that they don't sell it at all in the US any more? Seems like I read that latter thing somewhere but I don't remember where. I don't see NYC in any store I routinely shop at these days, anyway.)

Ruby Queen

This is NYC Ruby Queen, from the Crystal Couture collection:

This was a holiday collection maybe two years ago - it's pretty atypical for NYC and it got them a lot of attention at the time. I remember being kind of unconvinced, but I gradually snagged a couple of them anyway. But it is really pretty. It's a red jelly base and it has some purple glitter in it. Overall, it leans more pink than your average red glitter, although I guess if you put it over a red base it wouldn't be so obvious. My tick-marks run into the lettering and are a bit hard to decipher, but I think this is three coats on its own.

Here's Polish Insomniac's swatches of more of the collection. (I remember wanting the green one, I'm sorry I didn't ever get my hands on it. The only other one I have is the blue.)

Re availability: I was pretty sure these were LE, and when I looked on Amazon I didn't see any of these at all, which leads me to think they're pretty hard to find. You might have to go to eBay to have any hope of finding this one. (And I'm not sure it'd be worth paying a premium price for - at least, you'd have to be much more in love with it than I am!)



Added: I didn't notice when I was writing this that Ruby Queen looks awfully similar to what's supposed to be Poppy Fields, down at the bottom of the wheel in this picture. And... well, that caused me to realize that I screwed up. I posted an entry for Poppy Fields a day or two ago, and I'm wondering if I did that entry very late at night, actually, because now that I've looked at it, it's definitely not Poppy Fields. -- Note that this whole paragraph has no direct bearing on this entry. It's not that this is not Ruby Queen, it's only that that's not Poppy Fields at the bottom. I'm only mentioning it here because it's only just now that that I snapped to the screw-up. So if you happen to have noticed that the Poppy Fields entry has disappeared, that's why. It will reappear at some later time when it's fixed!

Big City Dazzle

This is NYC In a NYC Minute Big City Dazzle:

The light-colored swatch is three coats of Big City Dazzle by itself, although it says on the bottle it's meant to be a top-coat. It's not something that's ever likely to be truly opaque, that's for sure. Below that is two coats over Colorstay Rich Raspberry. This is just what it says on the bottle, really, a sparkle top-coat - it's basically multicolored, although pink seems to dominate if you look at the bottle.

There are a lot of polishes in this line, but I don't see Big City Dazzle listed. (Also, I said I wasn't sure where you bought NYC these days, but it's apparently available at both Walmart and Target - and Duane Reade, although that's not a store we have in these parts.)

NOTD: Sweet Peacock + Blue Majesty + matte

This is Orly Sweet Peacock plus matte top-coat plus NYC Blue Majesty plus more matte top-coat:

(and I think I used some old Colorstay base coat underneath all that, if you want to know)

I remembered from past manicures that Sweet Peacock tended to chip - I don't think it's that polish in particular. It seems to me that every foil/chrome-type polish is prone to chipping. I wore it for a day with matte topcoat and it only had one noticeable chip, but since it was noticeable, I patched it up and put a coat of Blue Majesty on top to help prevent it from chipping again immediately, and then put more (Sally Girl) matte topcoat on top of that. I'm really wanting to mattify everything glittery these days. I like the glitter as long as it's relatively subdued.

I wish I had taken a picture so I could compare. Sweet Peacock mattified did not look exactly like this, but it was similar - just without the dusting of glitter that came from Blue Majesty, and maybe the color was slightly different. If I can remember I'll swatch them on a nail wheel and then we can compare at a later date! (Done. See here.)

Zuza, East Village

This is Zoya Zuza and NYC (In a NYC Minute) East Village:

We're kind of in that never-never-land of nebulous blue-greens. (I've seen this kind of lighter blue-greens called "mermaid colors" and I like that term because it's vague enough not to pin you down on exact shades, but it still conjures up the right idea.) Anyway, it's clear that East Village is a little bluer and Zuza is a little greener. East Village is very sheer, as I recall (looks like this is three coats, on my wheel) and a bit shimmery. Zuza is super-shimmery. These are both colors that I feel like are too light to be terribly flattering with my (super-pale) skin-tones, so I tend to wear them layered over slightly darker colors, which helps with that. Zuza in particular is really, really pretty, though. (Actually it's not that East Village is not pretty, it's that dealing with its sheerness annoys me. All those coats!) (added: I wore Zuza alone after doing this post, and I don't know why I thought it was too light, before. It looked just fine on me.)

