Private I

This is Sally Hansen Diamond Strength Private I:

Diamond Strength is a discontinued line, and for the most part the polishes in this line were very uninteresting so I can't be terribly sad that it's gone. However, they did put out a few LE collections a few years ago that I liked. This one is a plummy glass-fleck, and it's really beautiful. The flecks don't show up well on the swatch in this picture, unfortunately. Maybe I'll try to reswatch it at some point.

I took a few days off from posting over the weekend - I've been posting every day for so long that it felt very weird. I should also mention that I didn't buy a whole lot over the whole Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, and I don't think any of what I bought was nail polish, for a change. The only thing I bought yesterday was a big pile of towels from JCPenney's, because they were cheap and they've always had good towels. (I know that's a boring purchase but somehow I'm very picky about towels and I don't like paying a mint for them.) And Friday I bought a bunch of stuff from Nyx, mostly meant as gifts. It seems like I bought one other thing but I can't remember what the heck it was. And I know I already had one polish on pre-order that hopefully will be here before too long.

Victorian End

This is SquareHue Victorian End, from the 1900s collection

I didn't put this in my top 4 SquareHues, but I think it was in the shortlist (which was the top 8). SquareHue does some good purples but this is the one I decided my favorite because it's different. It's sort of a dull dark plum, with shimmer. That doesn't make it sound too great, but obviously I really like it.

I said it was different, but actually it looks really similar to the polish below it on the wheel. I checked and the one pointing at the wheel is Victorian End, as it should be, and the one below it is Vaclavske Namesti, from the Prague collection, which was only a couple of months before the 1900s one - November 2014 and January 2015. Anyway, Vaclavske Namesti - which is the local name for what we call Wenceslas Square in English - is similar but even more grayed-out than Victorian End, and while it has shimmer I think it's less obvious. I like them both, but they are not dupes. I do think it was a bit odd to release these two so close together, though. (Victorian End does seem pretty appropriate for the its royal subject matter. Is there a reason for Wenceslas Square to be plum-colored? I have no idea.)

Norteña

This is SquareHue Norteña, from July's box:

It's a pretty dark plum creme. I don't think I have anything exactly like this, so there's another hole filled in my collection! (I'm not a creme person, as I have said many times, but this looks like a good base for layering.)

Here's the original post about this SquareHue collection.

July SquareHue: Marinera

I have to be honest and say that the first thing I thought of when I saw this name was tomato sauce - which is actually not spelled the same - marinara is the sauce, in case you're like me and you're not quite clear on this. (I did know immediately that that was surely wrong, just because it doesn't have anything to do with dancing, and that's what SquareHue's theme is for this year.) So it turns out that the marinera is a couples dance that seemed very familiar to me but I'm quite sure I could not have told you was from Peru. I hate to admit to this much ignorance but I figure I'm better off getting it all right out there up front. (I saw a reference to this dance as being from coastal Peru, so I'm clinging to the word "marine" to help me remember how to spell this. I'm usually a good speller, but those seemingly-interchangeable a's and e's are definitely giving me trouble.)

Anyway, this is the box I got:

Like last month, I only got two out of the three polishes; the third one was described as a straw color so I was pretty certain right away that it was not going to be something I was interested in. (After all, straw is pale and yellowish and I am not a fan of pale colors or of yellow colors, either.) The two polishes I did get are Limeña, a warm red with coppery shimmer, and Norteña, a dark plum creme. Both very pretty. I did more proper swatches and I'll get those up later. (As far as the names, Limeña just means a woman from Lima. Norteña means "northern" and applied to a person it'd presumably mean a northern woman, since these words are both feminine forms, but it seems to particularly refer to the style of music that goes with this dance, as best I could determine.)


Next month's dance is the flamenco, and the three polishes were a pearly dark olive, a "light terracotta" which doesn't sound like my thing, and another red. As much as I'd like to see the olive color, I decided to skip the August box since I wasn't much interested in either of the other two. (Maybe I can find somebody to swap polishes with - if anybody ends up with that flamenco olive and doesn't want it, let me know and maybe we can work something out!)


I noticed that SquareHue's polishes now say .45 oz where I thought it used to say .5, and that turned out not to be my imagination. I pulled out an old one to compare. (If you want to know, I think the purple polish in this picture is Baby Baby Baby, from the December 2015 collection, next to Limeña.)

