Nail care: cuticle care, remover and more

The first thing here is polish remover, and the only big decision there is acetone vs non-acetone - I come down on the acetone side, but your mileage may vary. It used to be when I was a kid that polish remover only came in Cutex, but these days it seems like everybody pretty much uses one generic or another. I use Sally Beauty's. I do like the bottle type pictured on the left below, where the acetone pumps into a little indented place that you can put your cotton ball or pad into. I first saw this at my grocery store (Orchid is a house brand) but I've seen it from other brands too. I just refill it from my big SB bottle, though. And then I also have the Target jar-of-remover with the scrubby thing inside (this, if they haven't changed it) because it's great for glitter removal, but I refill it with generic acetone also.

I've been taking biotin for a while now and I do think it's beneficial. I did some poking around online about it lately and apparently there are arguments still going on about what it does exactly and how much to take (5000 mcg - or 5mg - which is what the bottle pictured is, is a large dose). But nobody I saw seems to seriously deny that it does something positive to the keratin in your nails & hair. (If you haven't taken it before, I would start with a small dose and see what happens. I actually didn't snap  when I ordered this bottle how big a dose it was. I've just been taking it every other day, at most, because of that.)

As far as cuticle stuff goes, I don't have one holy grail and honestly I even switch around between types - I do love my Badger Balm but I also like to use the regular liquid oils sometimes as well. I like roll-ons like the one below, but I also like the ones that come in regular polish-type bottles and go on with a regular polish-type brush. (I have an old one from Chick Polish that smells divine, but they're out of business so that won't do you any good. The one I have bought more recently is Pretty Serious and it's unscented - I think it's called Cute Cuticles Purity.)

Oh, I do know one thing that is scientifically true (so I have read, at least - I'm definitely no expert) about cuticle oils, and that's that the kind of oil matters. You can't just slap kitchen oil or any old cheap cuticle oil on your nails and be sure it's doing anything. The size of the molecule matters, as I understand it; a large molecule can't penetrate the nail bed - which ideally is what you want it to do. I'm pretty sure I remember that jojoba oil was one of the small ones, but there are others. The big molecules (like coconut oil) will soften outer layers but can't get down into the layers beneath. (This piece from Nails Magazine lists some others.)

(Badger Balm is probably the closest thing to a Holy Grail for me out of everything I've talked about the last few days. I don't use it exclusively but it is awesome.)

Destash: China Glaze glitters

I didn't start out intending to destash all the big glitter out of the Holiglaze collection, but I think that's what I am going to end up doing. The smaller glitters are another matter, but I'm pretty sure all three of the big ones are going away.

This is Your Present Required:

The name of it has always bothered me, for one thing - it's a very labored pun, at best. And this combination of rose-pink and blue just isn't that fabulous. I think I liked it at the time I first got these polishes, but I was in the mood to be pleased, then. Now, it doesn't grab me. I don't like it enough to put up with the pain of removing it, if I was actually to wear it again. So that's one down.

Bells Will Be Blinging is one I was thinking I might keep.

But looking at it on the wheel, I feel pretty meh about it. It's pretty but it's not that exciting. Also I think it has bar glitter in it, which is always a strike against. I have other blue-and-silver things that are less of a pain than this. So that's two down.

(added: I also talked about this polish here.)

#3 is Be Merry, Be Bright - although so far I haven't found the actual bottle-and-wheel picture. If I find it I'll put it in, but in the meantime, I think you can get the general idea without it. On the wheel above, it's the polish above Bells Will Be Blinging. It looks similar to Your Present Required on the wheel but it's really not. I think I wore it with a matching undercoat when I first got it, and it looked really pretty.

And I really thought this one would survive, but no. Like I said, I think all three of them are going away. (added: here's the bottle-and-wheel picture)

There's one more out of this bunch that had already been in the destash box - that's There's Snow One Like You, the white texture. And I think there's one more that's going there, that I'll talk about later. But hey, I'm still keeping eight out of the original 13, that's not a bad percentage.

