The RIP tag

@jessface90 wrote up this tag about discontinued indie brands - I'll link her video at the bottom.

1. What are the top 3 (or just one, idc it's your life) brands you'd bring back if you could?

Rescue Beauty, Cult Nails, Chick Polish - I have quite a few RBLs (I counted, I have ten), I have ONE Cult Polish (which is black but it's an especially nice black, with a rubbery finish), and a handful of Chicks. I'll put some pictures below.

2. What is a brand that you never got the chance to try?

Lots of these, but especially... hmm, well, I was going to say NerdLacquer but apparently they are back! Also Candy Lacquer, for those gorgeous glitter combinations.

3. What is a brand that you tried at the last minute?

Wicked Polish had been gone for a while and did one restock, and I got a polish from that one. I'm not sure if that was "last minute" or "attempted comeback" or what, but they were gone again the last time I checked. (I have a list for this, btw, but I haven't updated it lately!)

4. Is the brand that made your first indie polish still in business (and what was your first indie/brand)?

Chirality was my first, maybe 5 or 6 years ago? I bought 3 minis, all holos. (They were also the first holos that I ever bought.)

5. What is a brand (or 3 or something) that you forgot about?

I have one Black Cat Lacquer polish that I really like - they still have a website but everything on it says "sold out."

(This is I Know You Are But What Am I?)

Here's Hipster Chick:

I used to complain a great deal about Chinoise, because it was $18 and it looks exactly like the rest of these reds, but it is a very nice red:

This is RBL Pretty Gritty, which I think I called my favorite polish of... some year or other. (It was 2015.)

And here's Jess:

Color Club stash

I really don't have all that many Color Club polishes.

L-R, this is Raspberry Rush (scented), Eternal Beauty (holo), Snow-flakes (silvery flakie topper), Hot Couture (pale pink topper), It's Raining Men (blue-to-purple duochrome), We'll Never Be Royals (purple-burgundy-orange multichrome), and Nail-Robi (purple-leaning blue creme).

I'm missing one mini that I forgot about, and there's one polish that I discarded. But I've written about both of those, for sure: the mini is Editorial (which I liked so much I bought two bottles of it), and the one I threw in the trash - because it had faded horribly - was Gimme A Grape Big Kiss, which came from the same collection as Raspberry Rush and was scented.

(Added, because I don't know why I didn't think about putting the old pictures here before.)

Editorial (on the left, but I think you could probably figure that out on your own). I believe it's supposed to be a dupe for Chanel Peridot.

And this is the only picture I could find that showed the original color of Gimme A Grape Big Kiss (It's the one in the middle.) And if you want to see the color it faded to, that's what's in the link on its name further above.

(This came from this post in very early 2014, and if you think this picture is out of focus now... well, it's fuzzy at any size, I think, but it's also possible you may be seeing it at a higher resolution than the original size. I cropped the down because it had other stuff in it; I think this was taken with my old Canon camera and the resolution is not great. That's why you don't see me repeating those old pictures a whole lot.)

I've got label pictures below, but first let me think about favorites. I had We'll Never Be Royals in my 2016 favorites, but then I decided I didn't love it as much as I thought after I'd worn it a couple of times. Nail-Robi is really beautiful, but it's a creme and I really haven't worn it a lot. Ditto Eternal Beauty - except it's a linear holo, of course. Linear holos are not really my favorite things, in general, either. Honestly, if I just get to pick one, I think I'm going with Hot Couture. Top-coats are often my favorite things, anyway, and this is a really awesome one.

So ok, that's decided, and we can go on to labels. Color Club has a bad habit of releasing bottles without any name on it. I've seen lots of complaints about this from other people, too, over the years. I know Eternal Beauty was unlabeled - I remember getting online and double-checking to make sure I had it right - and I think Gimme A Grape Big Kiss wasn't either. And neither was either one of the minis. I think the rest of mine were labeled, as you can see below (well, if you can read them):

(Snow-flakes, apparently, rather than Snowflakes or Snowflake - I think I've seen it called all of those at one time or another. The hyphen in the middle bothers me, really, but I usually take the bottle name as canon unless I have some reason to think it's not what they actually meant.)

And then this:

I just messed up the label on Nail-robi, it's not that it didn't have one. And I mentioned Eternal Beauty above, but I have also complained previously about the fact that all of the holos have really vague names that give no clue to what color they are. I mean, everybody does that some of the time, but from a company with a history of not labeling things properly in the first place, it's doubly annoying. Just number them if you don't want to give them a proper name, but give us a way to tell what is what.

Throwback Thursday: Intergalactic Space

This is actually Zoya Katherine (a jelly) underneath, and then Orly IGS on top.

I think this was just one of those manis where I was experimenting. (I did this so much I had a special name for it at one point: Playing with Polish. I mostly forgot to use it, though, so I finally gave up on that.)

Copper NOTD + new polishes

I got more compliments on this manicure than I've gotten in ages:

It's InstaDri Chop Chop Copper - which was an LE color from a couple of years ago - over Square Hue Y2K, which just came in the Square Hue box pictured below. Y2K is an almost-black - I guess it's dark charcoal gray, although in some lights it almost looked green. I actually intended to put a different copper polish over this, but I couldn't find the one I was thinking of, so I used this instead. And it's great. Chop Chop Copper is pretty thin, and I used 3 (very light) coats and the darkness of Y2K still shows through - which is good, that's what I wanted.

So Y2K came from (naturally) Square Hue's 90s collection.

