Ultra Violet

I'm a little behind - I just now remembered to check to see what the new Color of the Year was, and in case you didn't know either, it's Ultra Violet - a deep blue-violet. This is totally up my alley. (I liked Greenery, last year's color, but it's not terribly flattering on me. Same with the pastels from the year before that.) So I'm going to see what I can come up with for nail polishes to match.

(Links are not affiliate links, for the record.)

Here's a really awesome one, Zoya Isa:

which I actually just talked about lately, as it happens. It's a bit deeper than Ultra Violet is supposed to be, I think, but it's definitely in the ballpark.

One of my favorite purples ever (and I love purples, so that's saying something) is also in the ballpark, Poltergeist Purple:

As you'll see if you click over to the link above, it is on the new PS website but it's apparently not currently in stock. I named this my favorite polish of 2016, in fact - it has a blue-violet base but it shimmers and shifts off in several other directions as well. It's seriously cool.

(Hmm, if you're into holos, PS has a new one that's in this color range, Carina.

I've had wear problems with this brand (below), myself, but other people love it, so I'm guessing it's just me, and this is an awesome color, in any case:

Here's Violet Femme on Picture Polish's (Australian) website (I looked and Live Love Polish doesn't have it), but it is a current color. I did order this directly from the website several years ago, and it went fine when I tried it, for what that's worth.

(I saw somebody else's list of Ultraviolets, earlier - here - but it was all more expensive brands. I'm looking for things that are more reasonably priced.)

These aren't colors that I have, but Do You Have This Color In Stock-holm? looks pretty close. Or Essie Sexy Divide (which I've never even heard of). Or Grape Pop from China Glaze.

Orchid Of The Year

This is Lynnderella Orchid Of The Year:

This was my favorite polish of 2014 - that was also the year that orchid was the Pantone Color of the Year, thus the name. (Technically Pantone called it "Radiant Orchid" - which I came to think just meant it was a brighter orchid and not a pastel one.) I forget to wear this enough, but it's really gorgeous - as you can see above, it's almost the same color as Aurora (which is the one two spaces above it on the wheel), but OotY is full of a glitter mix - all the same color, more or less, but various sizes and shapes, and there's also scattered holo glitter as well. I put this on my thumbnail on top of The Necromancer the other day, and I even fished some big flower-shaped glitter pieces out of the bottle, which I don't even remember realizing were there before.

Necromancer is darker, but blends really well.

This was the first Lynnderella I ever bought - and, I think, still the only one that I've bought directly from her. I poked around just now and was reading blog posts about all the "Lynnderella drama" that happened back around 2012, but I didn't start buying indies until well after all that had happened and so I don't really feel qualified to have an opinion about it one way or the other. I've had nothing but good experiences with her polishes, though. And this one doesn't seem to be available now, anyway.

Color of the Year: Greenery

So, the Pantone color of the year for 2017 is "Greenery":

I like this. If you look at the actual swatch of Pantone 15-0343, it's a little duller than the feeling you get from this picture, but then I've learned over the years that Pantone is generally going for a general idea of a color more than one specific shade. In this case it's a spring green - sort of the color of hope! The NY Times article does the best job I've seen of telling how Pantone arrives at these decisions.

I've had a partial entry for this up and ready to go for a couple of weeks, because I knew they always announced this in early December, but then when they finally announced it I was busy and it took me a day or two to get back to it. I had done a little speculating about what it might be. I had seen a blogger predicting Hunter Green for 2017, and another one saying Kale, I believe, but I wasn't sure Pantone would pick any green because Emerald was the color of the year only a few years ago. I've seen various theories about how Pantone chooses - bouncing around the color wheel, for example. My semi-educated guess was yellow, because they haven't had a yellow since 2009. I knew there was a yellow (Primrose Yellow, I believe) on their spring 2017 list. But Greenery was also on the spring list. And for that matter, Greenery is a yellow-leaning green, so I wasn't actually all that far off, there, still.

