The middle ground of BCA polishes

More indies from the Breast Cancer Awareness box - this bunch is the medium pinks - not pastels, which I've already shown, and not coral-leaning and not very dark - those sets are still to come.

So as you can see above, these are Hope from Ethereal Lacquer, Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow from Polish 'M, and Wind Beneath My Wings from Music City.

Hope (Ethereal Lacquer - which is the only one of these three brands I had tried before)

(Again, I'm using Cosmetics Sanctuary's descriptions - which I suspect may have come from the makers of these polishes, since they're quite detailed!) "a dusty rose pink with iridescent chameleon flakes and red to green aurora shimmer" - I haven't worn this one yet, but I intend to because I really like the swatch.

Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow (Polish 'M)

"a deep fuchsia with iridescent shifting flakes, gold flakes, red holographic glitter and a very subtle aqua flash" - again, haven't tried it yet but definitely want to. It almost appears to have some texture to it in person. (I almost decided to try this earlier today before settling on the one below.)

Wind Beneath My Wings (Music City Beauty)

"a magenta creme based scattered holographic with blue fantasy flakes mixed in" - I have this on right now, and "magenta" is exactly the word I would have picked. Under the overhead light in my living room, it looks almost red. But I haven't seen it in daylight yet. The holo & flakes are also not terribly apparent right now, but again, sunlight will presumably help with that.

I just looked at the Music City website and all of their polish names seem to be songs. (I just thought that might interest somebody!)

Here is Wind Beneath My Wings on my nails (not the neatest application I've ever done, sorry!)

I like it - but then darker pinks are totally my thing so I figured I would.

Ciate Mini Mani polishes, part 4

It's been a while since part 3. Here's the whole set, in case you've forgotten (or never saw) where all these Ciate polishes are coming from. This was an advent calendar, and I got slightly out of order, but basically I've showed days 1-9, plus 13 and 14 (although 14 was not a polish, it was a brush-on cuticle oil called Jelly Oil). So I need to go back and show 10 to 12, and then skip to 15 and I'll be back on the numbered track.

Day 10 was Dangerous Affair, a deep red:

It's very pretty but it's the type of thing I probably won't wear much. (Maybe if I layer something over it...)

Day 11 is Antique Brooch, another glitter:

It's interesting - it seems to have a pink (or lilac?) base, and there's shimmer in there, too. Then there's at least a couple of sizes of gold glitter, I think, and some holo bits, too. (The description on Sephora's website - which is where I've been getting all of these descriptions from - calls this "gold pink glitter" which is kind of uninformative, really, although quite accurate so far as it goes.)

Day 12 was water decals in a rose-gold color (rose-gold seems to be a bit of a theme, here):

I haven't worked up the energy to try these out yet. (Knowing me, I'll probably lose them. I disassembled the box this all came in so this stuff is already starting to scatter all over.)

We've already covered day 13 and 14 back over here, and here is day 15, Total Eclipse:

It's described as a "dark gray creme" - it looks almost blue on the nail, here. But I usually like dark grays.

Day 16 is Supernova, another top-coat;

The description for Supernova just says "pink shimmer" and it does look pink and white in the bottle. But I put it on top of Total Eclipse (on the tip, specifically) and you can see that it turned things purple there. I'm gonna have to play with this one.

That's enough for today, and I'm about to go to sleep right here in my chair, anyway. Good night, or good morning!

NOTD: White Metallic

Here is Kleancolor White Metallic:

Yeah, these polishes are very imaginatively named, I may have mentioned that already. I normally never wear white polish at all, but I dunno, my sister had white polish on at Christmas - she says she wears it all the time because it's just easy to deal with, and I had big rainbow set of metallics that included a black and a white, so I thought, well, I'll start with that one, like, in solidarity or something! (What she was actually wearing was an OPI - she told me the name of it but it was nothing I ever heard of and so I promptly forgot. It definitely wasn't My Boyfriend Scales Walls or anything. It was... not as shiny as this one but it was at least shimmery.) Anyway, I won't say I'm going to be wearing this polish all the time but I do like it pretty well. It took three coats to get rid of the VNL. I'm not always terribly fussy about that but on this one I thought it looked better at three. I've had it on for a couple of days and it's holding up tolerably well, but tomorrow's hair-washing day and I'm sure I will end up doing my nails over again too.

