Nebula - NOTD + swatch

This is Orly Nebula, which is from last year's holiday collection.

It feels like a good fall color to me. It's purple (leaning towards blue-violet) with a lot of shimmery stuff.

Here's a swatch, as well:

TBT: Sparkling Garbage, Merida

I haven't done a Throwback Thursday in a while, but I pulled out a few old manis that I especially liked, and I'm going to make this an occasional feature this year. This is Orly Sparkling Garbage over Zoya Merida:

I really like this combination a lot.

Topic Tuesday: top fall colors

This was last week's Topic Tuesday, but as usual, I'm a little behind. I wasn't sure I was going to get an entry up today at all, but then I swatched my KBShimmer magnetics, and that got me rolling, and I ended up digging out most of my fall polishes and doing some swatching. This is going to be kinda quick and dirty, but I know what my favorites are here - the examples are the part that may be a bit wonky.

Favorite fall colors:

1. Copper & bronze - these are totally my favorites, especially copper. I'm going to go with the discontinued Spoiled Cougar Attack (silly name, I know) as my example.
2. Dark browns - there are a lot of good ones. I prefer shimmers.
3. Funky greens - I show China Glaze It's Alive below.
4. Orange - I like red-orange rather than yellow-orange for my skin tone. The holo here is more on the yellow side but if you layer it over the Orly base it all somehow works. (Look at the month of October 17 if you want more examples - last year when the Astros were in the playoffs I wore orange for the entire month.)
   
5. Deeper purples - grape colors are especially nice.

Oh, and I had a wheel already primed to go with black bases, so a number of these pictures are over black. I'm not sure any of these polishes are current but you should be able to find similar things.

Cougar Attack:

I've also got a swatch of Scrangie 2.0 which is sort of a weird bronze-ish oil-slick-ish color, so I'll add that here, too:

Although in this case I'm not sure what the heck would be similar.

Here's It's Alive (an old China Glaze):

This kind of thing is great, but just plain old olive green is fine, too. (I was thinking of KL Polish Chloe, which is a current color.)

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:

Fowl Play

Continuing with the purple theme, this is Orly Fowl Play:

This is a polish that a lot of polish people have heard of, even if they don't own it - partly (I assume) because it's said to be a close dupe for one of those legendary hard-to-find polishes, OPI Merry Midnight. Here's a comparison - they do appear to be extremely close. Merry Midnight was a holiday 2009 polish and so it probably was not ever made in large quantities. I hadn't really started following OPI that closely in 2009, so I don't remember ever seeing Merry Midnight at the time. I had started paying more attention to Orly, though, by the time the Birds of a Feather collection was released in 2011. The only one I bought at the time was Sweet Peacock, though. I had nothing like it then - I was just starting to really collect polish at the time. I remember thinking vaguely that Fowl Play sounded interesting but obviously I wasn't interested enough that I bought it. As you can guess from the big red sticker, I picked it up on clearance later - I think that was at Sally Beauty. (I always think that things that are on clearance are being discontinued, but not in this case: it's still a current color.)

Anyway, this is unusual (well, not really so unusual nowadays but certainly unusual seven years ago), in that it's a combination of flakies and regular glitter. It's a plummy color, a bit like Nfu Oh 51, although that's missing the glitter part. I like it a lot - I wonder if I would have liked it all that much if I'd bought it in 2011, or if maybe it took me a while to be able to appreciate it.

Added: an old post that also talks about this polish

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.)

NOTD: Feel The Funk over Kiko 497

I kind of feel like this picture is not exactly what you saw in real life, but I'm posting it anyway. This is the Kiko manicure I posted a couple of weeks ago, with Orly Feel The Funk and Matte All The Things.

I find that this happens often with holo glitters - maybe it's the defects of my own lighting, or maybe this is just what holo glitters do. In any case, Feel The Funk definitely looks much different over a lighter base; here you can see that it's still quite dark, even if the holo glitter makes it looks bumpy. I liked the actual result a lot.

Feel The Funk!

This is Orly Feel The Funk:

It's from the Melrose collection, which I think was last year's fall collection, if I'm remembering right. (Or maybe it was summer. The only ones I have from Melrose are this and Vintage, and neither of them exactly look fall-ish.) Anyway, it's basically a very sparkly holo-laden top-coat somewhere in the range between pink and orchid. I'm looking forward to wearing this. Maybe around the holidays, it seems like that would work.