It's late and I don't feel like checking, but I believe these are both current colors. I looked at NYC's colors not long ago and the "In a NYC Minute" line didn't look like it had changed at all from what it was a couple of years ago. And I'm pretty sure this is a fairly popular Zoya color so I would think it would still be around too.

(Added: I am in fact right about that: Zuza, East Village. What I'm not sure about is where you buy NYC these days - Target, maybe?)

Pitter Patter, Prince Street

This is Butter London Pitter Patter, and NYC In a Minute in Prince Street:

I said we were done with the redder purples, but naturally there are some strays - actually Pitter Patter looks almost wine-colored next to Prince Street, which is bluer. (If you put it next to a true wine-color, it would look very purple, though. See here for evidence of its purple-ness.) Pitter Patter was a special release for the birth of Prince George, and unlike some of BL's other LEs which have gotten re-releases, to my knowledge this one was a true LE and hasn't been seen again since.

Prince Street was a polish that I bought because I had a 50-cents off coupon at CVS, so I figured what better use than on a 99-cent polish? (This is the nail where there's the big smear on the wheel and you can't really read the name too well. I inevitably do this at least once when I do a lot of swatching. I usually figure it's better to just leave it a bit messy than to try to take it off and make it worse in the process.) Anyway, this is a nice medium purple, slightly on the blue-leaning side, slightly sheer (although whatever info I had about how many coats this is is under the smear). It's a purple like many other purples, basically, but then again the price is fabulous.

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.

Destash

As I mentioned a few days ago, I made a separate nail wheel for things I seriously intend to get rid of. That's not to say that these are the only things I'm getting rid of. These were actually the candidates to go away to Zoya in the Earth Day exchange. I bought six polishes from Zoya so that's what I was intending to send back; there are seven here because I changed my mind about one of them. I'll get to that. These are mostly drugstore brands because I figured those were the most likely to be full of toxic gunk. (I have not actually gotten these in the mail yet, I admit - but they are all boxed up and ready!)

(Added: I'm gradually adding more notes about all these polishes at the bottom of this entry, under a jump break.)

These two are Icing After Party (mixed shard glitter) and Wet n Wild Party of Five Glitters, which seems to be intended to be a Happy Birthday type mixed glitter (but is only a half-hearted attempt, I think). Somehow I just never cared for either of these.

(Detailed comparison of Party of Five Glitters with HB & other polishes here.)

Then we have two pretty similar oranges, Xtreme Wear Crushed and NYC Times Square Tangerine Cream. I think I bought these in two different years to wear at Halloween. The NYC is more of a straight creme; the Xtreme Wear has that sort of slightly-metallic finish that a lot of the older Xtreme Wear colors have. (I don't know a better way to describe it.)

These two became destash candidates because I have other oranges and I don't really wear orange much except in the fall, so I can't see keeping them all.

Here's the one that faded, which I mentioned at the entry I linked above: Color Club Gimme A Grape Big Kiss. It was a scented polish and I was honestly only able to ID it by the fake-grape scent, because as you can see it's not really identifiable as anything like a grape color.

To be fair, it was never really purple, it was sort of a red-violet, and in the bottle it does really look sort of pink - but the swatch looks orange. (Hmm, it looks awfully purple in Scrangie's swatches, actually. But I remember it as being more like one of those red-violets that reads fuchsia.) (Here's what it looked like when I got it three years ago. - Three years ago to the day since that was posted, in fact!)

The other polish in the picture above is the one I changed my mind about, because I kind of like it, and that's Dusty Spring Fields, a sort of purple-tan color. I seem to have feelings for it, in a weird way, and I decided to switch it out with my only other polish from this brand, Ramblin' Red:

I have a bunch of colors like this, so this one felt more like something I could bear to part with. Also I think of the two, it had more severe wear issues. (I talked about that previously over here.)

Can you see why I don't destash much? I really am emotionally attached to some of my polishes. I do have more in a destash box, though, and I have actually thrown a few things away, and given a few things away. I'll get to those later.