The reason I don't normally buy full collections is because I know my own taste, and I usually get a pretty good idea from looking at pictures of what I will and won't wear. So I don't see any point in wasting money on what I won't! In this case I didn't buy these in the first place, which is partly why I still have the full set. But there's still no point in keeping the ones I've worn once in over three years and don't think I'm likely to wear again.

The Singing Seed

This is Pretty Serious The Singing Seed, which is from the Museum of Naileontology collection:

I like this collection - she's been releasing these gradually over the last several years - because not only are they really lovely polishes but they come with these funny little blurbs that usually amount to little miniature sci-fi stories. This is a green and I was thinking I could have put this polish in the "funky green" category that I was showing yesterday, but actually I don't think it belongs there. It's green and gold glitter, with some bar glitter (which I don't usually like but doesn't seem to show up much here). Except for the bar glitter, it's actually a pretty conventional small glitter. But really pretty.

(I was watching destash videos again - I think this time it was Queen Jessika's - and she was talking about destashing all her glitters. So far I am not willing to go that far. I've certainly gotten a lot more selective about what glitters I buy, and I'm destashing things that I just don't wear and certainly that's going to involve some glitters. I'm finding that it's the big glitters that I'm not willing to deal with, rather than the smaller ones. But she makes a good point that unless you're willing to do peel-off basecoat - which I have not had good luck with - glitters can be an awful pain.)

Valentine's mani & gifts

We keep Valentine's gifts very small at our house, and I think this was a nice choice. (Not that I really need another red polish, as I've discussed recently. But at least it's a good red.)

The card almost made me cry.

The polish is Revlon Red, and the little heart is a mirror compact. Revlon Red is a nice middle-of-the-road red, maybe the slightest bit blue-leaning.

I don't have a picture of my actual Valentine's manicure, which went in a couple of stages, anyway. I wanted to try out Nails Inc Alexa Lace, and I wanted it over something neutral, so I tried out Square Hue Desert Storm, which was (naturally) in the 1990s collection. As you might also guess, it's sand-colored. And I actually liked it - I am not a neutrals person, generally. But it's a cool tan, which is kind of hard to find, sometimes, and it looked pretty good on me. It's not light enough to be called "mani hands" on me, but it's pretty close.

So I put Alexa Lace on top of that - and I dunno, I just haven't quite got the hang of applying this one yet, maybe. Two coats didn't seem like quite enough, and three coats was maybe too much. Maybe I just need to play with it some more. But it didn't look bad, so I wore that for a day or so, and then I went the red jelly route again, and put Jolly Lolly over it. And then later I put Revlon Red on top of that just because I wanted to try it out. Interestingly, the time I thought it really looked most like lace was when I tried to take it off:

Man, it was on there like glue - or more like concrete, maybe. The red started to come off, as you can see, and Desert Storm melted right away from underneath, but the glitter wasn't going anywhere. I kind of liked it this way, actually. Which is lucky, as it happens. I did eventually get it off with the Dip-It and some cautious scraping once it was loosened.

pre-Halloween manis

I had on Candy Corn Cordial, the Top Shelf polish, and I forgot to take a picture of that. It was kind of your standard orange mixed with your standard holo-glitter, though, if you can envision that. It had a sort of texture to it and I ended up wearing it mattified, because I wasn't all that interested in a glitterbomb at the time. However, I do have a picture of what I put on top of it (after a couple of days when I got bored, as I do):

This is LynB This Is Halloween (which inevitably gives me a Nightmare Before Christmas earworm every time, but there are worse things) over the orange base. I think it probably shifted This Is Halloween toward orange, having that under there.