The three polishes are Vogue (for 1990), Desert Storm (for 1991), and of course Y2K for 1999:

Desert Storm isn't exactly up my alley, but the other two are strong shimmers and so I'm happy. (I would say that I'll use it as a underlayer, except that's exactly what I said about the tan color from the Milan collection a year ago, and I'm not sure I've ever used it at all. Or who knows, maybe I'll go crazy and actually just paint my nails sand-color. For me, that would be a trip.)

(And if anybody has actually been keeping track here, yes, this is the first Square Hue you've seen since the 1900s collection back in January. I cancelled it and managed to stay away for, what, 8 whole months?)

Anyway, the only thing I've actually gone out and ordered lately was one orange holo glitter from an indie called Top Shelf. Because, well, orange holo glitter is exactly what we all need for Halloween, right? And I got some pretty nice goodies along with it:

Oh, the orange holo glitter is called Candy Cane Cordial, I forgot to mention that part. And then she also sent some cuticle oil, and some earrings, or maybe they're supposed to be wine charms, I'm not sure. (They don't match, but that doesn't necessarily answer the question, since earrings don't necessarily match these days either.) The cuticle oil is peach-scented, which I wasn't quite sure about, but it smells good - it's very light and more like a real peach than like some chemical pseudo-peach thing. (Was there actually some awful chemical peach scent you could get in the early 70s, maybe? Most of you are probably too young to have any hope of answering that - but my scent-memory says absolutely yes.) Anyway, big thumbs up on Top Shelf - I have swatched the actual polish on a nail wheel but forgot to take a picture of that. I'll of course be wearing the polish very soon anyway.

(And the usual disclaimer applies, or rather no disclaimer is necessary, because I paid full retail price for the polish and I'm assuming that being a blogger with a couple of dozen readers on a good day is not enough to warrant extra freebies just for the fact of being a blogger - which I didn't disclose in any case. My guess is that everybody gets some, although I didn't ask and so I obviously can't promise on that score.)

Ipsy vs Sephora Play

(I wanted to call this Battle of the Boxes, except that Ipsy doesn't actually come in a box, darnit. The literalness of my mind strikes again.)

I've had an Ipsy subscription for about a year, and I've enjoyed it. Everybody knows the deal, more or less, right? Pretty much the same as Birchbox - you pay $10 a month including shipping, and you get five good-sized samples - instead of Birchbox's sixth random item you get a little makeup bag for your samples, different every month. Occasionally you may get a full-sized item. (I can remember two items offhand that were definitely full-sized - a dry shampoo and a NOPI polish.) The items you get are supposed to be tailored to you but I still can't tell you to what degree that actually happens - in a year I got exactly two nail polishes, for example. But I did get a lot of other stuff that I liked, and the stuff that I don't like I give away, and it basically seems to me to be worth the money. I did try out Birchbox one month but it didn't seem to me to be particularly better. So I'm still getting Ipsy but I'm kind of on the fence about it, partly because I see what other people get and it seems to me that other people's stuff is better than mine - a time-tested recipe for discontent, right?

Now comes Sephora's version. This is the first official month, although I heard there have been tests before now. It's still sort of in limited release - people in three cities in the northeast quadrant of the country can get it (Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Boston, maybe?) and for everybody else, you can get on a waitlist, and I don't have any sense of how fast they're working through that list. But I have bought a bunch of stuff from Sephora lately, and because of that, maybe - they didn't actually say so - I got an invitation by e-mail, so of course I had to try it. Same price, but instead of the bag you get a 6th item.

So it showed up yesterday, and here's the big unboxing.

This is the side-view of the shipping box.

It's a box in a box, of course, I guess because most people are used to the Birchbox formula. (Ipsy comes in a padded mailer, and is always just fine, but I also guess that's why you rarely get anything that's in a glass container, like perfume, or nail polish.)

So there's a little bit of padding on top of the inner box, and when you pull that out you get the inner box, which looks like this:

Which I have to admit is pretty adorable. I don't know if the design is the same for every month, or if they change - not exactly a big issue for me either way!

Here's what you see when you lift the lid:

This is a booklet, which I have to admit I haven't looked at in detail yet. It seemed to have info on each product. There's a card in the back of it that's good for 50 Insider points if you show up at the Sephora counter with it, though! I think they are supposed to be able to answer any questions you have, too. And implied in this is something that matters to me, to some degree - everybody gets the same items, evidently. Like I said, this is one of my points of dissatisfaction with Ipsy. Some months I feel like they just throw in whatever they have left, and it doesn't necessarily seem to have much to do with what your preferences are.

Back to the unboxing - the next layer is cute matching tissue:

and under that, of course, is the main event:

So we have a Nirvana White perfume sample (which works out for me because I have a small Nirvana Black bottle already - a purse-size, that is - and it occurred to me lately that I didn't even know what Nirvana White smelled like); a lip-stain from Sephora Collection, a Bumble & Bumble hair oil, a Glamglow cleanser, and on the bottom row, a Marc Jacobs eyeliner and some Ole Henrickson "Sheer Transformation" moisturizer.

Here's the eyeliner:

It's black - I don't remember the color name but I remember thinking it was a cute name, for what that's worth. (Added: it's "Blacquer.") It's supposed to stay put really well, which is a factor that's important for me with my super-sensitive eyes - if I wear stuff around my eyes, I need it to stay there and not be in my eyes, y'know?

It's all stuff that I will try, for sure. I tried the lip-stain already and I really like it - the color is Peony, I remember that one. Moisturizer and cleanser are always good, perfume samples are good, I have no gripe with the product selection.