I started to say something about what I was going to wear next, but my god, I have soooo many new polishes and I just have no idea. I have 11 more Kleancolor metallics and I have like 19 Ciate polishes (I gave my sister a couple of the neutral ones that I didn't think I'd wear - there were 21 total polishes in the set.) Maybe I'll alternate between Ciate polishes and the magnetics for a while! I have no idea which one I might wear though - we can all be surprised tomorrow!!

NOTD: Less Bitter More Glitter duo

The "Less Bitter More Glitter" duo is two red polishes, a pearlized red called Shake Your Baubles and a glitter called Get The Party Started. (If I had been naming these, I would have done it the other way around - to my mind, "baubles" clearly ought to go with the glitter.) On Christmas Eve, I put the pearly one on all my fingers and then added the glitter to a couple of fingers on each hand. I took this picture for Instagram and I couldn't get the camera to focus properly, but I think you can get the idea anyway:

I love both these polishes, I might as well say that now. Shake Your Baubles, the pearl, is gorgeous, and Get The Party Started is, too. I wore this as shown above on Christmas Day so I could admire the pearly goodness, and then I put the glitter on every finger last night:

Also, this wears really well, for a red. I have had horrible problems with chipping reds in the past, but even the pearl one made it through Christmas perfectly pristine.

This is $15 for the set of two full-sized polishes. I bought mine from Sephora but it doesn't show up on their website now. NailsInc's own website still has it, though.

SquareHue 1970s

So here is the SquareHue 1970s collection, which is from 2015, I think? (I always forget these things) and it was marked down so I had a weak moment & bought it.

(I also bought the 1980s collection, but we'll get to that later. We're only talking about the '70s today.)

L-R, this is Watergate, Night Fever, and iPolish. iPolish doesn't sound at all like a 70s name to me -  but it's a white and a decent white polish is something I actually did not own. So I'm glad to have it to use as a base, at least.

(Looking at them in the bottles, this set looks kind of like it might be a holiday set, but actually it had to have come out in the summer, because they started with 1900s and did one box a decade up to the present. That would make it the August box.)


I get that Night Fever is supposed to be like a disco ball, but it's so holo-ish I'm having trouble as thinking of it as a 70s thing - similar to the problem I have with the name iPolish, really. I lived through the 70s and that just doesn't seem quite right to me. But that's nitpicking.

I did two swatches of Night Fever, and here they are piled on top of one another:

It's a mix of silver and holographic bits in several sizes. The wheel further to the left is Night Fever alone and the wheel on the right has it over Black Creme. (Added: I was looking at the wheel with the blacks after I wrote this last night and it looks like the holo in it might be linear - it caught the light really oddly and interestingly. Maybe they thought that looked extra disco-ish.)

Watergate looks much more blue in the bottle than it does on the wheel.

I think when I wear this I may try putting something under it, it's really sheer. But really pretty, too. The color reminds me a bit of Nail Junkie (and I love Nail Junkie, that's a compliment.)

And then as I said way above, iPolish is just white:

Added: It occurred to me eventually that I do in fact have one white polish - I have a mini of OPI Alpine Snow. I always forget about that. And I have a Sinful Colors white nail art polish also - not that I actually ever do nail art!

SquareHue Scuba Hawaii

SquareHue had a 40% off sale for subscribers only a couple of weeks ago, on past boxes. But you had to buy the whole box (some of them were two polishes and some were three), and I'm such a picky person that there aren't many boxes where I wanted everything in it. If there's something like a "straw color" (that one was in last month's collection) that's a dealbreaker for me. (I unsubscribed from SquareHue after the January box in 2016 and didn't resubscribe until a few months ago, after they finally changed their policies where you could pick your polishes to some extent, or skip boxes entirely). Well, the only collection that they had available in the sale where I thought I might actually wear everything in it was Scuba Hawaii, from last August. I knew people had raved about that collection. Even then I immediately started second-guessing myself about the orange polish, though.