Then yesterday I started over - oh! and I used my new Up&Up polish remover to get the glitter off and it worked like a charm (this stuff, if you don't know what I'm talking about - I'll probably have more to say about that later on). I was running late (as I do) and went out the door headed for work with Instant Artificials on my nails and a bottle of polish in my hand, and put it on as I went. The polish was Revlon Fall Mood, from the now-discontinued version of Colorstay. Then last night I put Lynnderella Cauldron Drippings on it, as a fade mani. I don't have a picture to tell me what it looks like, but I think I did a pretty decent job of it for once. Cauldron Drippings is Lynnderella, an orange hex-glitter with assorted other stuff mixed in. She says that every bottle is different. (I think this is still available but with a somewhat-different name. Aha, I just looked and it's Which Cauldron Is it? - however, that's sold out on her website at the moment.)

I don't know what I'll wear after this, but I'm trying to be more organized and so I have a list in my planner of things that I want to wear before Halloween. I have a lot of Halloween polish, it's a weakness of mine.  I divided them up and this is what ended up on this week's list: Very Pretty Vampire, Cauldron Drippings (which of course I've already worn but might conceivably do again), Chupacabra, Deadly Nightshade, and Walker Bait. It's highly unlikely that I'll change my polish three or more times this week, but at least I can make an informed decision rather than going, "Shit! I forgot to wear ____!" afterwards, as I usually do.

NOTD: Red Baroness plus Ichi Hanami

When last heard from on the NOTD front, I was about to remove Elderberry-over-black, and it may not surprise you too much to hear that it was a mess to remove. Glitter and black polish are not the best combo if you want easy cleanup. And then I was in a big hurry, and I didn't prep as well as I could have before I applied Strawberry Fields (2 coats over Colorstay base) - it looked alright the first day but it chipped a good bit the second day. I didn't get a picture - it's pretty but not all that out-there gorgeous.

So I tried to do a better job this time of cleaning up and prepping and filing. I've gotten as far as a coat of Nail Nutrition Strength. I'm toying with the idea of doing the Vinylux thing. I guess I can refrain from further base-coat if I'm doing that - it's not supposed to require it, right?

(Friday)
I did do the "Vinylux thing" - by which I mean my one (new-to-me) Vinylux polish with its accompanying top coat. I said in the last entry that I wanted to see how Vinylux Red Baroness compared with its Shellac counterpart - and unfortunately it didn't compare too well. It looked fine, but it didn't look like my shellac mani did, as I remember it. I remember staring at it because it was so beautiful, and I'm just not seeing that here. It's just another red. (It did get through a whole day and a shampoo - which is usually every polish's downfall, with me - without chipping, which I can't say about any other red I've ever worn in my life, as I remember it.)

So since my PS box arrived, I'm now wearing Ichi Hanami over Red Baroness. It looks great. (Maybe I'll actually get a picture.)

(Monday)
I posted the Pretty Serious purchases over the weekend - and here's Ichi over the Baroness, as mentioned above. I think it would be a little lighter worn on its own. Also note that I've had on Red Baroness since Thursday and Ichi Hanami over that since Friday, and I only have minor wear, which is pretty good for me - especially for red polishes, which as I said above, I always seem to have trouble with.

(I did a pretty good job of application on the Vinylux, not so great with Ichi Hanami, which I kind of slapped on late at night.)

2014 favorites (less #1)

I did a top 10 but I don't have fancy pictures or anything, because I think everybody who knows me knows by now that that's not how I roll. (I would have taken some sort of pictures if there had been sun today, but no dice on that. I will see what I can dig up out of the Delicious Color archives, though!)

I have never done a top 10 before, and given that, I decided that it didn't make any sense to limit it to polishes released this year only. Because of that, my criteria for inclusion is not when it was made or purchased, but rather that I wore it for the first time in 2014. (I did pull several older releases out of the list and put them into an Honorable Mention category, though - see below for that.)