So now we come to the battle of box vs. bag - Sephora Play on the top and Ipsy on the bottom:

I talked about the Ipsy bag to some degree in the last entry (down at the bottom) but I didn't have pictures yet. So it's red nail polish which I really like, hand and body lotion which I will use, a brush which I will probably use, the Nyx eyeshadows which I will probably try - but it's certainly nicer than what you usually get! - and the fifth thing is a shadow pencil which I already have one of in a different color. I'll probably give at least that one away. The hand lotion is Not Soap, Radio which I haven't tried before, and it smells good. So on the whole it's far better than the usual Ipsy bag - but I'm cancelling Ipsy, anyway, at least for now. (Ipsy does not make it super-easy to cancel, either, and Netflix can tell you that I am known to cancel and resubscribe to things repeatedly, so they might ought to re-think that. But at least they don't make you call, which would be the kiss of death. Anybody that makes you call to cancel, I will never deal with again.)

(Oh, and I do actually think this month's actual Ipsy bag is kind of cute - the little leatherette thing - but I now have 12 of these bags so I don't think I need any more for a while.)

Isn't it a bit ironic that Ipsy sent me Formula X polish, which is only available at Sephora? I'm inclined to think that was probably one of the leftovers from past months, before Sephora became one of their immediate competitors. (I don't know who put up the money behind Ipsy, but I suspect they just can't quite keep up with the purchasing mojo of Sephora. We'll see how this goes in the future.)

So - to sum up - Sephora Play wins for now. I'm not entirely sure that I will keep on with that in the long haul, either, partly because I feel like a lot of things that Sephora sells are kind of out of my price range. The items I've bought that are out of Ipsy bags are mostly not terribly cheap, either, but Sephora is definitely higher-priced, overall. I bought a $40 moisturizer but that's at the top end of reasonable, to me. I'm sure not buying a $75 one. (I don't know how much the Ole Henrickson one is, actually, but that's how much the Philosophy one was that I already had a sample of. For TWO OUNCES.)

A point in Ipsy's favor, now that I think about it, is that you don't always get the brands you're already used to seeing - they make you try new things, and many of them are good. Everything that I've bought because of the samples (there's three items listed here, and I've bought one more since then) were new brands to me, and I liked them.

(I just looked and the lip-stain is $14, which is not too bad. I assume we'll have a fair amount of Sephora-brand items in the mix, which helps a bit.)

The latest stuff

I keep forgetting to take a picture of my nails - I'm sporting my first Bubblegum Punk manicure, over Misa Quirky Smile (dark teal). And it's awesome.

I'm also doing my periodic rearranging of my stash - I've done this the last couple of years, and it's usually what ends up with me taking pictures of everything. However, I've done that twice and now my stash has pretty much grown beyond the point where that's practicable. I'll tell you what I'm doing, though. I tried organizing it by color and then I tried pulling out certain finishes (like holos and top-coats and so forth) and neither one of those has really worked out, completely. But I know I'm prone to wear certain things at certain times of the year, right? Brights in the summer, earth-tones in the fall, glitters in the winter, so forth. So I'm experimenting with sorting by season. Some things are basic and non-seasonal and those are their own category - creams, especially, tend to end up there. But it's kind of amazing to me how many colors fall well into the seasonal split. So I'll report back on how that's working out.

Here's the latest round of new stuff (all of which ended up in either a fall or winter box, as I recall):

L-R: Aura, Pitch Purple, I Know You Are But What Am I?, Casablanca, Legend

I actually broke down and paid full price for a Formula X for the first time... they lured me in with blackened red, what can I say? The one on the left was the non-sale one and the one on the right was on sale. (Placed at the ends, as the crafty among you might guess, to keep the other bottles from rolling away.)

The Models Own and the Black Cat are my first from both of those brands and came from the Llarowe closeout sale. I feel sad about Llarowe's scale-back because it seems like the end of an era. But really I suspect her own polishes were the best-sellers these days. And it's not like she's actually going away!

So here's the low-down on those:
Aura (Formula X Black Quartz) - I called this blackened red, but actually what it is is black-and-red microglitter. I believe this is pretty new and nobody has swatches of it out there that I can find, so the link is to the Sephora page. It looks great in the bottle, but when I swatched it, I was not as impressed. We'll see - I have so much new polish that it may be closer to Halloween before I get around to wearing it, anyway!
Casablanca (Sinful Colors) - a fairly light silvery-gray. Sinful calls this chrome but I don't agree, it's more satiny than that. I think I mentioned before that I had trouble getting this to dry. My bottle tended to go on thick, but next time I will definitely be doing thinner coats.
I Know You Are But What Am I? (Black Cat Lacquer) - obviously Pee-Wee inspired, I believe it's from an 80s collection. It's an almost-red fuchsia jelly glitterbomb. It's really gorgeous.
Legend (Formula X Shifters) - Sephora calls it "maroon and rainbow metallic" but in the bottle I thought it read purple. In fact I took pictures in pairs, I'll put those below.
Pitch Purple (Models Own HyperGel) - if you could get an even single coat of Pitch Purple on, it might be a brighter purple. But I couldn't manage that and I used two. With two it becomes much darker, but still very shiny and pretty. (I did end up using top-coat over it, but it's nearly shiny enough on its own.) Lucy calls it "ink purple" at the link above and that sounds about right.

See, Pitch Purple and Legend both look purple. This was in indirect sun and they are usually as true-in-color as pictures of purple ever are (which is to say, they mostly are, but they're not infallible). Legend probably has a more red-looking base than it appears, is my guess. That's presumably part of the Shifting duochrome-ness of it.