I'll have to come back later to the issue of what polishes might be close to this. (The one that pops in my head from my own stash is Ivy League, but really it's more lime than I think Pantone really had in mind.) (Kaboom is also shown with Ivy League, and I noticed somewhere a quote about Pantone saying that Greenery was "warm plus cool" which is pretty much literally what Kaboom/Floam is - a chartreuse green plus a blue-green. So to some degree that might be pretty close to the mark, too.)

Pantone put up a cool little clip on their Instagram showing the color being mixed. (I'm always saying I need to spend more time on Instagram. I was all into it early on - by which I mean years ago, now - and then now that everybody else has jumped on the bandwagon, I find it a little overwhelming! But there's a lot of good information that I miss because I don't mess with it enough.)

(Added: I've poked around some and honestly, I'm not finding a whole lot of nail polishes in colors like this. I hope every polish company has some in their spring collection - those should be coming out right away, anyway!)

Here's some more articles from different sources. I always find that reading different articles about the Color of the Year gives me a better overall picture of what Pantone was going for. Pantone's own announcements are sometimes sort of... opaque.
Huffington Post, Vogue, Forbes, CNN/Money, People, Us

And for reference, here's the last 10 Pantone Colors of the Year:
2016: Rose Quartz/Serenity
2015: Marsala
2014: Radiant Orchid
2013: Emerald
2012: Tangerine Tango
2011: Honeysuckle
2010: Turquoise
2009: Mimosa
2008: Blue Iris
2007: Chili Pepper

This entry has a chart that shows all the 2000-2014 picks, and the 2015 one is shown there as well.)

Marsala? + NOTD

I ganked a picture off the internet as an example of Pantone's pick for color of the year, which, if you haven't already heard, is "marsala," a red-brown.

I've heard some derision about this color, but I think it has possibilities as a "new neutral" - I don't think it's something I'd want whole outfits of, but I kind of like it. Is there a nail polish that approximates this color? So far I haven't seen one that comes very close. Lippmann Bitches Brew was suggested, that I saw, and it's sort of generally in the ballpark, I guess, but it's not very close to being this exact color at all. It's way darker. Possibly the closest thing that I own (and I'm not really a earthtones/neutral person so I don't have a lot of candidates) is OPI I Knead Sourdough, from the San Francisco collection. It looks fairly close in those pictures - closer than I would have guessed - and it's probably still obtainable, I bet. (I suspect it actually reads darker than this, though.)

As far as my own nails, I said I was going to switch to holiday colors, and so far I have. I also said I was probably going to start with Here Today Aragon Tomorrow, and that I did not do. I wanted glitter, and I didn't want to cover Aragon up with glitter the first time I wore it, so instead I covered Zoya Veruschka up with glitter - although really, the glitter wasn't all that heavy anyway, and you could totally see the base color. The glitter I used was Nyx Enchanted Forest. (Hmm, it looks pretty by itself and I'm not sure I've ever worn it that way. Maybe I'll do that this month while I'm on the red-and-green tear.) Anyway, I didn't get a picture of this combo. It was pretty but it was totally Traditional Christmas Green, just a glittery version.

Now I've gone red, and I'm wearing Via Della Spiga, from the Square Hue Milan collection, which was the October one. It's just a great classic creme red, and there's not much more to say about it. Goes on beautifully in two coats. (I guess I could say that it's what I wanted RBL Chinoise to be, and what Chinoise wasn't, somehow. Which is an old complaint of mine, but a compliment to Square Hue!)

Emerald City

I talked in a post a while back about how nobody seemed to know what color Radiant Orchid was, but actually last year's Color of the Year seems to have the same problem, in a way that surprises me. Opinion on Radiant Orchid seems to have settled down a bit now, to a middle-of-the-road red-violet, but at first it was really all over the place, and that's not that surprising because I don't think most people carry a very clear picture in their mind of what color "orchid" is, much less "radiant orchid". (Purples seem to confuse people, anyway, but that's a whole 'nother blog post.) But I would think that most people DO have an idea of what color "emerald" is.

(NOTE: See the bottom of this entry for a list of recent Colors of the Year, if you have no idea what I'm going on about here.)