This is 2-10 - #1 is coming tomorrow. In alpha order by brand:

• China Glaze Travel In Colour
• Cover Girl Outlast Violet Flicker
• Dollish Polish The Angels Have The Phone Box
• OPI Alcatraz... Rocks
• Pahlish Pyrite
• Serum No 5 Yule Light Up my Life
• Sinful Colors Gilded
• Zoya Carter (Pixie Dust)
• Zoya Teigen

Yule Light Up My Life:

The Angels Have The Phone Box:

Carter, without top coat and with:

Honorable mention (older polishes which I just wore for the first time in 2014):

• Barielle Elle's Spell
• China Glaze Glitter All The Way (former holiday polish inexplicably in Mardi Gras colors)
• Kleancolor Sparkle Purple

Glitter All The Way:

Sparkle Purple:

Other nail products I loved in 2014:
Chick cuticle oil (works great, but mostly I love it for the scent, tangerine-ginger)
Orchid-brand nail polish remover (for the weird pump-action bottle)
Nailthins decals

Orchid remover:

This was rest of my shortlist:
Bonita Peonies Gone Wild
Chick Hipster Chick
Chick Once Upon A Time
Jade Vestido De Gala
Julie G Butterflies & Rosebuds
Lush Lacquer Ho Ho Holodays
Nyx Enchanted Forest
Orly Intergalactic Space
RBL Meow Meow
Serum No 5 Sunset Flare
Square Hue Vaclavske Namesti
Urban Decay Vice
Zoya Posh
Zoya Yuna

Pump nail polish remover

I only bought this because it was free or nearly free with a coupon, but I really like it, it's turned out:

This is Orchid (H-E-B house brand) polish remover in a squat 6-oz. bottle with a "convenient spill-proof pump." I wasn't at all sure that I would care for a pump polish remover, but I figured, well, I'd try it. It turns out the pump didn't quite work the way I was imagining:

It has this little flat cup on top and it pumps UP. You put your cotton round or cotton ball or whatever on top of that and pump right into it. Mostly it works very well, although as usual nothing is really spill-proof where I'm concerned. I managed to actually shoot remover into the air right through the cotton round at one point and spill it that way, but still it's hard to have a major spill with this, anyway. (I will probably buy another one when I find them on sale again - I think regular price was in ballpark of $2 - but meanwhile I just refilled it with the acetone I had on hand.)

I took these pictures a week or more ago, and then I promptly forgot about them. I have been wearing Kleancolor Sparkle Purple for several days, and now it's chipped, and when I went to take it off I remembered the remover pictures. I really like Sparkle Purple and I'll probably just do the same mani again, so I'll try to get pictures this time!

Playing with thermals, and acetone

I bought nail polish remover back a few months ago from Sally Beauty, and I bought the one that just said "Acetone" rather than "Pure Acetone" - it looks slightly pinkish, and I believe it has a little bit of lanolin and such in it. And I expected it to work just fine, but really it didn't so much - not on difficult removal jobs, anyway. It seemed too diluted, I thought. So I went back to Sally Beauty today and bought the Pure Acetone, and I poured the two together. And it fixed it, to my satisfaction. It's still not as drying as pure acetone would be, hopefully, but it's also a lot stronger than the "impure" version. And I had enough partial bottles floating around that decanting from one bottle into another wasn't a problem at all.

The mixed version took three coats of Nfu Oh 51 off with very little trouble, where I had trouble getting two coats off with the other stuff.

I finally got around to trying Naughty & Nice, the Polished by KPT thermal, and well, not much happened. That's not really true, it got much lighter when I put it on, so it's reacting. But my nails are so short I barely got that "french mani" sort of effect that thermals normally have.

Here's a couple of pictures taken in the car, in a couple of different spots (meaning, a couple of different traffic lights!) so that the light is a little different.

Maybe it's shifting a little bit, because right now it looks paler than either of these, but I'm certainly not getting the two-tone effect at the tips. I'll have to try it again when my nails have grown out. I cut them back very severely last week, so they're shorter than normal.

Super Star over black

One of the new Sinful Colors, slightly blue-shifted and lobstery as usual in this light:

It's really pretty - blue-green with purple flakes which are not visible there. I put it over a black base - it was one of those ones that I have a bunch of with no name and no brand, the ones that I have long been theorizing are actually L.A. Colors. I may test this and go buy the L.A. Colors black and see if it's the same, because I liked the way this went on - it was a near-one-coater. And this is three coats of the SC over it.