Fruit Punch, Santa Red My List

Here are NYC Fruit Punch and China Glaze Santa Red My List:

These are really not anywhere near being dupes, but at least in this picture, you can't tell a whole lot of difference on the wheel, can you? Fruit Punch is more of a multicolored microglitter in a raspberry-pink base, and Santa Red is more of a metallic. I would also say that what I see here in the bottle is pretty much correct, in that Santa Red My List is more towards a neutral fuchsia (is there such a thing as a neutral fuchsia? less purple, anyway) than Fruit Punch.

Disclaimer: for the record, I did get Santa Red My List for free from China Glaze. It was in a holiday collection a couple of years ago.

Stash additions, June & July

I haven't bought a whole lot lately (with a big exception I'll tell you about below), but here's what I did buy. The lone NYC came from CVS - mostly because I had a coupon that was expiring - and the entire bottom row came from Sleek Nail.

top row:

• Prince Street (NYC In a Minute) - this is a fairly standard purple shimmer, maybe falling a bit to the red-leaning side

bottom row:

• Are You Jelly? (China Glaze) - a very bright orchid-leaning purple jelly. Right up my alley, I hope!
• Strawberry Fields (China Glaze) - from the permanent collection, a pink with a strong gold shimmer
• Bat My Eyes (China Glaze) - this was from a Halloween collection (as you might guess) a couple of years ago. I remembered somebody raving about this one so I decided to try it. (I hate summer heat so I'm telling myself that Halloween is just around the corner!) (Added: honestly, this doesn't have to be for Halloween only. It's so gorgeous.)
• Red Baroness (Vinylux) - this was the color of my one shellac manicure, several years ago, and when I saw that it's still available as a Vinylux color, I decided to try it out and see if this version lives up to the Shellac version. I do already have the Vinylux top-coat so that was a definite factor here. This is more of a pinkish-red than it looks here, with a slightly metallic finish.

As far as the "big exception" I referred to above, well, I went a little crazy on Pretty Serious' website a couple of days ago, and ordered a bunch of stuff. (This is always the problem I have: the longer I manage to restrain my compulsive shopping habits, the more likely it gets that they'll eventually break out in a big way.) I don't honestly remember exactly what I bought, so I won't try to tell you now. We'll find out together when it arrives! I had been telling myself I could order something from Nordstrom's anniversary sale, so I guess this will take the place of that, and the anniversary sale is off-limits now. I'm going to try not to even look. It did turn out - I always forget this - that PS's prices are in Australian dollars, so I didn't spend nearly as much as I thought I did. So at least there's that.

(As far as my nails, I'm still wearing Elderberry, which I've had on for a solid week - and it still looks quite decent, which is amazing for me. But it is chipping now, so I'll probably exchange it for one of the above later tonight!)

NOTD: layers and layers of pink

This is Zoya Kimber, Zoya Reva, and China Glaze Travel In Colour, topped with Matte Me Crazy:

I did the Zoya portion late at night and I'm not entirely sure how many coats of what were involved, exactly. I'm lucky I got any kind of useable manicure because I think I fell asleep before it was dry. I've done the Kimber/Reva mani numerous times. As I've probably explained before, Kimber on its own is too annoyingly pink, and Reva is too orange. So both of them together kind of cancel each other's faults out, as I see it. But I looked at the result this morning and thought it still looked awfully orange for my taste. (It may just have been the light.) So then I put TinC on top and thought it looked awfully pink again (I don't know why that surprised me, considering that that's what TinC always does). But when I put Matte Me Crazy on top of the whole shebang, it toned down the pink enough that I liked it again. The end effect was not very matte, really, but it had a satiny foil-ness to it that I liked quite a lot.

Details, as best I remember:
Zoya Get Even base coat
Kimber, 2 coats
Reva, 1 coat
Travel In Colour, 1 coat
Matte Me Crazy, 1 coat

NOTD: the wearin' of the green

This is Pretty Serious VT100, mattified:

It's badly cleaned-up but - as I always say - at least you can get the idea. I think it's really lovely, actually. It's an emerald green base with gold microglitter. Here it is on PS's website (and that's not an affiliate link, just so you know). I had on Nail Nutrition and Orly Bonder underneath, and put a coat of NYC matte topcoat on top. (I went to buy a spare bottle the other day, since I've been using it so much, and it was $1.72 at the grocery store. You can't really beat that!)