And here are the two redder ones. Aura does not seem to be quite as advertised, but it's still pretty. I am going to take Ignite (see below) and black creme and all these vampy red glitters and play around and see what I can come up with for my Halloween needs!

I was complaining about Ipsy never sending me nail polish, but this month they finally did. (In these days of employees whose only job is social media, I don't think it's completely paranoid of me to wonder if that's completely a coincidence, that I get nail polish right after I complained here about not getting any!) So Ipsy is partially out of my bad books, but I'm also getting Sephora Play starting this month, and if I like it I may continue that and cancel Ipsy. We'll see. I just feel like Ipsy can be very spotty and it annoys me when I see that other people got better stuff than I did! (In fact, one night lately I was wandering between YouTube videos and I saw a video with two people comparing their Ipsy bags - one got way better stuff than the other one, and I was like, "Oh good, it's not just me.")

So anyway, the Ipsy bag came after I had already taken the picture above, but the polish is a Formula X mini, and it's called Ignite, and I thought, "Oh, yawn, red," but then it turns out it's not a bright red, it's a blood-red (apparently Sephora's description was "smokin' red"), and I'm not entirely sure I have anything exactly like it - which is dangerous because next I may be wanting to buy the full size. It's beautiful. It occurs to me that I have actually not tried any of Formula X's normal colors because I've been buying all these sale ones, and they're all from other lines besides the core one - even the one that wasn't on sale. This is very shiny and very unlike the ones I have. (Apparently I am safe, though - I just went and nosed around Sephora's website and Ignite is not there any more.) (And I will of course take pictures of the whole Ipsy haul eventually. It had Nyx eyeshadows, which I would be more excited about if I wore eyeshadow more.)

(I got an e-mail meanwhile that Sephora Play is also on the way - and Square Hue, which I'd sort of forgotten I restarted again. More more more.)

NOTD: Casablanca + Blue Rouge

So that combination in the title is what I'm wearing now, Lynnderella Blue Rouge over Sinful Colors Casablanca. I started out the day Friday with nothing on but base-coat, and I was going to put some polish on before work, and then Rob showed up unexpectedly because his car had broken down and he had already had it towed back to the mechanic's across the street from us - and I ended up just getting dressed and walking out the door with him. (The brakes went out on the car, which is scary, but everything's fine except that we have to pay to get the brakes fixed, ugh.) I took him and dropped him off at work, but it wasn't time for me to go in yet, so I went and got lunch, and then I couldn't stand it that my nails were in their natural, slightly stained condition, so I went to Walgreen's and grabbed a bottle of nail polish practically at random, and that was Casablanca. (Not quite at random; I went down the Sinful displays at the front going, "No, not glitter... I have that..." etc. -- It was a process of elimination, basically.)

I don't remember having seen Casablanca-the-polish before, but it doesn't seem to be a new color, either, as far as I could figure out. It's gray, or rather silver, and SC calls it chrome, but it's actually not. It's not shiny enough to be chrome - it's more like a satin finish. It's an interesting color. I was complaining about it on Twitter that night because I of course had put it on in the car (I guess I could have put it on at work, but that would have been just as much of a pain) and it went on in one thick coat, and I went, "Oh, wow, a one-coater," but then it Would. Not. Dry. Of course it was raining and I'm sure the general humidity did not help. I let it dry for a few minutes and then I went inside, and then I had to go back and fix it inside, because it got all messed up just walking across the street to get inside, even though  I was trying to be careful. So I imagine the answer is that you have to do thin coats instead of allowing it to go on in one thick one, anyway. I'll report back after I actually try that.

I picked up that particular bottle of polish partly because I was thinking it looked like a layering polish, so of course when I got home, I went looking for something to layer over it. I looked at the little line of Lynnderellas and I picked out Blue Rouge as being the most silvery - I figured it would mesh with the silveryness of Casablanca. And it did. (I still am awfully crappy at fade manis, though. Practice! I need to practice!)

It has occurred to me that while I mentioned using Instant Artificials, what I haven't mentioned is that my current base-coat of choice is Bridge the Ridge. (Instant Artificials first, then Bridge the Ridge, then polish.) I have been trying out ridge-fillers just because I realized that my fingernails do tend to have ridges, but honestly I mostly just like the feel of this one. And the results as far as wear also seem to be good.

Stash additions: binge edition

So here's the big list of everything I've gotten lately, in alpha order by name (bottle pictures are here and here, and there are swatches at the bottom). Also, since virtually all of these were bought on sale, one way or another, many of them have limited availability. I've put notes on some of them where I know they are still available as of the time I'm writing this. (Some of them may be available from other sources like Amazon, anyway, of course. And I think at least a couple of the Lynnderellas may still be available, too, but with the way they are sold - i.e., mostly on eBay - it's hard to be sure!)