Update: this was a bitch to get off. I'd recommend foil (or the peelable basecoat, if you're thinking ahead) for this.

Patricia and Thames

This is what I'm currently wearing - Nostalgic "Patricia" over Butter London "Thames":

Ignore the lobster-hands; I don't know why they always look that way in this light. I don't try to color-correct my pictures because that seems to me to be a bit contrary to the idea of showing what nail polish actually looks like! (But that's probably just ME being contrary, as usual.) Anyway, Thames is a lovely emerald-ish green with maybe a hint of blue - and hmm, I just looked it up on BL's website and they call it blue-green, but anyway. That seems to be sort of usual - the line between darker greens and blue-greens seems to be pretty fluid. Which makes a certain sense when you think about it, since a lot of colors that we think of as green in nature, like the color of a spruce tree, have a definite blue tinge to them.

And it is a really pretty color, with a sort of a foil-ish finish to it - but still, you know me, I couldn't let well enough alone, so I put Patricia over it. Patricia is a packed green glitter, as you can tell from the picture, but what you can't really tell is that it also has purple bits in it. It's terribly pretty. (Here is the blurry picture of Patricia I took a while back, which clearly shows the purple in the glitter!) This started out as an all-BL mani - Nail Foundation, 3 coats of Thames (it's a bit sheer to start out with) and Hardwear. Then I added 2 coats of Patricia and another coat of Hardwear, making a whopping 8 coats total. It made it through a hairwashing just fine - that's usually my acid-test because I have oily hair, even now that I'm over 50, and so I tend to use my nails on my scalp more than I should.

One note on my last manicure, and that's that I was wondering about how Jewel Tone would come off, but it did alright. I didn't have to trot out the aluminum foil to get it off, at least!

The Last Haul

Friday night I took off the bright blue, and oh yeah, bright blue is a pain to take off. (Another big surprise, huh?) It made such a mess on one thumbnail that polish remover wasn't budging it at all, and I finally resorted to a bit of chlorine bleach to get the worst of it off. That's probably not very good for your nails but it doesn't seem to have done any serious damage.

My Zoya order came, with Liberty included, but somehow I have no desire to try Liberty right now. (No more blue for a bit.) This is, for the moment, The Last Haul. It's not a very big one, but it's what I got. And if you see me buying any more polish any time soon, kick my butt, ok?

L-R and top to bottom:

• Sally Hansen cuticle oil
• Montana Sky (Colors by Llarowe, which are apparently completely sold out now)
• Liberty (Zoya)
• Seche Vite
• Suri (Zoya)
• Rikki (Zoya)

The Llarowe and Liberty don't look that different in this picture, but Montana Sky actually has a darker base, with bright glitter. Liberty is just bright.

So (to continue the story), after I got the blue off, finally, I decided to try Zoya Perrie. And - like every other paler color I've ever bought - it's just not flattering on me. I don't know why I keep trying. It's a pretty color, and I'm not getting rid of it or anything, but in my stash it's probably destined for layering. Which is basically what I used it for, in the end - I put Convergence over it, the plum-colored holo.

But by this morning, that was chipped, and I decided to try out Rikki, above. I was thinking I really wanted it to be just a little darker, though, so I put it over Zoya Irene. And I really liked the result. Two layers of Irene, one of Rikki. (Our waitress at dinner liked it, too.)

History

My friend Col asked me the other day why the sudden interest in nail polish, which made me laugh. The answer, of course, is that it's not sudden at all, it's just that he suddenly noticed - I'm guessing it's because I've been tweeting an awful lot of links to blog posts lately. Even though I persist in saying from time to time that this is "not a real nail blog" (mostly meaning that I don't swatch constantly and take well-lighted pictures of my swatching), I have gotten a bit more serious about posting semi-regularly and tweeting the links and such. I've had various blogs for 10 years or so now and I can say with fair confidence that I will never be super-regular about when I post. But I'm trying to get in something once a week or so, at least.

