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:

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.

Sand & Stilettos, Arsenic

This is Funky Fingers Sand & Stilettos and OCC Arsenic:

In case you can't read my writing on the wheel, Arsenic is the bright silver pointing right at the bottle (just below City Of Ashes, the darkest gray polish on the wheel), and Sand & Stilettos is below Arsenic. Arsenic is a straight-up bright silver glitter, where Sand & Stilettos is a silver holo with a lot of rainbow stuff going on. You can also see that S&S has a much more textured appearance on the wheel, where Arsenic comes out looking more like a metallic.

You know, the fact is, I don't love really bright silver glitters, for some reason. I've always liked silver jewelry (although I really don't wear a lot of jewelry these days) so it's not that I don't like silver. But these are just, I dunno, too flashy? (As I said with Celeb City the other day, maybe I need to try them with matte topcoats.) Sand & Stilettos in particular is already residing in the destash box, although I haven't actually gotten rid of it or anything yet.

I'm not seeing anything to indicate that either one of these polishes are still available - OCC nail polish, Five Below's "beauty" page. (As far as I know, Funky Fingers is only available at Five Below, although I could be wrong.)

Added: I was reading through a bunch of old polish swatch entries that I came across, and I realized that the polish in this entry that they call "Reject" has to be Sand & Stilettos. (Note: it's 2018 as I write this, and I still have this polish. I keep threatening to destash it, but it's still here.)

Celeb City, Hurricane

This is Xtreme Wear Celeb City and Square Hue Hurricane:

Celeb City is a super-bright silver metallic - not quite a chrome, but close - and really I rarely wear it because it's so bright it's kind of annoying to me. (I should try matteing it down and see what happens.) Hurricane is the darker one above it, it's sort of a very grayed-out silver or maybe it's really just a gray with a lot of silver shimmer in it. (Square Hue calls it a "platinum metallic" but as a person who lives in hurricane country, I can tell you that I think of it as the gray of storm clouds.)

I talked more about the names of the polishes in the Square Hue 2000s collection the other day, so I'm not going to repeat all of that. See over here. As far as availability, Hurricane is not listed on the Square Hue singles page, and I don't see Celeb City on the Xtreme Wear page either. So if you wanted these I guess you'd have to look outside the normal channels. Celeb City was around for a while so I don't imagine it'd be too hard to find, though. Hurricane might be more difficult. (On the other hand there are dozens of polishes like Celeb City, at least. Not so many like Hurricane.)

Trailer Trash, Never Forget

This is Hard Candy Trailer Trash and Square Hue Never Forget:

What was I thinking when I put these two in the same picture? It's pretty much the ridiculous and the sublime, name-wise. (Or at least an attempt at the sublime, I'm not sure I'd say it was successful.) But actually the polishes are pretty similar antique-silver-foil things, although Never Forget is slightly more grayish. I don't have good notes on this but I believe that Trailer Trash is more sheer, because I know I spent a whole winter layering it over practically everything I wore, some years ago.

Hard Candy used to have a bunch of polishes with names like this, in the old days - Trailer Trash, Jailbait, Scam. I've always thought they were pretty funny, and I was sorry when the newer (less hip, more Walmart-friendly) version of Hard Candy got rid of the goofy names.

Meanwhile, more recently, Square Hue walked themselves into the name problem when they did the "Decades" collection in 2015 - the problem of what to do about the 2000s, that is. I suppose that they knew what they were gettng into. (They really were trying for the sublime and the ridiculous, though - it's a three polish set, for the 2000s - the others are Hurricane, presumably for Katrina, and... wait for it... Idol. As in American Idol, yeah. They're all silver/grays, too, so I'll be probably talking about the other two of these really shortly.) Honestly, I think doing a 9/11-themed polish was a mistake. Giant tragedies and nail polish just really shouldn't intersect, in my opinion - that pretty much goes for both Never Forget and Hurricane. Your mileage may vary, of course. (I'll just refer back to this entry when I get to Hurricane in a in a few days.)

You can't get Trailer Trash except maybe on eBay. (Hmm, it's only $13.99, actually - guess it's not that HTF.) You actually can still get Never Forget as a single bottle from Square Hue.

Added: I just noticed in this picture that this is Trailer Trash layered over what looks like black:

(the same nail is visible in the first picture above as well) - I'm pointing it out because I mentioned that I used to use this for layering, and I forgot that I had tried it while I was doing the swatching for this wheel.