Maybe I'm giving people too much credit, or it's a generational thing, I don't know. Maybe people don't obsess over color like I do. (I'm sure that's true, in general - but probably not of my fellow nail polish junkies!) I grew up in the era when The Wizard of Oz was an annual television event - I'm not sure where that tradition came from, exactly, but I know it was true for years and years, that it was on TV exactly once a year. I guess whichever network it was had a contract about it, but back then when there was no internet we didn't think much about that. It just showed up once a year and everybody watched it, pretty much. So that's one thing that shaped my perception of "emerald" - it's the color of the Emerald City, of course. And the other thing was pictures of jewelry in catalogs. The emeralds in those old catalogs were usually a little darker than Emerald-City green, but they were a pretty similar color, on the whole. So I have a definite opinion. Emerald is a dark green, but it's green. It's not a bit blue-green, it's like you took a color like "kelly green" - a St. Patrick's Day green - and made it darker. .

Well, the reason I'm going on about this is because there's all these nail polishes that call themselves emerald, but aren't (in my opinion, anyway). I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this issue before, here and there. I think I first started noticing it with Thames, last summer:

Now I don't know for sure what BL's website said in July, but right now it calls it a blue-green. I think it may have been Nordstrom's fault I thought it was supposed to be emerald, and of course I don't have the website from then to look at (in fact as I write this Nordstrom's website is down completely - it says they're "making enhancements") - but you can see where I was talking about this last July, anyway. And in fact I never thought it was emerald at all, looking at the pictures - it was just that Nordstrom said so. (And okay, I will grant that it could pass for emerald if you're not looking close.) But then there came Viridian (from Illamasqua - Sephora's website calls it "peacock green"), and then Darkest Emerald Luxe (from Rococo) which I was talking about yesterday - it just doesn't look very green to me at all. So I'm confused, now, about whether my whole perception of what an emerald looks like has been off for my whole life!


I found a cool graphic with the last 10 official Pantone CotYs, going back to 2004, which is interesting. I think I've only really been aware of it as a Thing for the last 5 years or so, because I do remember some talk about Mimosa, and I definitely remember the flurry of talk about "Honeysuckle" (which was a pink) back at the beginning of 2011.
2009: Mimosa
2010: Turquoise
2011: Honeysuckle
2012: Tangerine Tango
2013: Emerald
2014: Radiant Orchid

Just what color IS a radiant orchid?

Which one? It's a mystery to me. (Actually, I just pulled this picture out at random, as one that had colors that looked pretty close, but the one at the bottom left is Winterberry - I'm pretty sure that one's not actually orchid. The others... well.) (The other three are Eternal Beauty, Lotus, and Harmonie. More on that down toward the bottom.)

Pantone 18-3224 is what I've seen on swatches of the official color of the year, but Pantone's dirty little secret, near as I can tell, is that they announce the color of the year, but they don't really attempt to make anybody use that exact color. I suppose it would be impossible to do, for one thing. I've been watching this process for several years now and it's the same every year. This year, they put up a picture of an orchid on a red-violet sort of background - so which color is radiant orchid? the color of the orchid (and there's a couple to pick from there) or the color of the background? Nobody seems to know, or maybe the people who know are mostly not commenting.

One thing about it, this has drawn a lot of interest to the color orchid, and red-violet colors in general, which I think is Pantone's whole idea, and probably is why they don't just make it about Pantone 18-3224. (I said "dirty little secret" above like it was a bad thing, but really I don't think that. It gets them a lot of publicity, yes, but it also gets people thinking about color in general, and that's good.)

There's some color discussion below that is maybe a bit tl;dr long for people who aren't into this subject, but after that it's mostly links, and a polish list, so skip down to those if you just want to see the colors without reading more about this!


I've done a lot of thinking about color in general, in recent years - although I'm certainly no expert - and something I've been playing around with, in my head and on Pinterest and such places lately, is where the line is between purple and pink. It's pretty shifty, anyway, and orchid is somewhere in there, but I'm not entirely clear in my mind on where, either. (I think one of the links above had a picture of a sheet of various Pantone colors that are close. That's actually the most useful bit, to me.)

Anyway, in my head - and presumably on a color wheel - the progression through purple and into pink goes like this (and bear in mind that while I may put this in list form, it's actually more like a sliding scale. The points are not fixed.