My husband has also noticed that my interest in nail polish has risen to the level of a hobby lately, but really it's been that way for a couple of years now. I guess maybe the blogging has made me more voluble about it. I've always painted my nails off and on since I was 12 or so - more or less since the time my mom decided I was old enough to wear makeup. Usually I'd go through periods of keeping them polished all the time, and then get bored with the maintenance and stop for a while, and then start again some time later. So it's always been sort of a cyclical interest of mine. But I've been keeping my nails polished more often than not for maybe the last decade, and the periods where I neglected them have mostly gotten shorter and shorter and have disappeared almost entirely for the last year or two. (I used to paint my toenails off and on, too, but never very regularly, and I've abandoned that entirely these days since I don't usually wear sandals or open-toed shoes and so nobody sees my toenails at all except family, when I kick my shoes off at home or at somebody's house where I'm comfortable enough to do that.)

I never had acrylic nails or have gotten a professional manicure at all, except for a couple of Christmases ago when my cousin (who's licensed as a cosmetologist, although she hasn't been in the business the last few years) gave me a gel manicure. That's partly because I didn't feel like I could afford regular manicures, and partly, I finally realized, because I don't actually like people messing with my nails very much. I've always had pretty healthy nails without much effort, and usually I think fooling around with them doesn't improve them, and often seems to actually do harm - for example, my cuticles are just fine, usually, when left alone. The more I mess with them, the more they seem to have problems. (I did like the gel manicure quite a lot, though. I might eventually buy a kit to do my own.)

Speaking of nail care, I watched Holly's video about her nail routine, which made me think a bit more than usual about mine. (For example, I think I might ought to try cuticle oil, at least.) As I said, I believe in letting well-enough alone, for the most part. If I wasn't just genetically lucky about my nails I would probably do more. I do use Nail Nutrition when I think of it or when they seem dry. I usually use another base coat on top of that - I always use some sort of base coat and almost always a top coat. I'm not consistent at all about brands, though; those vary according to what I have around. And I used Cutex or a similar store-brand polish remover until the last year or so, when I finally started using 100% acetone. And it doesn't seem to have caused my nails to dry out excessively, so I'm planning on sticking with that unless I start having problems.

============================================

What I'm wearing now:

1. Nail Nutrition
2. Sinful Colors Base Coat
3. Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Ivy League
4. Ivy League
5. Zoya Zuza
6. Revlon Colorstay Top Coat

As I've said before, Ivy League is too yellow to look good on me. So this is an attempt to get to some sort of spring-green that's more flattering on me. I think Ivy League and one coat of Zuza work pretty well together, really - some of the yellow-green peeks through, but the blue in Zuza tones it down. And Zuza on its own would have been more blue than I wanted.

I grabbed a sunlight picture in the car of my (currently very short) nails, so you can get an idea of the color:

 

I was being impatient and I messed the finish up on this a bit - you can see the bumps if you look close - so I don't know how long I'll stick with this. But I definitely like it. It's one to remember for future reference.

Chloe and Chirality

I decided not to try to make Orbit last another day, since it was looking pretty ragged, and took it off last night. I have to give it extra props for coming off quite cleanly, especially considering the glitter and all those bazillion coats. I didn't even bother with the finger cots, since it came off so easily without them.

The new mani is an oldie but a goodie, Chloe over Carly. CSM basecoat, 2 coats of Carly, 2 coats of Chloe. Carly is sort of burgundy-ish on its own, and Chloe just gives it pink flash - sort of raspberry(ish), at least in the light where I am now. They go well together. (My barista liked it!)

(There are some weirdnesses with the light here that had me checking my hands to make sure they didn't really look quite like that. My fingertips are not pink like they appear there, although my cleanup job is admittedly pretty nonexistent. Plus I went, "Surely I don't have tipwear already?" and in fact I don't. Apparently what appears to be tiny chips is just the light as well. That bump on my middle finger from where my pen used to rub against it in grade school is unfortunately quite real.)