• Alexa Lace (Nails Inc.) - believe it or not, this is my very first Nails Inc. polish. I think this was an Alexa Chung collaboration. It's a matte glitter (or maybe technically satin) in red, and it's an unusual mix of shapes that does come out looking rather like lace. (I was looking to see what other polishes were in this collab - it was Alexa Leather, Alexa Lace, Alexa Sequins... there was also cashmere, and stars and hearts and at least a couple of colors under an "Alexa Edit" name. It's a bigger collection than I realized.)
• Alpha Nail (Nail Pattern Boldness) - a blue-to-purple-shifting duochrome topcoat. (Still available from NPB here.) (2015 mani over red here)
• Bit Faker (Butter London) - gorgeous mixed-metal glitter in the copper/bronze range, which can be built to opaqueness in two coats.
• Blue Rouge (Lynnderella) - periwinkle and various purples - despite the name, it's much less blue than Forget You Not. Similar to Viola but paler. (I guess the name makes more sense if you think of it as blue plus rouge - red - which, after all, makes purple on a color wheel.)
• Bubblegum Punk (Rescue Beauty Lounge+R29 collection) - iridescent shimmery cellophane-ish top-coat. Sort of hard to describe but really beautiful. It becomes very close to opaque, at least, with 3 coats. (Available from RBL here.)
• Cauldron Drippings (Lynnderella) - orange glitter and random(ish) mixed glitter - she says every bottle is different - in a clear base. Mine has bar glitter, among other things, but not enough of it to be seriously annoying. It's very pretty - in a mega-Halloween kind of a way!
• Excuse Me I Blurpled (KBShimmer) - blue and purple glitter, my favorite combination. It looks like the base is actually blurple. I swatched this over a black base and it was very dark that way. I believe it's really intended to be worn on its own.
• Explosive (Formula X) - really wild metallic holo glitter in a black base. (Sephora's description is "black rainbow mega-glitter" - I've also seen it called the perfect New Year's Eve polish). Still available at Sephora at the moment.
• Fly (OPI mini) - from the Nicki Minaj collection, a turquoise cream, maybe a bit lighter than the average turquoise.
• Forget You Not (Lynnderella) - periwinkle (i.e., blue-violet) satin glitter in a blue base, with pink shimmer
• Good Girl Gone Bad (Deborah Lippmann) - this was a holiday 2011 polish, a sparkly wine-red. It's gorgeous. I try not to obsess about polishes in this higher price range because I just don't need to be paying full price for them - so I'm glad I didn't know about this one til I had an opportunity to get it at a bargain price!
• Graffiti (The New Black ombre set) - These are a bit odd, these sets, but I'm glad I got this one, because it'll be fun to play with. It has five separate mini-polishes - they don't seem to have individual names - and some of the other sets are various shades of purples and so on, but this one is black and silver and gray. It has a black creme and a shimmery one and big silver glitter and fine silver glitter. I can't see doing one finger in each but I think it'll be good for layering.
• Love Potion No. 99.9 (Lynnderella) - my understanding is that there was an old formula that was just called Love Potion 99, and then the new formulation is 99.9. (But I can't swear to that.) It's got orchid leanings but it's darker than Orchid Of The Year, which I already had. Basically, it's purple glitter (somewhat red-leaning) with maybe a slightly purple-tinted base - almost clear - and some scattered small red glitters.
• Scrangie 2.0 (Rescue Beauty Lounge) - Ji's blurb about this talks about oil slicks, and man, maybe I'll see that when I look at this in other lights, but so far I can't see it at all. I called it a fall-ish polish. (The second link is also the link to buy it, fyi.) Anyway, it's also described as "complex" and that I absolutely buy. I honestly thought it was a sort of a bronze metallic when I decided to order it, and I don't think that's completely off, either. Now that I'm looking for it, I guess I do see the oil-slick effect. A bit. Anyway, complex is certainly right and I'll probably have more to say about this after I wear it! (more swatches) (Note: that was the wrong link, but I finally noticed and have corrected that!)
• VamPink (Lynnderella) - I'm not sure how I ended up with so many Halloween polishes - three of the six Lynnderellas - but eh, I love Halloween and anyway, neither of these two with vampire names really look exactly like Halloween colors so I can wear them whenever. This one especially - it's various pink, magenta and black glitters in a pink base.
• Very Pretty Vampire (Lynnderella) - this looks different than I thought it did at first. It's not exactly Halloween - what it is is goth. It's red, burgundy, and black in a clear base. It has big pieces including some good-sized squares, although I haven't really managed to fish any of those out of the bottle yet!
• Viola (Initial Lacquer): ...and in fact this very possibly the very bottle that I now possess, in those pictures, since I got mine from Oh Three Oh Four's blog sale. This is mixed purple glitters in a purple jelly base, with some small glitters in other colors mixed in. I had never even heard of this brand, but then it looks like she's not making polish any more, so I guess it's best not to get too attached to the brand!

plus:
Glitter Food (Nail Pattern Boldness) - made to be a top-coat that evens out glitter, although I've heard people say they also use it as a base under their glitter, and I'm currently testing that out. I'm going to have lots of material to test both those uses out on with all these Lynnderellas! It actually has a third use, as well - the other use is as "Fix-a-Flat" - you use it to sort of re-suspend glitters in the bottle. (The link above has a photographic demonstration of that.)

Okay, swatches:

This is some of the new top-coat things compared with some that I already had. Left to right we have Gossamer (Jin Soon), Alpha Nail (NPB), Bubblegum Punk (RBL) and an oldie but a goodie, Hard Candy Jailbait, all over WnW Black Creme. Jailbait does not look so much like the others over black, but the effect is generally similar. I talked over here (towards the bottom) about these polishes while I was doing the actual swatching. Gossamer looks pink-ish, Alpha Nail looks blue-ish, and if those two are fraternal twins, Bubblegum Punk is their shinier cousin.

Here's Bit Faker over black, Wet N Wild Black Creme on its own (which is what's under almost everything this wheel), Alexa Lace, Scrangie 2.0, and Alexa Lace again, this time not over black. (Scrangie is not over black, either.) Alexa Lace over black is rather similar to the one Lynnderella, but I like it. The link way above has it layered over a pale pink and that was pretty as well.