Basically, the exterior of the bottle seems to be exactly the same size, it's just that the interior of the bottle is hollowed out a bit more in the old version of the bottle than in the new. I looked at several bottles to make sure that's what I was seeing, and the shapes varied a little but the interior of the new bottles seem to consistently be a little shallower. The difference is only, what, 1/20th of an ounce, so it doesn't take much. (It doesn't particularly bother me that they're smaller, I was mostly just curious to see where the difference was.)

(I am trying to remember to write SquareHue - one word - instead of Square Hue, two words. I mostly became aware of that because Google has corrected me a couple of times. My tag is still two words, though, if you decide you want to look up what else I've had to say about them!)

What color is this? Posh Plum

This is Xtreme Wear Posh Plum, which I'm pretty sure is discontinued:

I hung the "what color is this" tag on this post because this polish is not really what I would call "plum" or at least it's lighter than what I would expect. It's absolutely a red-violet of some sort, but looking at the swatch and not looking at the name, I would be inclined to call it more of a raspberry-ish color, not quite purple and not quite pink. Also, while it doesn't show in this picture, I have thought in the past that it has a bit of duochrome flash - blue, maybe? (If so, it doesn't show up on the nail in either of these swatches, new or old, but I think I see it in the bottle in the older picture. What I don't remember is whether it's sometimes visible on the nail, but I think it might be. I may have to actually wear it or something and try to find out.)

NOTD: Good Girl Gone Bad

I finally wore Lippmann Good Girl Gone Bad, which I think I've had for about a year. It's really pretty and I wore it both matte and shiny and for once I have pictures of both, although I don't think they do it justice.

It's plummy and dark and glittery, that's about all I have to say about the color. I did it matte first:

This is two coats, I think? with probably Superfood base-coat and Matte Me Crazy on top, and as you can see it was wanting to chip a little, but I had had this on for a day or more before this, so nothing too awful. Come to think of it, I think I put a different top-coat under the matte top-coat, too, which was maybe the old Revlon Colorstay one - because this polish is very textured and I ran out of Glitter Food.

So I patched it up, as I often do, and this time I put shiny top-coat on - although quite honestly I'm not sure at all which one that was, possibly Revlon again:

You can see that it's wanting to chip a bit at the tips there but on the whole this lasted pretty well. And you really can't see that original chip here, so I call this a win. I like it both ways.

Added: I notice that I was talking about the "is it a plum or a red?" issue when I swatched this last year. But it's pretty definitely plum-leaning, even though I'm sure you can find people calling it a red. Here's the swatch that I did a couple of weeks ago, for more evidence:

Private I, Scandalous

This is Sally Hansen Diamond Strength Private I, and Revlon Scandalous:

I knew Scandalous was supposed to be a dupe of something, and I googled and came up with Lippmann Bad Romance. Not really a dead-dupe, according to that link, but awfully close. Red-violet glitter in a black base, or near-black, at least. It's hard to tell which. I think that maybe both of these polishes have jelly or jelly-like bases, actually. Private I is really luscious-looking and full of flakies - the wheel swatch really doesn't do it justice. It's lovely.

Scandalous is a current color, but Private I was LE several years ago, so I doubt that it's anything you could lay your hands on easily.

Kashmir, Purple Gleam, Bold Sangria

I thought this was the darker end of the red-violets when I was swatching, but it turns out that at least one of them is very deceptive. This is Pretty Serious Kashmir, Milani Purple Gleam (it's hard to read the bottle, but I think it's from the One-Coat line), and Colorstay Bold Sangria.

Lemme stop and say right off the bat that I think Kashmir is the only one of these three you can easily get your hands on. All the Milani polishes with this bottle shape are discontinued, I'm pretty sure, and this version of Colorstay is also discontinued. That out of the way - I like all three of these a lot but I am just fascinated with Purple Gleam. It looks red-violet in the bottle, but on the nail the red stuff just seems to disappear, and it looks more like a blue-violet - or a grape. Somewhere along the way lately I was talking about how I wasn't sure what grape-the-color actually looked like (it was in the entry on Grape Minds Think Alike, which makes sense) but I think Purple Gleam is it. Your mileage may vary, but anyway, this is a stunning polish.

The other two here are more middle-of-the-road dark plummy things. I love plums (which should be no surprise to anybody, if you've been watching the parade of plums from my stash go by recently) so "middle-of-the-road dark plummy thing" is a compliment as far as I'm concerned. They are not much alike, however. Bold Sangria is a creme; Kashmir is a jelly base filled with flakes of various colors. (Actually, calling Kashmir middle-of-the-road is probably a great injustice now that I think about it. It's far too interesting for that. Bold Sangria is a lovely color, but it's a creme. And sorry, it's late and I'm babbling.)