Steel Guitar, Steely Gaze

This is Orchid Steel Guitar and Hard As Nails Steely Gaze:

These are awfully similar-looking dark shimmery grays, on the wheel. (Of the two dark grays, I'm pretty sure Steely Gaze is on top and Steel Guitar is below that. Steely Gaze is maybe just a hair darker, but it's hard to tell.) I'm not sure if you can get either of these any more - Sally Hansen seems to have discontinued all the Hard As Nails colors, because I only see the strengthener listed. Orchid is a store-brand, and while the store in question (H-E-B, a grocery chain) is only in Texas, there are a few colors online - but this doesn't seem to be one of them. That's not to say it's discontinued, I'm not sure about that part. I know there were still far more than 7 colors in the store the last time I looked. (This link on their website should get you eventually to those 7 polishes, as well as showing you other Orchid-brand products, mostly skincare products and soaps. They also have nail polish in a pump bottle that I really love, although that's apparently not on the website either.)

Midnight Magic

This is CoverGirl Outlast Midnight Magic:

This is part of a whole set of multicolor glass-fleck polishes - or maybe there were a couple of sets, actually. Some of them came out in a mini "Glosstini" size first, as part of the Catching Fire movie tie-in; however, I don't think this was one of those and that post above backs me up on that. So they may have come out at different times, but there are a lot of Outlast polishes with this basic finish - see the box set down at the bottom of this post. Anyway, this particular one is apparently a near-dupe of Zoya Feifei. I don't think it looks that super-similar in the bottle, but I'll grant that it might on the nail. (Feifei is a bit more obviously blue-looking, is how I remember it.)

I know I saw these polishes - the full-sized versions, that is - marked down a good while back (in fact I think I bought a couple of other colors at the time) so I don't think they are current Outlast colors - but when I searched a bunch of shopping links popped up so I'm pretty sure you can find it on Amazon etc., if you decide you need it. And I'm pretty sure Feifei is still current if that falls through!

Gray's Anatomy, Desert Storm

So this is Wet n Wild Fast Dry Gray's Anatomy and Square Hue Desert Storm, from the 1990s collection:

It annoys me that I keep taking pictures of the Square Hue bottles from the front, because you really can't see much of the color that way. But this is just your basic sand color. (Unlike the beige ones below it that I was complaining about yesterday, though, I believe I have actually worn Desert Storm.) Gray's Anatomy is more fun: it's got a sort of an oil-slick quality to it. I guess it's probably technically a duochrome, and it's quite sheer. You can see what looks like some pink shimmer on the nail wheel. (I've worn Gray's Anatomy a couple of times as a "syrup mani" - I thought I had a picture of that, but if I do I haven't been able to track it down so far.)

I think that both of these are current colors - Square Hue now carries a small selection of single bottles on its website, and Desert Storm is one of them. And I didn't re-check today, but I'm pretty sure Gray's Anatomy was still current the last time I checked, at least. Even if WnW has happened to drop it since then, it should still be findable.

(Huh. Square Hue actually calls Desert Storm a gray or greige - i.e., gray-beige. It doesn't look a bit gray to me, but I might buy greige as a way of saying "slightly-gray beige." Look at it next to Gray's Anatomy, though - it's just... not gray.)

Johnston Canyon, Charlotte

This is Square Hue Johnston Canyon and Zoya Charlotte:

It's probably significant that both of these polishes came in sets, and that's because these are colors I would never ever buy. I'm not a fan of pale colors or especially of beige colors, and these are, well, very beige, and very pale. If I am going to wear neutrals they're generally going to be much more gray or brown than this. I don't really like this kind of color much and more importantly to me, it just doesn't look good on me. That's not to say I will never ever wear these, but if I do it will probably be for layering or something. But I've had Charlotte for well over a year, I believe, and Johnston Canyon for nearly a year, and I've never actually worn either of them.

As far as comparing the two, I believe Johnston Canyon is slightly paler and it's a creme, and Charlotte is much more shimmery.

Johnston Canyon was part of the first set in the Square Hue Adventure Collection, the January box earlier this year. (The theme that month was "Hike Banff.") The Zoya was from a "mystery box" trio of minis which you got for free when you bought... something or other that I don't remember now. What I do remember is that there was much shrieking when people saw these boxes. I was not the only one that thought they were boring, not by far. I think, though, that they were actually designer colors originally created for a fashion show, for what that's worth.

Forbidden Fudge, Rich In Heart

This is SH Nailgrowth Miracle Forbidden Fudge and Sinful Colors Rich In Heart:

(You could still get Rich In Heart the last I checked, but the whole Nailgrowth Miracle line is discontinued, I'm pretty sure.) (And another parenthetical thing: I've seen a couple of people online say that Forbidden Fudge is a hilarious and/or awful name, although I'm not 100% sure why - I guess because it sounds like some kind of poo joke?? It never occurred to me before I saw it mentioned, but I could see that being possible.) OK, so, these are two very dark browns which actually look pretty alike in this bad nail-wheel picture, but I don't think are really as much alike as they seem. Forbidden Fudge is pretty much a straight-up dark brown, but it's a nice dark brown which doesn't look black. You can kind of see the difference in the bottle shot of Rich In Heart, though - it has wine-tones in it which FF does not. It's sort of a very dark marsala brown. Makeupwithdrawal has a good picture where you can see the red tones (and some very nice stamping to boot.)