Here's Bit Faker, without undies and with the black undies:

You can see that it builds pretty easily to opacity, on its own. I think it looks really good both ways, though.

Also, I filled that blank black space up there with Cauldron Drippings:

I should point out that none of these have topcoat at all - it becomes pretty obvious on some of these big glitters. Anyway, I imagine I'll wear this over orange, when it comes right down to Halloween, but it looks pretty cute this way, too.

The only one of this bunch that's new is the first one. This is Explosive (Formula X), Snowflakes (Color Club), Travel In Colour (China Glaze), and Fire Fly (Jesse's Girl). Explosive is really splashy, as I think I mentioned above, although you can't really see it here. Interestingly, to me, the smaller glitters in Explosive look exactly the same size-wise as the ones in the next polish, Snowflakes, but they read really different from a distance. Rather than reading like a loud holographic, Snowflakes reads more like a flakie - I guess it's a flakie in glitter form? I guess that's possible. -- Then after that we have Travel In Colour, which as I already knew, reads pretty pink, and it covers more than these others. And the fourth one is Fire Fly, which I'm always forgetting to wear but which I've always thought was gorgeous when I did remember to wear it. It almost looks greenish here, but really I think it's just sort of colorless, or maybe silvery. It just adds shimmer.

Explosive without and with undies, and I'm happy to see that you can get more of a hint of the rainbow effect in these pictures:

It has a gray base and you could wear it on its own, certainly, but I think I like it over black more, in this case. I may save this one til winter because it's so seriously flashy, and I usually get in the mood for that in the winter. We'll see.

Let's see, this is Viola, the Initial Lacquer one, and then Love Potion 99.9 and VamPink. You can see that VamPink does look pretty pink, and that Viola is somewhat more blue-violet, where LP99.9 is maybe more towards neutral.

Here's Fly, Good Girl Gone Bad, and Excuse Me I Blurpled again, you've seen that one above. I had to start a different wheel, and I ended up filling half of it with the Lynnderellas without topcoat, because it made it easier to see what was what in the glitter. The two Llarowe polishes I got in the mail tonight are also on that wheel, so I'll probably have pictures of all that later on. I also think I'm missing large pictures of some of the Lynnderellas, so I'll go back and fill that in too, in case anybody besides me cares!

Here's the whole black wheel once it was completed (well, it's all over black except the two I pointed out above, Scrangie and Alexa):

(I have gone back to writing the names on the wheel because even though it's messy, it gives me a record of what's what. I am too scatterbrained and when I put the list somewhere else I tend to lose it!) (And I remembered after a while that I quit using Pigma Pens on these - that's the ones that are smeared, on the left - and went to using fine-point Sharpies instead, because those hold up better on the plastic.)

NOTD + polish binge, part 2

The first of half a dozen (or more) glittery manicures to come:

This is 2 light coats of Love Potion 99.9 over Xtreme Wear Purple Potion. I think when I took the picture I was only wearing Glitter Food as a top-coat - everybody including NPB, the maker, says to put another top-coat over Glitter Food, because it's not all that shiny, and that's absolutely true - but actually I liked the not-so-shiny effect. After I took this, I put on a coat of Seche Vite, and then I ended up putting on another coat of Sally Girl Matte. I may put another coat of Glitter Food on and see if that gets me back to the original state (which was somewhere in the middle).

I didn't pick "half a dozen" out of a hat above, here's where that number came from:

Six Lynnderellas, count 'em, six. Plus a Lippmann glitter and a KB shimmer one, and the mini from Initial Lacquer, which I had never even heard of - it was a bonus. So was Fly, next to it, at the bottom and also TWO sets of nail appliques. (I have a picture of one of them, I'll stick it at the bottom. The other one had gone rogue at the time I was taking pictures and I couldn't find it.)

If you want to know, here is the list of everything in the picture. I'll have some posts coming up with swatches and stuff too, but here are just the names for now:
Top row: Very Pretty Vampire, VamPink, Good Girl Gone Bad, Fly mini and Viola mini
Bottom row: Love Potion No.99.9, Blue Rouge, Forget You Not, Excuse Me I Blurpled, and Cauldron Drippings

(I do feel like I should mention that while the three at the top right look very similar in this picture, they are in fact not so much. The Lippmann is a microglitter and the other two have pretty dissimilar glitter mixes.)

I've probably mentioned where the Lynnderellas were coming from before, but Oh Three Oh Four's blog sale is definitely still ongoing as of the time I'm writing this, and there's still a ton of stuff left, so check it out if you're into Lynnderellas (and for that matter, there are some other HTF brands at the bottom, too). I highly recommend the customer service - Dulcie was awesome.

Here's the one nail applique - the other one was a different brand:

(I should have one more minor installment on the binge, and then I'm done. The only thing I haven't gotten is the two items I ordered from Llarowe. But I'm pretty sure I got a shipping notice on it so it'll be along in the next few days, I'm sure.)

NOTD: Tiramisu + flakies

One note first about my last manicure, where I had on many (and some quite thick) layers of polish: they were still wearing tolerably well, but over the weekend, I pushed one nail up against something, without much force at all, and the polish just popped off the nail in one piece, like it was a press-on nail. I knew it was thick, but not that thick.