But the box is here and I do actually like the orange. It's red-orange enough that it's fine.

Here's the swatch card as well as the wheel swatches. The orange is Nani, and the violet is Ikaika, both cremes, and then the third one is a foil, Akamai. That one is pretty sheer but I think if you build it up enough it'll be awesome. So I'm pretty happy with this. (The box was marked $25 and so 40% off was $15, and that includes shipping. I think that was a pretty good deal.)

(See, in this picture the orange doesn't look very red-orange, either. That was why I got nervous about it. But yay, I like it fine.)

Lillibet's Jubilee

This is Zoya Neeka, which I've already talked about, and Butter London Lillibet's Jubilee:

This is a full-out almost-chrome metallic, which is something that BL does quite well. I bought it in a "Royal Purple" set with Pitter Patter and No More Waity Katie (which ought to be coming up very soon). It refers to the Queen's Jubilee several years ago - "Lillibet" for Elizabeth, see. Anyway, I've seen this referred to as "lavender" and "lilac" both, because nobody including me seems to ever know the difference between those two - I think that's because both lavender and lilac come in various purple tones, botanically speaking. This is definitely slightly on the blue side, but it's hard to tell - in many lights this will read as a silver. The purple is there but it's pale enough that it tends to disappear. Beautiful polish, though!

Blast from the past

We've already established that I'm disorganized, right? No surprise to anybody there. Well, today I found a 2010 Sephora holiday catalog stuck way up underneath my car seat. Presumably it's been there for five years or so. It mostly just had the usual stuff - it didn't look all that different from what they'd have had for holiday 2015. But I sure would like to get my hands on this S-OPI mini set.

It was $48, which is pretty high for a mini set, but then regular S-OPI polishes were about $10 back then so it's not too bad relative to that. I have a few of these colors, I think, but not near all of them.

Butter London Password Please set

A few weeks ago I ordered this Butter London set for $9 with free shipping:

There are three mini-size polishes (I think BL calls them "fashion size"), and three even-smaller top-coats, basically nail-art size, plus an "ombre brush." Here it is on the website, but it's apparently sold out. Almost all of these polishes are limited-edition - the only one that's not is Doily (which I keep wanting to call Dolly). I have swatches of all of these - I swatched them in pairs, and I'll go through those below, but here are all the bottles:

This is Hush Hush (pink creme), Doily (white matte glitter topcoat), Password Please (dark purple creme), Spotlight (blue flakie, although they call it holo glitter), Looker (nude shimmer), and Bubbly (gold topcoat) - plus the ombre brush at the end.

This is Doily and Hush Hush:

I threw in an extra polish which is not in the bottle pictures (and not from this set, of course) - I had an unnamed bright-pink sparse glitter that I don't think I'd ever swatched before. That's it at the top alone, and I put it over Hush Hush as well, below that, just to try it out. And then the last pink nail is Doily over Hush Hush.

This is Password Please and Spotlight.

I love flakies, and they can call Spotlight a holo glitter but it looks like a flakie to me, and I'd totally buy a bigger size of it if it was available. Password Please is purple, but when you put Spotlight on top of it, it appears much more blue.

And last, we have Doily again because I swatched it again, this time over Looker, which is in the middle, and then also the last topcoat, which is Bubbly:

I'm not really sure if the ombre brush was necessary because this are pretty much just straightforward top-coats and I doubt that I'm really going to use it. But for $9, this is a deal any way you look at it.

Hello Kitty from OPI

I was interested in the OPI Hello Kitty collection, but I was afraid it was going to be a bunch of supergirly pinks and I'd hate most of them. And, well, it is and it isn't, and I don't. There are a bunch of pinks, yes, but there's also black and white and bright blue and yellow, and some of the pinks are pretty interesting. It's definitely not all cremes. (Here's all the colors.)