NOTD: Just Breathe

Well, first of all, here's the earworm that I get from this name:

Which is quite a welcome earworm - although honestly, at this point, almost anything that stops the non-stop loop of "Despacito" that's been going on in my head is very welcome. But this is a song I've always liked. (Not that I dislike "Despacito," really, either, I just want it out of my head for a while, thanks.)

Yeah, so anyway, I liked the idea of breathable polishes - it just sounds healthier, y'know? But I hadn't tried the Orly Breathable polishes because they're kind of expensive, until I was poking around at Walgreen's a couple of days ago and it turned out they had some colors marked down to $4-something. Then I got to the counter and they actually rang up for $2-something instead, which is awesome and makes me tempted to go back and pick out another color or two.

So the color I bought is (take a wild guess!) Just Breathe:

Since it's breathable - meaning, your nails can take in oxygen right through the polish - you don't wear a base-coat or a top-coat. It went on very watery on the first coat but deepened up nicely on the second. It's still not really opaque - a third coat might do it - but I figured since this was the intent I'd try it out. I expected it to be chipping within 5 minutes but it's holding up decently well, really, and I like this slightly-dusty purple color.

I honestly can't see wanting to wear this all the time, but for giving your nails a break (or if you want to be halal) this is a nice option. I know of at least one other brand with a breathable formula (Inglot) but this is the first one to be widely available, I believe.

(Wear update at the 3-day mark: better than I expected. There's some noticeable wear, but it's not bad, and after 3 days, that happens to me a lot, even if I'm wearing conventional polish plus base-coat and top-coat like I normally do.)

Orly stash & favorites

For Orly, I have several pictures divided by bottle type. What I have the most of are the regular large bottles:

L-R, top row: Purple Poodle, Fowl Play, Intergalactic Space, Sparkling Garbage, Vintage, and Retro Red. The one in the middle on the right is Diamond Love, a top-coat. And L-R, bottom row: R.I.P (which is seriously settling, isn't it?), Pearl Wisdom, Sweet Peacock, Rage, Glitz, Flagstone Rush

There are thirteen bottles pictured above, although actually I have a 14th one that's not here because it's a backup bottle. (That's Pearl Wisdom - I used to wear it all the time but I haven't worn it in years. So probably the backup bottle should be the first thing here to go into the destash box.)

Then I have four minis (hopefully in the right order):

These came in a set: Tiara, Groupie, Hot Stuff, and Razzmatazz.

Then Orly Color Blast - I only have three and two of those were a set:

The first two are the duo, a Frozen tie-in. The pink is Free Spirit and the blue one is Frozen. And then the third one is just called Plum Chunky Glitter, as I recall. It shows up nicely over certain colors, but as usual with glitters, I haven't worn it much.

Hmm, favorites. They do make nice fuchsias, and I like both Hot Stuff and Free Spirit a lot. (And I like Frozen, for that matter. That was a nice duo.) But I don't think that quite rises to the level of favorites. For the record - although I've said it before and I will undoubtedly say it again - Rage is just not my color, although I think it's pretty. I know a lot of people are crazy about it but on me it doesn't look great.

Favorites: Fowl Play and Sparkling Garbage
(I only have 20 Orly polishes altogether, so two seems like a reasonable number of favorites. I don't have new swatches and I probably won't do a new one for Sparkling Garbage since I swatched it back in December. I definitely will try to get one done for Fowl Play, at least, though!)

Runners-up: Flagstone Rush (which is the brownish metallic), Sweet Peacock (only falls short because it's a dupe to other blue metallics), Intergalactic Space, R.I.P

NOTD: Sparkling Garbage over Agro, matte

This is layers and layers of stuff and it's so much I hope it just doesn't peel right off my fingers - I wrote it all down last night and I already wasn't sure exactly what I did:

1. Nail Nutrition Strength
2. Superfood Base Coat
3. China Glaze Agro
4. Orly Sparkling Garbage
5. more Sparkling Garbage (I think it was only two coats but I won't swear to that, it might've been three)
6. ColorStay Sealing Shine (which is the oldest version of ColorStay, I think - practically vintage! but it's a nice top-coat)
7. NYC Matte Me Crazy

So 7 or maybe 8 coats. I'm sure I've done more layers than that in one manicure, at some point before, but this is up there. But I really like it a lot. Mattified glitters are kind of my thing lately, I don't know if anybody's noticed. Sparkling Garbage without the matte is - as its name implies - really super-sparkly and I like it a lot, but for normal daily wear I like it better matte. You can still see all the little shiny bits but it doesn't look like you're at the disco. And I like it a lot over Agro, too - Agro by itself is dark olive but this lightens it up without losing that olive-tone completely.