Decades of Shades

This is OPI Decades of Shades:

(My writing is hard to read there, but this is the top one on the wheel, below the empty spots.) Decades of Shades is sort of a milk-chocolate color, not especially dark, and I liked the swatches I saw before I bought it, but in person it's, like, the most boring possible brown. That link below calls this a dark brown, which it's really not. Often when something is lighter than I thought I say "well, maybe mine has faded," but in this case the swatches all pretty much look just like my polish. I used to call it "baby-poop brown" and that may be unfair, but - well, clearly, I really don't like it. I'm probably not really capable of being fair about a polish I dislike this intensely. (The only reason I've hung onto it is because I use it for a layering polish from time to time.)

This polish apparently was from the 25th anniversary collection, 10 years ago, which kind of baffles me - this is not my idea of a classic color (although the brown in that swatch does look darker than most of the other swatches I found online). Looking at the whole set (at the link above), my only thought is that maybe they were trying for what might have been fashionable in 1981. Very warm colors - very 70s, really, and I never did like 70s colors even at the time.

The polish to the left of it in the picture is I Knead Sour-dough, which is coming up right away in another entry, but I left it where you can see it because they are sort of similar. I Knead Sour-dough has a lot of red shimmer in it, though, which is enough to keep me from getting snippy about it like I do about Decades of Shades.

Decades of Shades is currently showing up on Amazon as a "rare color" (and it was apparently LE so that's fair) but their picture looks much more orange-leaning than I would say mine is. Still, maybe that's what I don't like about it. I'm a cool-colors person, so maybe this is just too warm a brown for me. That makes a certain amount of sense.

(I made a "least-favorite polishes" tag just for this entry - then I went back and found a few more polishes I don't like, so there's more than one thing there if you look. I didn't find too many, though - mostly if I dislike something this intensely, I get rid of it.)

Viridian, Boughs of Holly

This is Illamasqua Viridian and Pahlish Boughs Of Holly:

Both of these are part of holiday duos - I started to say "coincidentally" but when I started thinking about the seasonal part of it I decided it wasn't coincidental at all. (The other halves of the two pairs were Illamasqua Glitterati, a glittery red, and Pahlish Yuletide Treasure, a multicolor glitter.) These are both meant to be tree-greens, presumably. You notice they're not nearly the same color - it's that kind of thing that makes me go off on minor rants from time to time about the difference between blue-green and green. Here, I would say that Viridian is blue-green, where Boughs of Holly is more of a true green (and is maybe has some yellow-green highlights to it at that). If you look at winter greenery, some of it is actually a bit on the blue side (there's a reason they call it "blue spruce," after all) and many forest greens are slightly or not-so-slightly blue-leaning as well. Viridian is actually a color-name, and Wikipedia has helpful little swatches. I don't think this Viridian is exactly the same as that viridian but, hey, it's in the ballpark. Viridian-the-polish seems more grayed-out.

Both of these were more-or-less LE polishes, although the Illamasqua duo was around for a lot longer and so might be more likely to be findable if you were determined. When I talked about Glitterati back in April I noted that it was still listed on their website, although it also said it was sold out. The Pahlish duo was a one-month thing and so is more genuinely hard to find, I imagine. (The other half of that duo is shown here.)

Enchanted Forest, Shake Your Money Maker

This is Nyx Enchanted Forest and Deborah Lippmann Shake Your Money Maker (who, you may notice, appear to buy their bottles from the same source):

This is definitely an iPhone SE picture, because the old phone never did this: it cut the nail wheel right out of the picture. (I talked about this before - it's not actually the phone itself doing this but Evernote, and I eventually figured out how to turn it off.) These are both blue-leaning green glitters, although obviously the mix is very different. Enchanted Forest is a small glitter in a sheer formula, and SYMM is clearly one of DL's signature big glitters - gold plus a green somewhere in the forest-green-to-teal range.

The wheel labels aren't legible at all here, but Enchanted Forest is the one pointing straight at the bottles here, and SYMM is above that. (The China Glaze bottle here is Agro, which I'll talk about later. I don't think it's even on this part of the wheel, so I don't know what the point of this picture was supposed to be.) Enchanted Forest is very obviously blue-leaning on the wheel, although I often wear it over greens, which of course makes it look different. I've worn SYMM a few times and it's pretty - I need to remember it when fall gets here - but I wear Enchanted Forest more.

Neither of these seem to be current colors: current Nyx colors; current Lippmann glitters. (If those glitters were just a little cheaper I would be in deep trouble. Superstar! Flash Dance! Bad Romance! But I don't even wear the glitters I already have that much.)