I got this set:

This is Look At My Bow! a medium rose-pink, and Starry-Eyed For Dear Daniel, a dark-pink microglitter. I want to compare Look At My Bow! to Zoya Shelby - that's the ballpark it seems to be in.* Starry-Eyed For Dear Daniel is much more interesting to me. (And hey, I got a coin purse!)

*But it's not quite a Shelby dupe. See ALU's comparison here.

I did swatch these, but I don't have pictures of that yet.

Bonita & Cover Girl gift sets from K-Mart

K-Mart doesn't exist in Texas any more, or not my part of Texas, at least, so it's one of several places I like to go if I have time when we're in Ohio. Although actually, as far as nail stuff goes, K-Mart is pretty unexceptional. Unless I missed something on this last trip, K-Mart doesn't actually have much in the way of nail items that are different than what every other store carries - with the exception of these Bonita gift sets. I had only seen Bonita at Rite Aid previously (and we don't have Rite Aid in Texas either). If K-Mart had individual bottles of Bonita I didn't see them - but I did buy a couple of bottles of Bonita at Rite Aid last trip and liked them. I refrained on the gift sets, though.

I guess this set, called Santa's Crew, is meant to represent various holiday "characters" - Santa and an elf and so forth:

This second one is the only one with what looks like the "normal" Bonita bottle - as you can see, each one of these three sets has a different bottle shape. This one is called Jolly Nails, and it has glitters and metallics and what looks like a couple of plain old cremes. (The silver and gold metallics are the ones that interest me the most!)

Actually on reflection (I've now looked at the bottle pictures, but I decided this was the case before I even looked) I don't think this is the same bottle as the ones I have - which are Bonita Salon. Here is the Bonita website, where you can see that there are actually a number of lines, all with different bottles. But it doesn't particularly look like they used any of the regular bottles on any of these sets.

The third picture is terribly out-of-focus but since you can see the polishes so I'm including it anyway. This set is called Mani-More and it seems to be more on the glitter & shimmer end of things:

(I'm sort of wishing now that I had gotten names on these colors, but I didn't. I have no idea whether any of these are regular Bonita colors or what.)

The other set that I thought was interesting enough to take a picture of is from Cover Girl. I have several of these  colors, and I think at least some of them are the colors that were released this time last year as a Catching Fire tie-in, in Glosstini size. They all have more or less the same glass-fleck-ish finish. Some of them were already core colors, I think, and at some point during the year this year the ones that weren't already core became core. They are some of my favorites, really, but since I already have (possibly) half of the six, it wouldn't be worth it for me to buy the set. I did look to see if the names matched, and they did, although I don't remember what they all were. The three I have with this finish are Seared Bronze, Pyro Pink, and Violet Flicker. (I may also have a black one, which I don't remember the name of offhand. But it doesn't seem to be included in this set in any case.)

(Here's All Lacquered Up's pictures of the collection, so you can get a better idea if you're interested. Going by what she says there, I think the black one I mention above must be Midnight Magic.)

Holiday haul photos

Pictures of the Christmas haul (see last entry for the full list):

I should add that, lest you imagine that I got a lot of Christmas gifts other than this, I really didn't. This was what I asked for, and it was all I expected. My husband usually buys me some surprise things - one of them was the Revlon polish set, which wasn't on my list because I didn't know about them - and another one was a quilted tote bag. And we got a couple of small joint gifts from other family members, but this was the bulk of my gift list, and I am quite, quite happy with that. (I couldn't think of anything else that I especially wanted or even needed, quite honestly!)

This was the first time I'd gotten a Zoya Dream Box, and the box itself is surprisingly nice - it's not just a cardboard box; it's substantial. It seems like you could use it to store jewelry or something in, really.

(The thing that says Matte Velvet on it is a card that was inside, not part of the box. I did try out Savita, the purple, and it was really pretty.)

I took this picture mostly so you could see the little skull on the top of the Urban Decay bottle:

The color is another purple - darker than Savita, and shimmery - it is gorgeous. I knew I was getting this because we picked it up one day when we were walking through Macy's, back around Thanksgiving. I would probably never have bought it for myself, but since Rob was with me, I said, "Well, you could get me that for Christmas!" so he did. (They had the cutest UD salesperson, all pierced and hip, nothing like what I think of as a typical Macy's salesperson. She's probably a large part of why I decided I had to have this!)