So now I'm wearing an awfully fall-ish manicure. People are out shopping for fall clothes here, but I don't know how they could stand to actually try them on, because it's been in the high-90s to low 100s here for the last week or more. It's freaking hot. I am totally ready for fall, but that's not really why I came up with the manicure; it was really just because I had Tiramisu, and I decided to start with that. Tiramisu is either a medium brown or a really dark tan, depending on how you look at it. (I bought it on sale a couple of weeks ago, and it's gone from Sephora's website now, but here it is on Amazon. But bear in mind that it's a mini, and it's nothing unusual, so I certainly wouldn't recommend paying that outrageous price for it.)

After I put on two coats of Tiramisu, I went into experimental mode. Tiramisu is quite pretty, really, but it's a brown creme, and I am just not into the cremes lately. (If you're thinking so why did she put this on in the first place? well, so was I.) So first I put Fire In The Sky over it, and it looked pretty but I was wanting more coverage than even two coats provided, so I put a coat of Shine Of The Times on top of that, and then I was happy. I mean, you can still tell there's brown under there, but it's a very, very glowy orange-y brown (with green flash) now. (My co-worker thought it was a different polish than I had on yesterday, because yesterday she didn't see the green flash, and today she did.)

You're not getting the full effect, here. I couldn't capture it with the iPhone at all.

Added: Here's a better one, taken a day later with the Canon. This isn't wearing fabulously well, but at least here you can see more of the flaky goodness.

I mentioned whenever I tried it before that Shine Of The Times goes on very thick. I think that the two flakies are pretty similar color-wise, but Fire In The Sky seemed not only less thick, but much more of a shard texture. It looked very pretty, it's nothing against Fire In The Sky - it's just that I wanted the thick coverage right then, for this mani, and I wasn't getting it.

Details (1 coat unless specified):
Nail Nutrition Strength Formula
Bridge the Ridge base coat
Tiramisu (Sephora Collection), 2 coats
Fire In The Sky (Pretty Serious), 2 coats
Shine Of The Times (Essie Luxeffects)

Pretty Serious haul

I don't really use the term "haul" a whole lot because I don't often go hog-wild. And I don't know if 5 bottles really quite constitutes "hog-wild" either, but well, from my point of view, it's wild enough. So I better enjoy these, because I can't buy anything else for a good while. (If I adhere strictly to my $5-a-week budget, I won't be buying anything else until sometime in September, in fact.)

Pretty Serious has released two new collections lately, both of them add-ons to previous collections (Museum of Naileontology and Stop Collaborate & Listen) - I have here one from each of those collections, plus several other assorted polishes. I'd bought polishes from them previously, but never this much at one time, so I got a nice big box full of polish:

And here's the unboxed contents:

left to right: Fire In The Sky, Kashmir, Poltergeist Puddle, Ichi Hanami, Daphne's Disco Party

There's a wheel picture at the bottom of this entry, too.

The Museum of Naileontology descriptions are always entertaining, and they could possibly disappear at some point in the future if the polishes get discontinued, so I'm copying and pasting this one here, for the record. (Actually I may do this for all of them, come to think of it. The quotations are in bold print.) (Also, I've added S&L swatches if I found them because her swatches are just the best!)

Fire In The Sky (here's Christine's pictures, because they're really good)
Introducing the Opal Treasure Flake Top Coat collection from Pretty Serious. Stunning, iridescent opal flakies, swimming in a high quality, super shiny top coat formula. Fire In The Sky is an eruption of glittering red and orange opal flakes, shifting all the way to golden.

Because apparently I can never have enough flakies.

Ichi Hanami (Museum of Naileontology collection)
[ee-chee hah-nah-mee]
The practice of Hanami is a Japanese tradition that is many centuries old. It is a celebration centered around elaborate viewings of their much respected cherry blossoms (sakura) during their first blooms of the season. The cherry blossoms are sacred since they are considered to carry the souls of the mountain gods down to the humans. The people began to transplant the trees from the mountains down to the villages and around their rice paddies so that the mountain deity could travel down on the petals of the falling blossoms and bless their crops. It is on this original visit, the first Hanami, that the deity announced its presence to the Emperor in the form of a glowing cherry blossom that never dims. Lost to theives over the decades, our Naileontologists have discovered it's whereabouts and returned it for all to enjoy in our Museum of Naileontology. You can continue to enjoy it as you pick up your own glowing replica from our gift store! (Swatch & Learn)

Color-wise, this reminds me of Hard Candy Scam - the version of it I have, anyway, because I believe there are two. But it's not a glitter, it's a heavy shimmer instead.

Kashmir (from the latest Collaborate trio - dreamed up by Christine of Serenity Nails, and here's her post about it)
This is a dark red-violet jelly packed with both glass flecks and flakies. Christine says, "Kashmir is one hundred percent secret sauce," and that seems about right. (Incidentally, "Kashmir" is hands-down my favorite Led Zeppelin song, but that's not really why I bought it.)

Daphne's Disco Party (from an ongoing series of "Daphne" polishes - she is the girl on the Pretty Serious boxes and blog header!)
When the mirror ball drops, Daphne cracks out the crop tops! And what better way to get down and right back up again than with a matte neon glitter bomb that explodes all over the dance floor like the electric boogaloo! But even that isn't enough razzle dazzle for an 80's loving girl like our Daph, so we've added some pink iridescent glass flecks to really make it sizzle. (More swatches from Swatch & Learn)

Because I don't have enough matte glitters. Seriously, I don't.