(Also note that VT100 is marked down, which I think was why I bought it in the first place. If you want it, it's probably wise to grab it while it lasts!)

Before that I had on Nail-robi and Flake Your Booty, which is the blue flakie, and I mattified that also, but I never did get a picture of that manicure. It's been raining all week so I haven't had the light. The picture above is from the iPhone, in the car. It was raining but it had let up enough at the time that the light wasn't too awful.

Nail-robi looks like a navy blue on the nails to me, with maybe just a hint of purple, but on a cotton round when I took it off it was definitely purple. That always interests me when that happens.

Winter manis

I don't have anything specific that I save to wear in January, but my January manis tend to fall into a couple of categories. If I'm feeling down I tend to wear glitters. (So far this year my mood has not taken a downturn, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed there.) I also tend to wear neutrals a lot. I'm not big on true nudes, so this tends to mean grays or grayed-out versions of other colors. Towards the end of the month I tend to shift towards a Valentine's Day theme - pinks and reds and the occasional purple. I've been pulling things to wear but I'm not quite ready for that yet. Soon, I think. (I was eyeing Purple Medallion, in particular, from yesterday's post. That might be the next thing I wear.)

However, today it's blue-gray. I was thinking about "throwback Thursday" and so I was digging around for something that was an old favorite, and I came up with Zoya Feifei - one of their glass-fleck-type polishes. This is three coats and it's not 100% opaque at that point, but close enough to suit me. (I just looked and Feifei is still available, which surprised me - I had some idea they had discontinued these.) (For the record: that's not an affiliate link.)

(This was taken in my car in the rain earlier - I was parked across the street from work and I was trying to decide whether to brave the rain or sit and wait for a few minutes. I finally told myself not to be a wimp, but meanwhile I got the picture! The lighting is surprisingly okay, considering the weather.)

Working backwards in time:
This is S-OPI I Only Shop Vintage, over a base of Rococo Stone Cold Karma, which is just a darkish nude. You can see the nude in this picture maybe more than in real life; I Only Shop Vintage is more like an "old gold" shimmer. I really like this, even though I don't feel like it should be especially flattering to my skin tone. Somehow it always seems to overcome this!

Before that I was wearing my recent L'Oreal purchase, The Reign of Studs, which is a texture... and also my brain really, really wants to read that name as a joke I'm not getting, because otherwise it's just very strange. But if I can get past the name issue, it's very pretty. I mattified the hell out of it, I must note - 3 coats of NYC Matte Topcoat, because I didn't feel like going as shiny as it would have been otherwise.

And that was over the previous manicure, which I also really liked but which I failed to get a decent picture of - that one was Square Hue First Flight, one of their new January releases. It's a pale gray that's sort of opalescent, very nice.

One more:

I was looking at my file of NotD pictures from 2014, and the last one I added, back in December was one I don't think ever made it over here. It's not anything special but just for completeness' sake: this is NYC Blue Majesty over Triple Shine Slick Black, in a sort of vague stab at a French mani effect. (I think I just wanted to try Blue Majesty out, was what that was about!)

New: Milani, NYC, Chick + a wear update

I mentioned having bought some stuff on sale at CVS and here that is:

L-R: Sugar Plum, Ultra Violet, Ruby Queen
The Milanis are shimmers, the NYC is part of the holiday set, I think? and it's glittery. I've seen a number of people raving over this "Crystal Couture" set, I may wish I'd bought more.

Then I've had this set of Chick polishes and treatments for a month or so but never did get pictures of all of them:

This is cuticle oil (my second bottle because I loved the first one so!), basecoat, Fairy Snot (which is a sparkly topper, naturally!), and Once Upon A Time. I've worn OUAT and really liked it but I'm not sure there are pictures.

Also, I wrote about having to use five coats of Optical Illusion last week - that was Friday, I think, and this is what it looked like on Tuesday, which is not bad considering I never used a topcoat:

Now I have on multiple coats of This Is Halloween, and I really like the color but it's already chipping pretty badly, and I did use topcoat this time. (I may not get a picture of that because I'll probably take it off tonight and try something else.)