I hadn't even seen the Revlon Parfumerie polishes, as I said above. The bottles are adorable, and these are fun colors:

I don't own many very-pale-pinks that I like, and this one seems to have possibilities. (I have a nail wheel upcoming for that, as a matter of fact!) And you can never have too many reds, right?

And here are the stray loose bottles:

This is Slightly Unstable, Alcatraz Rocks, and Elderberry. I think everybody pretty much knows about Alcatraz Rocks already, right? (Google it if not; it's pretty much universally adored, near as I can tell.) Slightly Unstable is part of a Women of Harry Potter line and it's the Bellatrix polish, sort of a green duochrome-ish thing. I haven't tried it out yet so I can't be much more specific than that! And I am totally in love with Elderberry; I'm wearing it now. Blue and green and purple sparkliness is right up my alley.

Oh, here's a better picture of the Take Ten set, I almost forgot that one:

(It had two separate boxes within the bigger box, which is clever. You could take it apart and give it as two separate gifts if you wanted to!)

Early-December Diary

(Sunday morning, more or less)
It's after midnight so it's Sunday and it's December, which I can't believe. Aaagh, I'm not ready for Christmas. (Oh crap, that means Holidailies starts today, too. I gotta think of something to write!!)

I just wanted to record before I forget that I managed to chip the Glitterati - it was my own fault, using my nails as levers is not a good thing, I know! But I did keep it a couple of days, anyway. The thing I wanted to record was that it came off relatively easy, which is nice. I had one lately that was a bear to get off - I think it was In Through the Out Door - so I am skittish about glitter removal again. But then that's what I bought Glitter A-Peel for! I'll know the next time.

(Monday)
I stayed home yesterday, and I left my nails alone, for once, but now I have on Zoya Suri, which is a lovely royal purple with a subtle shimmer. It's the first time I've worn it. I bought it last summer, but it seemed fall-ish, plus that was in the middle of my big summer buying binge and I had plenty of other things to wear, so I decided to save it for a while. I knew I would love it, and I do.

My other nail news is that I got an e-mail from Jessika of Polish Insomniac saying that I was one of the winners of her China Glaze Giveaway. So woo! If it's really the whole Christmas set it's a whopping FIFTEEN polishes, so I am really going to be awash in polish. But many of them look lovely so I am thrilled.

(Tuesday)
Because I can't leave well enough alone, I now have stuff layered on top of Suri. It's a compulsion, I swear. I bought L.A. Colors Jewel Tone, because I wandered into Family Dollar and it was a dollar, and then I got home, and I'm pretty sure I have this color already. You know that set of minis that's been in my stash pictures and wheels all this year, that I keep calling "unlabeled brand" and things like that? I got it for Christmas last year, and it was labeled "Color Theory" - it just says "nail polish" on the bottles, but it must've actually been L.A. Colors, because I have the stuff out of the labeled bottle on some nails and the unlabeled on others, and I completely can't tell the difference. (Mostly I have not remembered to wear these polishes much.)

(This time last year, I had never bought an L.A. Colors polish. Looking at it now, the bottle shape even looks like L.A. Colors.)

Color Theory, and more

I'm waiting to see if the pictures from my phone decide to upload or not (I really need to find a better way to do this - my current method usually works, eventually, but often takes a good while), but meanwhile I'll just start talking.  I haven't posted but once since Christmas, and I was all about talking about my jelly sandwich that day, and I mentioned this little set of polishes in passing and then never came back to it. And my photos have finally transferred over now, so here it is:

I saw these in CVS one day and my husband was with me, and I said something to the effect of, "Oh that's cute, that'd be a good thing to get me for Christmas if you want" (mostly thinking that it was more interesting than a lot of the gift sets out there) - and even though it was November at the time, I think, he remembered. (Or maybe he went back and bought it the next day, I never thought to ask, but anyway, he got it.) I thought it was a nice range of colors and had some cute glitters. I still haven't tried but a few of the colors, but it does figure into every manicure I've done since Christmas, one way or another. Luckily I did take this picture before I opened it up, because I promptly managed to send the little bottles flying all over the place - I did retrieve most of them, but I think there's still one or two lurking under the TV table that I haven't gone diving after yet. (It was not that the packaging was bad - I had been looking at the colors and had loosened most of them from their little slots, so it was entirely my own fault. I'm really talented at finding new and creative ways to make messes. Nothing broke, though, so it could've been much worse.)