Orchid-brand, and other assorted purples

(Monday)
Well, when last heard from, I was putting on one of my new polishes - On a Trip. I really liked the color a lot, but I messed the finish up by not letting it dry long enough, and it was bugging me, so the next night I covered it up. I had yet another purple with me, and I used that - this one was Orchid-brand, called Island Couture. It's a violet shimmer, very pretty, and I'm still wearing that now, although it has a good bit of tipwear. I'm thinking about taking it off but I haven't quite gotten around to doing that yet.

I know Orchid is a brand that's probably unknown to a lot of people, and I don't know that I've talked about it since I've been posting here, although I know I've said most of this elsewhere. It's apparently a store-brand that's exclusive to HEB, which is a Texas-only grocery store chain. (They are pretty much the dominant chain, or at least sort of co-dominant with Kroger's, in big swathes of east and central Texas - I don't get to the other parts of Texas enough to be sure about them! Texas is a big place.) Karen and I did a swap back in 2011 where I sent her a couple of bottles of Orchid, and she theorized that they may be more or less the same as Pixel Polish (except cheaper, which is good for those of us with access to HEB stores, not so much for the rest of you). Anyway, it seems to be good quality polish. I don't have a huge number of bottles of it but I pick some up occasionally. They also have skin care products which I have not gotten around to trying so far - the only thing I've bought other than polish is their 100% acetone remover which of course is the same as anybody else's. They do have good coupon sales from time to time so that's usually when I've bought their products. (You can see an example of an HEB coupon sale in my old display photos which were on Karen's post and are also on Flickr.)

(Wednesday)
The layered purples were really holding up very well, considering, but I took them off earlier, finally, and put on Chirality Convergence (which is the plum-color) again - partly because the sun is out today and the first time I wore it, it was cloudy the whole time and so I have never gotten a good look at its holo effect. It's very unusual for us to have cloudy weather for many days in a row, but we did a few weeks ago and it happened to be when I first started trying out my new Chirality purchases. (The sun came out by the time I wore Kale later in the week, but it never did for Convergence.) Anyway, I really liked the color of Convergence, sun or no sun, and I wanted to try it again.

Added: pictures
Megalast On a Trip (I am not sure how accurate the color is here, but you can see pretty clearly that I marred up the finish!)

Chirality Convergence (in artificial lighting)

Didn't get a picture of the Orchid one, I'm afraid.

Maybe I should start putting on Convergence when we need rain. The sun was out when I put it on, but it clouded up before I even got outside, and last night and today we have had rainstorms. I'm starting to think that Convergence has magic cloud-attracting properties!

Chirality report

I'm in the middle of the stash thing, and god knows, I have to finish it while I'm on a roll or I never will, but here's a mani rundown, meanwhile.

(Wednesday)
I said this in the stash post last night, but to recap: I'm wearing Chirality Convergence, 2 coats. It seems much more neutral than it looks in the Etsy picture - but neutral in a good way. I said I was looking forward to seeing it in the sunlight, and unfortunately today is one of our rare completely overcast days, so I still haven't.

(Friday)
I am now wearing the Chirality that I really did the order for: Kale. And I love it. Actually I love both of the two I've tried. I am not utterly in love with the base color of Kale, but that's just because it's a little too similar (in low light) to some of the other grayed-out greens I already have. But I love the shimmery subtle holo-ness of it even in low light, and I love the formula, and I am definitely a Chirality fan now. Also, Convergence came off like a dream, which is also nice. I'm sort of planning another order in my head, in which I will order more minis, because why not? Try out more colors, see if they are all equally awesome. But I am waiting for a bit on that. I still have one more (the black one - Symbiote?) that I haven't even tried yet.

Oh, and I did 3 coats of Kale but it probably wasn't necessary. I think two was really plenty.

ADDED:
Two things: one is a review of the Chirality holos that I came across after I wrote this - only one of those is a color I bought, but she says the formula is very consistent across colors. Which is good, and does seem consistent with what I've seen myself so far.

And two, just because I came across it, and because I had never heard of Chirality until a couple of weeks ago myself, her business card:

And because I have gotten a bit gushy here, I would like to reiterate that no, this is not a person I know, nor have I been compensated in any way for saying this stuff! I just bought the products and I like them, so I gush. (Uncompensated Gushing: a really terrible band name.)

Also added: a picture of Kale in the sunlight