SpaRitual Optical Illusion

I talked towards the bottom of the last entry about how I bought Optical Illusion because I wanted a swampy green, and well, it is that. I'm wearing it now, and it's quite beautiful, but I'm wearing FIVE coats because it's so thin and streaky. I think when I wear it again I'm going to layer something underneath, because that's just crazy. I was talking about whether it was a yellow-green and how green it would appear on the nail, because it didn't appear at all yellowish in the bottle in my living room. This is what the base looks like at two coats, in the sun:

So you can see that it's very yellow-green, even at two coats. In the shade it looks much less drastic and you're starting to be able to see the glitter:

But it's still very streaky, and five coats is what it took to get to the bottle color. I wanted it as sort of a specialty color, anyway, so if I have to put on 5 coats a couple of times a year, I suppose I can live with that. But it's a bit frustrating.

I went to CVS to pick up a prescription earlier in the week, and of course I came home with a couple of things. There was a buy one, get one half-off on Milani, and NYC Color was 40% off, so I bought NYC Ruby Queen, a red glitter, and Milani Color Statement in Sugar Plum and Ultra Violet, which were both shimmery, bright pink and purple respectively. I might wait until after Halloween to wear those, or maybe not since there's still two weeks to go. I probably don't really want to wear orange for two whole weeks!

Stash - misc drugstore

This is the next-to-last installment of my stash-by-brand series that I started six weeks ago - you may notice that I kinda lost momentum there! It was interesting to me to see it, though, since I organize my stash by color, normally. So this is some drugstore polishes, and tomorrow I'll have a few more, plus some strays.

Okay, first up is various incarnations of Wet n Wild:

L-R - top row is Fergie Cabo Cruise, Fantasy Makers Purple Potion, Megalast On a Trip, Wild Shine Black Creme; bottom row is all Fast Dry: Teal of Fortune, Party of Five Glitters, Dancer Is the Best Reindeer, and Gray's Anatomy. (Fast Dry seems to be prone to losing the lettering on their labels!)

NYC Long Wearing: this first one is the one that's mislabeled - it says Pink Champagne but it's really Fuschia Glamour, I think. Then we have Times Square Tangerine Creme, and then the In A New York Minutes: East Village, Fruit Punch, and Big City Dazzle, which is a Sparkle Top Coat. (I also have Grand Central Station, which is clear, but it got mixed in with the basecoats and topcoats and I didn't think it was interesting enough to bother going to track it down just for completeness' sake.)

The two big bottles of L.A. Colors are Jewel Tone and Pink Sizzle. The minis are all unlabeled, as I've said before, and the only reason I decided they were L.A. Colors was that the one down at the very bottom is more Jewel Tone. (Also the bottles look really similar, even without that evidence!)

This is some miscellaneous stuff. Fright Night Claw Polish in Voodoo; Spoiled in Cougar Attack and Deeper Dive; L.A. Girl 3D Effects in Black Illusion; e.l.f. Fairy Dust (which unlike other "Fairy Dusts" is a flakie); Sinful Colors Nail art in Bad Chick; and Confetti Purple Pizzazz.

Last installment tomorrow!

Overload

On my nails: No More Waity, Katie. And I wasn't sure if I would like it, but I do - a lot - and I see why everybody carries on about it. It's just... different. And cool. (I think I thought it was going to go on paler than it actually did, that's one reason I was unsure about it. I ended up doing three coats and two coats of top coat, too, and it's still a bit bumpy.)

Another thing: I am officially back on no-buy status. Karen's box came and I have so much new stuff that it took TWOthree pictures to get it all, and I have enough new polish to carry me into the fall - and probably into next year - even if I don't buy another thing. I know better than to think that's going to happen but I really gotta quit going out and LOOKING for more nail polish. I still have three Zoyas and a Colors by Llarowe coming in the mail, but after that I have got to stop for a while.

We'll start with the stray one, which is by itself because I accidentally left it out of the next picture. This is my first e.l.f. polish (or my first e.l.f. anything, for that matter), and apparently it is called Fairy Dust, although it doesn't seem to say that on the bottle. But I love flakies so I'm sure I will adore it whenever I get around to trying it.