Meanwhile, my jelly sandwich that I posted about before was lovely and lasted really well, which is the main reason I haven't posted much since I first posted about it! It held up unmarred for about four days (which is really good for me with my tendency to use my nails as levers) and then I patched it up and made it last several more. I remembered to take a picture, too:

This was the only picture in which you could see Luna underneath peeking out at all, but in real life it showed up quite well. In sunlight it tended to get quite flashy, in fact.

So earlier this week when I finally took that off, I was feeling too lazy* to go to the bedroom and look in my big stash. So I rooted around in the little bowl in the living room that I throw stray nail polishes and earrings and such into, and ended up with Who Are You Wearing? again, and Jem on top of that. It didn't wear terribly well, though, for some reason (I'm not even sure what base and top coats I used, so I have nothing particular to blame that on). So last night and this morning I started over and ended up with another long string of layers:

1. Nail Nutrition
2. basecoat: SH Salon
3. that same gray that I had under the jelly sandwich last week (from the Color Theory set above)
4. Orly Diamond Love
5. berry color from Color Theory set (which has no names or even numbers, which is going to drive me crazy)
6. Zoya Delilah - red glitter
7. Diamond Love again

I think of Diamond Love as a top coat, although I'm not sure whether it's actually intended to be one. I googled around and came up with a couple of pictures of DL in the bottle, and a description from a seller site of it as an "opalescent microglitter" which sounds about right, and also one which describes it as "rare" - which I take with a grain of salt on seller sites, because some of them like to call everything rare. But there doesn't seem to be much in the way of reviews, either, which makes me think it might not have been around long. I'm pretty sure I fished it out of a clearance bin at the grocery store a couple of years ago, along with Orly Pearl Wisdom which I really wore a lot for a while. The "opalescent" part means it tends to go on like an old-fashioned frost, which may be why I haven't worn this one a lot. But actually this mess of layers came out looking okay (if bumpy):

Depending on the light, the final result seems to shift back and forth between a purple-burgundy and a red, but it looks pretty nice, either way. I was surprised at how much of the berry-ish color shows up from underneath Delilah - I would have thought Delilah was more opaque than that. But see, this is why I like to play with layers, because you never know what you're going to get!


*Actually I have been sickly all week this week, so "lazy" is possibly being unfair to myself. But that part doesn't really matter when it come to nail polish, does it?

Too early for tinsel

I put base coat on my nails yesterday before work, and then I got busy and almost forgot to put polish on. I finally slapped on a couple of coats of Let Me Go (which is Sinful Colors - a mother-of-pearl-ish duochrome) - although it's very sheer, it was enough to feel like my nails weren't naked. Let Me Go is a very odd color - I think I first heard of it through Holly so let me just link to her post about it. I don't think she says how many coats she had on in those pictures, but I think it must be a lot - I wore two coats to work yesterday and it was still much sheerer than that, so she must be wearing at least four, I think.

When I got home, I pulled out a set of Orly minis out that I've never remembered to use much, and put Tiara on top of Let Me Go - it seemed like it would coordinate. But my god, it's so very shiny - it should be called Tinsel, that's what it looked like. Maybe right before Christmas I would like it, but not now, it just drove me crazy. So I kept going. I thought of jelly sandwiches, and started to put Paloma over it, but then I finally went with Kaufda, the copper that I didn't put on the other day. And it looks really good. I suspect that the tinsel underneath livened it up a bit, but I haven't used it on its own enough to be sure. I like the final result, anyway.