• blue-violet
• neutral purples, that lean neither blue nor red
• red-violet
• magenta

and somewhere in there between red-violet and magenta, you start reading these colors as pink, especially if they're very pale. But the thing about orchids is that I've seen things all along this range be called orchid, all the way from blue-violet to awfully-pink, and in all kinds of intensities, too. So I still don't know the answer, assuming there even is one. But oh well, these kind of things make life interesting, right?

(I should qualify that: I don't have an answer but I do have an opinion, which is that orchid is on the paler end of this range of colors - although that may be where the "radiant" part comes from; maybe it's meant to imply a more intense color. Until I started paying attention to this in the last year or so I probably would have just called the darker red-violets "purple" but nowadays I'd be more likely to actually call them "red-violet," until they start shading into more magenta/pink tones, at which time I start calling them "fuchsia" or "hot pink" or something like that.)

Linkage:
First of all, Beauty Department did a whole post where it mostly looks like they did try to match the specific Pantone color I named above (and which is shown in the entry) - they came up with some things that I hadn't, at the time, like Zoya Charisma. (Charisma's been on my Zoya wishlist for a while, and I don't know why I still haven't gotten it.)

Here's some polish and makeup and other assorted items from several sources that I think is in the orchid/red-violet ballpark:
new Zoya Hudson (a gorgeous orchid shimmer, but apparently not yet available). Most spring lines seem to have an orchid - they'd be crazy not to! I know I saw a China Glaze picture somewhere also.
Zoya gives you several choices from their current lines - Perrie might be closest to the traditional idea of orchid, there.
Bobbi Brown Ultra Violet lip gloss
Orly Grape
Pantone iPhone cover and a "chip drive"
Laura Mercier Orchid eye stick

(Added: Huffington Post did a piece on this, too, and their examples are also all over the place.)

More late additions (I'll probably keep adding here as I come up with more examples):
Butter London Molly Coddled (they call it "opaque lavender orchid")

I also started pulling polishes out of my stash that I thought read as orchid or red-violet, and here's my list. (It's a pretty long list, so I'm not going to make any attempt at links here. If you don't want to google, you can look by brand in my labels list in the sidebar; I'm sure I've talked about most of these in the past year or so. Although bear in mind that the "orchid" in my label list is the brand, not the color; I need to go in and make that clearer.)

This list starts with the paler and redder colors - although you do have to bear in mind that I don't look good in pastels and I know it, so my palest is not terribly pale - and gets darker, more or less.

• Zoya Perrie, as mentioned above
• Julie G Crushed Candy (a "Gumdrops" texture)
• Zoya Kieko
• Chirality Convergence (holo)
• Confetti Purple Pizzazz (sheer, is really more of a topper)
• Zoya Harmonie (which is a frost - see picture above)
• Color Club Eternal Beauty (holo - also in picture)
• Zoya Lotus (which has a pretty neutral base but a shimmer that's more towards red)
• RBL Purple Haze (more greyed out and neutral)
• Revlon Ultraviolet Nail Art wand (not at all neutral, and not meant to be - this is in the Neon part of this line, though, and I had the impression they were discontinuing them)
• SH Xtreme Wear Posh Plum
• Sinful Colors Fig
• SOPI Domestic Goddess - discontinued, but I think the SOPIs have been seen around on clearance aisles, or virtual clearance aisles, and pretty recently
• Triple Shine Vanity Flare
• Zoya Mira
• Insta-Dri Grape Going - a duochrome
• Colorstay Amethyst
• Zoya Roxy - which is a glitter with a darker base but very red-violet glitter
• Kleancolor Sparkle Purple
• Zoya Carly - sort of like Jem's plummier sister! (I love Jem but it's too brown for this list)
• Revlon Plum Attraction (probably the darkest in this bunch)

(Added: I was looking at Revlon's website just now, trying to figure out if Plum Attraction is a current color - I suspect not, and I haven't found it so far if it is - but I did notice that Nail Art Neons are still listed as a line, so I may be wrong about Ultraviolet. What's not listed any more is Moon Candy, another of the Nail Art lines.)