Dear Tiffany + an unlabeled polish

This is AbsoluteNY Dear Tiffany and an unlabeled polish:

We're on the green end of blue-green here, although if you compare these to the polishes surrounding them, they're also definitely blue-leaning. Dear Tiffany is really what I would call "mint green" - again, slightly blue-leaning but not very. The unlabeled polish is more obviously green but still leans just a hair blue, also.

Unnamed glitter, Racy Green

This is an unnamed Accessorize glitter, and Milani Racy Green:

Two coats of the Accessorize glitter came out very much cyan blue, more than you would expect looking at the bottle. It's pretty but I've never worn it much. Racy Green is a polish I did wear quite a lot back when I first had it - as you can see it's much more green on the nail than it looks in the bottle. (This is why I keep talking about blue-to-green being a very confusing transition. There are so many examples like this that I can't quite tie down as one color or another.) The polishes I had from this line were all really pretty metallics. I don't know if they really all were, but the ones I remember were.

I'm pretty sure both of these polishes came to me via the blogger community, in one way or another. I bought the Accessorize polish from somebody's blog sale, and as I recall they just called it "teal glitter" or something like that. And I'm pretty sure that the Milani came to me from Karen even earlier, way back before I had ever paid any particular attention to the brand. She sent me a couple of Milani polishes in a swap. Accessorize is or was a line of accessory stores, I think, although I don't ever remember seeing one. (Still is, apparently, and the closest one to me is in Dallas, which is not at all close, so I guess that explains it. They don't appear to have any beauty items at all these days, going from their category list on the website.) Milani is still around but this polish line is not, I know that. So not easily obtainable nowadays, for either of these. Neither of them are anything particularly worth hunting down anyway, in my opinion.

Frogtown

This is Pretty Serious Frogtown:

(It's named after an old low-budget movie, Hell Comes to Frogtown. It's part of the Post-Apocalyptic Princess collection, which also boasts other "classic" polish names such as An Uzi From Daddy and Toxic Tiara.) I talked before about how hard it is to pin down some of these colors in the green-to-blue-green range and what their actual color is. Kaz of Pretty Serious has it labeled as green, and sometimes it looks green to me and other times it looks blue-green. Surely she would know, right, because she created it - but I dunno. I keep thinking blue-green. Back when I first bought it in December I was talking about the same thing. Usually when I've actually worn it I've said "green" - see here as well - but the pictures keep coming out looking blue-green. Go figure. Anyway, it's full of microglitter and it's really pretty, so that's what's important, right?

Zuza, East Village

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

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

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

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

Kissy, Bottle Green

This is Sinful Colors Kissy and Gosh (or Oh My Gosh) Bottle Green:

As you can see, these two don't look all that far apart in color in the bottle, but they are definitely very different on the nail. This is two coats of each. Kissy is very cyan-blue and very packed with microglitter - in fact it's apparently a pretty close dupe to Zoya Charla, which I've never gotten around to buying.

I was going to say that Bottle Green was a creme but I found somebody online saying it was a jelly. (I've now lost that link, sorry.) I clearly need to look at it again. I would call it more or less green, but it's a fairly blue-tinged green. I think "teal" would be a reasonable word to use for this color. Also, as far as the brand-name goes, Gosh is the brand, and as near as I've ever been able to figure out, "Oh My Gosh" is just their name for their minis. (I don't know how well you can read the label, but it says "OH MY" in very big letters and then "GOSH" in a much smaller font.)

She's Beyond Kelp!

This is KBShimmer She's Beyond Kelp! (along with Baphomet's Berserker, which we've already discussed):

I just looked and this is on sale at KBShimmer right now. It's one of those "ultra chrome" flakies, the almost-opaque ones with a heavy shift going on. This one is blue-to-green, basically, or maybe green-to-aqua. You can see the shifty thing going on on the wheel. This is really an awesome polish. (I really ought to get some more of these.)

Never Too Rich

Here is Pop-arazzi Never Too Rich:

This is mixed sizes of glitter in a clear base. I was intending to say that it was blue and green glitter mixed together - until I looked at this picture, which looks more definitely green. I have the bottle in front of me right now and I walked around the apartment with it and looked at it in different lights and I'm still not sure. I think maybe the glitter is actually green but it shimmers to blue. It definitely has a lot of holo and iridescence going on, that's for sure. (Here's somebody else's swatch which looks definitely green but it's also layered over green there. So I'm not sure I'm ready to take that as definitive evidence either.) I might wear this and see what I think - if I do I'll certainly report back! For now we'll just call it blue-leaning green.

(Note: see also here, where I swatched it over a blue metallic. It still looks green - but it's awfully pretty that way.)

I have only ever seen Pop-arazzi at CVS and I don't know who makes it. They have some cute colors but I had never gotten around to buying any, and I was pleased when my husband bought a couple as a little surprise on my birthday. (The other one is gold.) He did good, because these are pretty.