Speaking of Chloe: I was reading back over old posts, and I noticed the one where I said "Chloe over Roxy - I never thought of that!" - except if you keep reading back to January, I did in fact try Chloe over Roxy, and didn't like it. My memory is crap - but hey, that's why I keep a blog, right?

I was poking around in somebody's blogroll last night, and I have no idea where I ended up that pointed me to Chirality, but I fell in love with those holos, and since she has the mini-bottles, I ended up buying three. It's really the $9-12 price tags on most indie polishes that have put me off this long. So I'll be reporting back on that. I think it was Kale, Convergence, and Symbiote that I bought. It was the green (Kale, of course) that sucked me in.

Glitter and the removal thereof

My friend Karen wrote about using finger cots instead of foil for removing stubborn polish a while back - as you'll see if you click over there, she was using it to take off a gel mani, but I was mostly interested in the technique myself for glitter removal. (That's mostly because I am too cheap - so far - to fork out for a gel setup. If I find one on sale, all bets may be off there.) I finally remembered to buy some finger cots a week or so ago, in time to try it on my - sort of vaguely Valentine's-themed - repeat of Zoya Paloma over Luna. And it worked really well. It's basically the same idea as the aluminum-foil technique, but it's much easier. And finger cots are pretty cheap. I bought a package of 36 assorted-size ones at the grocery store for a couple of dollars. (They were in the pharmacy section with the first-aid items.) Cut some cotton rounds into quarters, saturate one with acetone, cover your nail with the acetone-soaked cotton, and then cover the whole thing with an appropriately-sized cot and let it sit a while. I haven't settled on a definite soak time but it really didn't take long, on my experimental round. A couple of minutes seemed to pretty much take care of it, but of course this may vary wildly depending on what exactly you're removing. Luna still required some extra silver-glitter cleanup afterwards, of course, but not near as much as I would have guessed.

(I did the Paloma/Luna combo more or less the same way I did the last time, except I think I did an undercoat there that I left out this time, and I couldn't tell the difference at all. Basecoat, 2 coats of Luna, 3 coats of Paloma, and topcoat. Still a lot of coats, but I like the result.)

So since I have an improved method of glitter removal, that put me in the mood for more glitter, specifically Studio M Slammin' Red. Which, come to think of it, I got from Karen in the first place, in a swap a year or so ago, I think. (Naturally Karen documented her end of the swap much better than I did. Although she sent me so much bonus stuff that I still frequently say, "Oh, that's one of the polishes I got from Karen," so I hope that tells you how great she is as a swap partner!) I know she sent me a couple of Milani shimmers that I have worn a lot, and she also introduced me to Studio M glitters, which I now love. I would have trouble feeding this addiction since they are exclusive to Meijer stores and we don't have those in Texas, but as it happens, my in-laws live in prime Meijer-land in Ohio, so I visit periodically and can indulge. My very favorite was a silver-gray one that I unfortunately failed to close properly and ruined, but Slammin' Red is a close second. I really think of it as more of a pink than a red - a dark raspberry-pink, sort of like Zoya Blaze's showier cousin. The Studio M glitters are really glitter-packed, with what looks like pink and silver holo glitter. I did try taking iPhone pictures in a couple of different lights, and this was the best one, in (rather cloudy) daylight today:

You can see the glitter a bit there, but for a better look at the total glitter effect, you have to try somebody else's pictures: Polish Monster, for example, has pictures that really show off the glitter. (She also said that Studio M is basically the same as Color Club, which I hadn't heard before. So if you totally fall in love with this color but you don't live in Meijer territory, that's something else to try!)

I almost forgot to say that this is two coats but one could easily be enough - this goes on quite thick, for one thing, besides being quite opaque as well. And boy, it ate up the top coat. I used two and it was still bumpy. But I like it too much to care.

So I've been having fun trying out one pink after another. I'm sure this one will probably last through Valentine's Day (although if you look at my pinky closely, you'll notice that it does have a distressing tendency to chip a bit), and after that I'll go off on some other tangent. Purple, maybe!