I'm not sure either one of these colors is technically a current color but I bought both of them on Amazon not too too long ago (a few months, I think), so they are probably findable.

Groupie

This is Orly Groupie (in a mini-size):

This is on two spots on this wheel, although one of them is nearly invisible. It's by itself on #6 (I think it's two coats) and over black on #7 (also two coats, I think). It's just gold shimmer, pretty simple but I don't know of any other polish like this. I bought it and then proceeded to completely ignore it, but now that I've finally looked at it again, I really like this a lot over black. I'm thinking I might experiment with some colors and see what I come up with.

I don't think this polish is available any more but it's really late and I don't have the stamina to check.

Note that I can't write on the front of these wheels like I normally do. I ordered the same wheels from Amazon that I've been ordering for several years, but they sent me different ones this time, for whatever reason. I don't hate these but they have little lines all over the front (which you can't really see very well in this picture) and so there's no room to put anything except numbers on the front. You may notice - since you can see it through the plastic - that I'm still writing on the back though. If you forget to write the name down first, though, it's really hard to turn over a wheel with wet polish on it and write on the back without messing it up. (That's why I'm not sure about how many coats there are, on this polish.)

Free Spirit

This is Orly Color Blast Free Spirit:

This is a Frozen tie-in polish; it came in a "Sister Duo" with an ice-blue that presumably was the Elsa polish. This is really just your basic fuchsia creme,* but it's a very pretty one. I did several swatches of this with various top-coats over it - you can see a couple of those here. (My favorite of that bunch was Shine of the Times over Free Spirit, which may be the one at the very bottom, but I'm not sure about that since I don't have the wheel in front of me.)

*Added: I came across another post where I talked about this polish - not the same as either of the ones below - where I quote somebody else as saying this is not a creme, it's a crelly. I'm always terrible at spotting crellies unless it's super-obvious but I'm going to go on the assumption that they are correct.

Here's my original comparison post showing several different colors similar to this. And here's the picture with the duo as I first saw it, as a birthday present.

I'm pretty sure this is discontinued - I suspect it was snapped up more by the people collecting "Frozen" merchandise than for the polish itself. And this polish, at least, is hardly unique.

2016 favorites, part 2

The first entry about my favorites from this past year showed discontinued polishes. Now we're on to ones that are still available. This is seven of the top 12, so there are five more after this. I'm pretty sure only two of this group were released in 2016 (Alice and Purple Fiction, both from fall collections). A couple more were 2015 releases (Verismo and the Color Club Oil Slicks) and the rest are older, I think.

L-R and top to bottom:

• Color Club: We'll Never Be Royals
• China Glaze: Purple Fiction
• Orly: Sparkling Garbage
• Jin Soon: Verismo
• Zoya: Ivanka, Alice, and Dream

These are not in any particular order. I decided at one point that Alice and Purple Fiction were the top two of this bunch, but I like all of these a lot.

I went and looked at the company's own websites to verify availability for this group and the next, and that's what the links are.(Checked on 12/27/16)

Sparkling Garbage

This is Orly Sparkling Garbage:

This is from the Mash Up collection, a couple of years ago - it's a pale green microglitter. You can maybe get it to something resembling opaqueness if you were really patient - but it's really a topper. I put it on top of the Zoyas (Olivera and Merida) just as an experiment - that's the two above it, it's just on the tips, there, and then at the bottom that's it on the whole nail over Jet Set Jade, which is the polish you can see at the far left. I do really like this a lot. I remember seeing some swatches I really liked when it first came out, but then I kind of forgot about it until lately. I looked on Amazon and it was there (a bit to my surprise) so here it is. I don't believe it's a current color, but obviously it is still findable.

NOTD: Sparkling Garbage over Merida

I reported last week that (somewhat to my surprise) I fell in love with Dream, and so I was expecting to fall in love with Merida too, since it's just the green version, and I love green.

Well, not so much.