You may notice that there's an actual lip gloss in this one:

It's unusual for me, but I had a CVS coupon for $3 off a lipstick or lip gloss, I think it was, and so I thought, well, I should use that to try out some brand I've never tried before. So I tried the Almay, because the color looked like the kind of thing I like. But it's actually lip gloss - that is, much too sheer for my taste. (I was hoping for something a little more substantial. But at least now I know.) That said, I imagine I'll use it some.

I also bought Fairy Dust and the NYC matte top coat on the same trip to CVS, I believe. The SH file I found at Target for 70 cents - and I bought a couple, but amazingly, got out the door without any nail polish, so a small victory there. The other two polishes on the top row are the ones I got from Llarowe, Pretty Serious Party by the Pool and Jade Echarpe de Seda (and I hope I'm spelling that right because I'm not stopping to check). The little Christmas box on the right is what the Pretty Serious bottle came in, and I thought it was cute so I put it in the picture. Then I put the Nicole box in the picture, too, even though there's not anything cute about it. The red polish upside-down on the bottom row came in it - it's the Special K promo one that I wrote about some time ago. (I think I remember thinking it would probably be here in July.) I think the color is called Challenge Red-y.

The other thing in the picture above is nail polish earrings, down at the bottom, and they're really adorable. They came from PrismNYC.

Alright, so this is really the main event, here: the swap box. I got a standard size (what I think of as VHS-tape size, although I suppose that's a very old-person name for it, huh?) but really heavy box from Karen of Frazzle and Aniploish - it was heavy because it had eleven polishes in it, as below.

The Julie G's were what started this, of course: all the Gumdrops except the two orange ones. And I knew she was sending something else, but I didn't quite expect this many somethings! The rest of these brands are actually all ones I've never had before, because I've never even bought a Fergie polish, now that I think about it. (It's Cabo Cruise, the Fergie.) Then we have two Rimmel Cocktail colors, on the left (Cutie Colada is the green one, and the blue one is Apple Berry Smoothie). The Layla is CE61, which the internet informs me is also called Ipanema Girl. The Pixi is Evening Emerald; the Finger Paints is Hypnotic, a magnetic, and last is the Sation glitter, which is Holiday Spirit. I am SO looking forward to trying out all this stuff!

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.)

East Village

I've had on NYC East Village since Thursday, and it's holding up really well. It looks the same as I expected it to from a distance, but it doesn't really behave like a foil even though it looks a bit like one. It's super-sheer; this is 4 coats and you can still see my nail line a bit when the light hits it right. It reminds me more of something like SC Let Me Go, a sheer pearly thing.

I'm looking at my nails compared to this picture on my screen and it's slightly paler and considerably greener than it looks there. I would call it a dark aqua, really.

Here's Is that Silva (resting on a hotel towel):

One makeup note (not something I talk about much):
We packed hastily for this trip, and I managed somehow to forget my makeup base, even though I got everything else, makeup-wise. We went to a Wal-Mart in some small town in Arkansas, and I bought the cheapest one I could find, which was Maybelline Fit Me for (I think) five dollars and change. And it's really not bad. It seems to be similar in concept to L'Oreal Color Match, which is what I wear normally. I think I ended up buying the very palest one (#110, I think).

Also I just found the bit below, which I wrote on Thursday and forgot that I didn't post:

I am so very tired. We got to Ohio late yesterday and we have been doing stuff ever since, with a short break for sleep last night. Rob was a pallbearer so he had to be at the church at 9am, although I am not really clear on why since the funeral wasn't until 10:30. Just to make sure the deceased was there ahead of the mourners, I guess. So I got up much earlier than I am accustomed to, in order to make sure that Rob got there on time, which he did. And now that stuff is all over, and I am just sitting here feeling exhausted and marking time until I feel ready to sleep. 

If anybody thought my nail polish [Is That Silva?] was inappropriate, they didn't say anything to me. Of course I am the person who wore green nail polish to my own father's funeral last year, because it matched my green shirt. I never have seen what was inappropriate about that, really, but my sister seemed to think it was, anyway. (Pft.) I wore that same green shirt today, in fact, but it was so cool here that I had to wear a jacket over it.