Poltergeist Puddle (from a Halloween past, naturally)
Poltergeist Puddle is an intense blurple shimmer with a pink flash and a slight golden duochrome. The ethereal entry in the Monster Mash collection is a purple with an almost out-of-body glimmer and a spectral shimmer! (Swatch photo courtesy of The Polish Haven)

Honestly, I really started out to buy Purple Monkey Dishwasher, here, because it's still available and that name has always cracked me up. But when I went and started pulling up people's swatches, I ended up with the one above instead. Because, y'know, shimmer! duochrome! and still purple!

I put all these on a wheel, and man, three of them (that would be the three that aren't top-coats, right?) are really near to being one-coaters. I would think two coats at most would do it. And I deliberately did thick coats of Daphne's Disco Party on the upper part of that nail, but this is only two of those, so for this type of glitter, that's good coverage as well. I really only did this to see what would happen - I think if you were totally committed to getting it opaque, maybe you could, but it's certainly not what I really intend to do with it.

(I think you can probably figure out which is which, by this point, but for the record, L-R, this is Ichi, Poltergeist, Kashmir, Fire, and Daphne - over Black Creme for the last two.) As I said, this is two coats on the last one, but only one on all the others.

Stash: new purchases + a few more strays

I'm getting the existing stash part out of the way first. The newest of my new purchases are further down, so if you're uninterested in this top part just scroll down!

What I have here are three polishes off my "MIA" list plus the two new polishes from KBShimmer (both of which I've already worn and posted pictures of).

on top:

• Harlow (Zoya Matte Velvet) - a plummy-pink with shimmer that's really beautiful. I usually end up wearing all the Matte Velvets with top coat, because it brings out their shimmer in them.

bottom row:

• Dirty Sexy Money (Misa) - this is more green than it looks like in most pictures. It's also a near-dupe for Color Show Tenacious Teal (or more likely it's really the other way around, since I think DSM is an older color.) If it was a bit brighter I'd call it a crayon-green - it's in that neighborhood, anyway.
• Chimera (OCC) - a silver-green foil, very different but I never think it really looks good on me, unfortunately.
• She's Beyond Kelp! (a new KBShimmer duochrome/metallic flakie for summer) - a blue-to-green flakie that reads like a foil. It mostly reads green but the blue shift is pretty strong when the light hits it right. (Here's my mani that I just took off. I had it on for most of a week.)
• Witch Way? (KBShimmer) - I'm guessing from the name that this was a Halloween polish. (The link above says it was part of an Autumn collection, so I guess that comes to the same thing.) It's a dark grape-y purple jelly with pretty heavy holo glitter. (my mani here)

As for the MIAs, these were the top 3 polishes on my list which I linked above, and I found them practically the minute I went looking for them - they were in my boxes mixed in with everything else, which was what I suspected all along. They just managed somehow to get skipped in the picture-taking process. I haven't come up with the rest of that list yet, though.

As for other new purchases, I went on a little tear of ordering stuff and everything is here now, so here are the other new additions. Absolute New York is a brand I had never heard of, but they are apparently a sister brand to Nicka K NY, which I had, so when I saw these on an Ipsy special offer I thought I would try them out. So far I'm very pleased with them - they have a really nice formula (a bit streaky but that's not surprising with these kind of colors). Note that there are wheel swatches of all these further down!

across the top:

• Bronze Foliage (Virago Varnish) - it's not something I'm likely to wear much until fall, but this is so beautiful that I had to order it when I saw it. A glitterbomb of fall metallics in mixed sizes and shades. (There aren't many pictures of it online that I could find, other than Virago's own, so that's what the link is to.)
• A Dragon Is Not A Slave (Paint Box Polish) - this polish is so bright in the bottle that I thought when it arrived that it was a Spectraflair-type holo polish, which it's not. It's a green jelly base packed with gold & green holo glitter, instead. Look at the wheel pic below and you can see the glitter bits. Apparently you can build it to opaqueness or at least near-opaqueness, but I'm thinking I'm going to try it over a darker green and see how that works.
• Nourishing Cuticle Oil (Paint Box Polish) - I really did the PBP order for this, not for the polish above, much as I like it. I'd heard good things about this cuticle oil, and since I seem to prefer oils over balms, I wanted a purse-friendly oil. This is .33 ounces of oil in a rollerball dispenser. Mine is citrus-scented, which I adore, but it comes in a great variety of scents if citrus is not your thing.

bottom row (all Absolute New York polishes - I can't find any swatches of these anywhere, but see below):

• Blue Email - This is not really a neon blue but it's pretty bright. It's darker than cyan, lighter than teal. This one was thicker than the others - it was pretty opaque after one coat, on the nail.
• Purple Neon - not a neon, but a bright-orchid creme. Very pretty.
• Dear Tiffany - I thought "oh, this is going to be a Tiffany blue," but really it's not, because it's greener than that. I need to compare swatches with Dirty Sexy Money above, because it really seems to me to be more in that ballpark (although possibly it's a bit paler than that one).
• Magenta - this one is the only one that I would call a neon. It's very bright, brighter than it looks from the bottle picture below or the swatch - more like what it looks like above, really.

Here's a screenshot of the Ipsy offer on the four polishes above. They were $10 including shipping, and since they retail for $4.99 each on AbsoluteNY's website, it's a good deal. (It sold out some time ago, sorry!)

And the wheel pictures:

Bronze Foliage (one coat over black) and A Dragon Is Not A Slave (one coat on its own!):

Purple Neon, Magenta, Dear Tiffany, Blue Email:

I wasn't keeping good track of the coats when I did this, but I believe this is probably three coats on all, because these were still looking pretty sheer after two. Possibly only two on Blue Email.