I don't really know why it failed to grab me - it just seemed kind of... ordinary, I guess? It doesn't look ordinary in Zoya's pictures (that's the link just above) and I thought it looked fine on the nail wheel but on my nails it just felt like your basic holiday green, to me, except with the holo stuff like Aurora and Dream. I kept looking at it and waiting to get excited about it and it didn't happen. I'm sure I'll give it another try later, but meanwhile, I wasn't feeling any oomph and I had that bottle of Orly Sparkling Garbage that I got from Amazon (I may not have mentioned that here before, come to think of it, because I kind of half forgot about it between the time I ordered it and the time it showed up) so I added that on top.

And ok, now I am in love:

(I don't know if you can really tell the difference in this picture. I didn't take one with just Merida, but my nail-wheel swatch is here.) It's still more or less the same color as Merida - maybe a little lighter, but seemingly not that much - but now it's got microglitter and I feel like I see the holo stuff from Merida pop out now and then, as well, and yeah, it's oomph, alright. But it's still not so out-there glittery that it annoys me. Sometimes there's a fine line about too little oomph and too much, and for me this totally hits that.

This is two coats of Merida, one coat of Sparkling Garbage, and no other top-coat. (And NailsInc Superfood underneath, almost forgot that part.) This was taken under the fluorescent lights at work.

(I did some wheel swatches with Sparkling Garbage, too, I'll get that up within the next couple of days.)

Intergalactic Space

This is Orly FX Intergalactic Space:

It's on two nails on this wheel - you can tell which ones because it's the polish with the weird little white "planets" (or well, larger round matte pieces, anyway) - the top one of the two nails is Intergalactic Space alone and the lower one is over purple. I think that this set of polishes came out of the rage for galaxy manis from a few years ago. (Although actually I saw a post about galaxy manis on Twitter just today so it's not like they're gone!) Anyway, this one is a mixed glitter with mostly bronze and purple pieces, and maybe a couple more colors of very fine glitter pieces - plus the big white ones - in a black base. It's really quite awesome, although really I could do without the white pieces and so I just don't worry about whether I'm getting many of those on the nail. The purple/bronze combo is really nice, though, and I can't think of any other polish that's very much like this.

Availability: this (and most of the other FX polishes, apparently) are still showing up on Orly's website, so I imagine you should be able to find this in a wide range of places.

Purple Poodle

Here's Orly Purple Poodle:

I talked about this way back in January but I've been retaking pictures and that picture was another one that I wasn't entirely happy with. I still can't get the glitter in this to show up on the nail wheel, though. It's still true that the base of this comes out exactly the same as Houston We Have A Purple (despite the fact that they don't look alike in the bottle!) - this one just has an added fine glitter to it. (This is the same swatches I used back in January, though, so maybe I need to go back and have a go at re-swatching this at some point.)

NOTD: Orly Vintage

This is just after I put on the 3rd coat of this and before I'd cleaned it up at all (because I had all the lights set up and I wanted to take the picture while I was thinking about it!):

Like so many pale cremes like this, Orly Vintage (which is from the Melrose collection, from this past spring) is kind of balky to apply. Even with the 3rd coat you can see where it was wanting to pull down at the bottom of the nail. The first coat was very streaky but it evened out for the most part after the second coat. If it hadn't been for the pulling, two coats would have been enough. I was hoping for a true jade green but this is something more like a mint green. Still, for a lighter color it looks pretty good on me.

(I think I mentioned the other day that I'm kind of on the hunt for what I've started calling "semi-pastels." True pastels, the really pale ones, are not flattering on me, but I've come to realize that there are polishes like this one that are slightly darker than those, that I can wear.)

Vintage

This is Orly Vintage:

This looks too blue in this picture. It's really a jade green. This is new to me and I haven't figured out yet if I'm going to like it. (Early trials - by which I mean sticking my finger under the wheel to try to see what it will look like on me - are promising.) I found this via somebody's "favorite greens" videos - I really shouldn't watch those videos, it always ends with me buying something. But I'm kind of on a mission to figure out where the line is between the true pastels which truly do look awful on me, and the just "almost-pastel" colors, some of which it turns out I can wear. This is the first time I've tried a color like this, so I'll have to remember to report back.

Added: the manicure picture came out greener-looking:

That entry is here.

I bought my bottle from Amazon, although it's also available through Orly. Probably at Sally Beauty stores everywhere, too, I'm guessing.