Here is some stuff from The Ordinary that I bought from Ulta not too long ago:
I realized when I looked at this picture that I actually hadn't tried the Azelaic Acid yet. I think I'm afraid of anything that's like a peel. (I started to say that it was the word "acid" I was afraid of, but that's not true - I use hyaluronic acid products with no fear whatsoever.) I've now tried it and so far it seems fine. I bought it because I read an article somewhere that was written by a dermatologist, demystifying the various Ordinary products, and I actually took notes. Azelaic Acid was supposed to be the very mildest one.
I really like the Buffet, too. I have a whole bunch of Ordinary serums - including HA and rose-hip seed oil and squalane. I like all of those, I just have issues with the whole craze the last few years where people think peeling off layers of skin is necessarily a good thing. A little bit, yes, but people take it much too far! (Why am I surprised?)
(This is another one of those things I hadn't gotten around to posting.)
I didn't know there was such a thing as National Lipstick Day, but apparently there is (it was July 29), and Ulta had a sale when it rolled around, which is how I came to buy a whole bunch of lip products. Ulta also had a little bonus package if you spent some certain number of dollars ($25? I'm not sure), which was this:
This is, as you can probably see, an assortment of lip treatments. I've tried most of this and I like it fine, also though trying to get the lip masks to stay on my lips was pretty comedic. (Yes, there is a selfie, but no, you're not going to ever see it. It's really not a pretty sight.)
I only bought one thing that was higher-end, because it was about half-price and that put it more into my price range. This is Urban Decay Lo-Fi lip mousse.
This looks like it would be the kind of color I like, but on the lip it's awfully neutral-looking. I've been wearing it some, though, and I do like the texture of it - I don't think it feels very much like a mousse, though. Note that the thing sticking out on the right side is an applicator, which retracts back into the package when you close it - kind of cool.
All of the lower-end stuff was marked down as well, so I just tried a bunch of different things. Here we have a Nyx Lip Lingerie, and three Maybelline Super Stay products, two of the Matte Ink line and the other one an Ink Crayon.
I'm not worried about showing swatches for these four, because you can see the colors quite clearly from the packaging and it's pretty accurate. Mostly I think the top two are too neutral for my taste. (I was determined to try the Lip Lingerie because I kept seeing people talk about it, but this was the least neutral color they had, and, guess what, it's just not me! I should know better than this by now, since it's what I always end up thinking.) The matte ink in the pinker shade is okay but I inevitably like the red-violet one much better. I actually like the ink crayon most of all - I need to go back and see what other colors they have but I still like the less-purple fuchsia very well. The colors here are Treat Yourself, for the Ink Crayon; on the Matte Ink the more purple one is Creator and the pinker one is Inspirer. (I don't seem to have the Lip Lingerie color name anywhere handy.)
While I'm on the subject of lips, here's the Tarte lipstick that I bought on sale at Sephora.
You can see that I've been using this a good bit - enough to wear down the shape of it, anyway. The color on this one is Sea Goddess.
Wet n Wild released a whole set of Pac-Man stuff, which is so adorable I couldn't resist it even though it's not really anything I need at all. I did refrain from buying absolutely everything - in fact, I didn't even buy the
nail polish! - because it was not very interesting colors, I thought. But I bought a couple of items from Ulta, and then more from WnW directly later on.
This is the Game Over eye palette:
I'm linking Kathleen's video below, partly because she compares this to a recent Anastasia rainbow palette, and she says it totally compares favorably, and this one is $9.99 as opposed to $45. (This whole collection is limited edition, so if you want something from it, better go grab it fast!)
Here's the lip scrub - Bonus Fruit!
I feel like they even got the font right. (Can you tell I have feelings about Pac-Man?) I bought the two items above first, and then later I kinda went on a lip scrub binge from WnW - they were having a sale - so here's my new lip-scrub collection:
I am not big on green apple scent or taste, really - the rest of these definitely are more my kind of thing (although the green apple is okay, not obnoxiously scented at all). The pink and black one at the bottom is from the Rebel Rose collection, I think, and so far that one is my favorite.
So from WnW I also got a gift set which included many of the Pac-Man items I didn't buy the first time around:
This is the Powder Kit, and it has the blush palette, the powder brush, and the little pellets of bronzer. Kathleen also loved this brush, and I have to say I don't disagree. Plus, it has a handle full of floating glitter, so coool. (Imagine what we would have made of all this in the 80s...)
Many of the kits still seem to be on WnW's website at the moment. Don't know how long that will last, though.
I also bought another little box of pellets which is "blushlighter" but for some reason I don't seem to have a picture of that. It works much better than I expected, though, I like it. I may end up giving the bronzer away, though, because I doubt that I will use it.
And then I bought this to experiment around with. It's the kind of thing I probably will use some of the time, at least.
Here's Kathleen, with a nice take on rainbow eyes from the palette:
(I can't really visualize myself wearing it, but it's still pretty!)
I think I mentioned this before, but this is something I got for my birthday - the palette from the Ulta Avengers tie-in collection. Rob and I had gone in Ulta six weeks or so ago, and this was already there then. I don't think I said much more about it than "Ooh, cool," at the time, but he went back later and got it for me. He knows how I love the MCU movies. (We went to see Captain Marvel a third time this weekend, since we'd already seen Endgame twice, although we'll probably do Endgame one more time while it's still in the theaters, too.)
The palette doesn't have the most striking cover in the world...
There are plenty of logos on the inside, though. It's got a pretty interesting selection of colors - I mean, it's got the usual neutrals, but it's also got some brights. I don't have a huge collection of palettes, though, so I'm maybe not as picky about color selection as some of you might be!
I went into Ulta a week or so ago - I don't really do into the physical store very often at all - and they had a promo on L'Oreal/Nyx/Maybelline. (It was the little box below, with any $20 purchase of those three brands.)
So, question: I know that L'Oreal and Maybelline have had the same ownership for a while, but the promo got me wondering if Nyx is part of that group as well ...aaaand I just went and poked around on Nyx's website, and I didn't see anything that directly 'fessed up to corporate ties. However, I finally found that if you click on Careers down at the footer of the page, it takes you to the L'Oreal Talent webpage. So I'm guessing the answer to that is actually yes.
Here's what I bought - mostly Nyx, and L'Oreal foundation:
On the True Match Lumi, I bought C3 - I've always thought I was C2.5 on regular True Match - but so far the C3 is working fine. and then the Dewy Finish setting spray, a liquid lip, and a lip pencil.
So the promo was five assorted items (in the box above).
L'Oreal clay cleanser (I have another sample of this from somewhere else, but I'm not sure I've ever actually tried it), lash primer, yet another mascara, a micellar water sample, and a Nyx lippie that looks like it's full-size. Unfortunately that brown looks awful on me, I tried it.
Here's another picture where you can see some of the items better:
The pink lippie is "candy slick" - it works pretty good for me. The brown one is Liquid Suede, and so is the pencil. (Added: I forgot to look at the actual color names at the time I posted this - the Candy Slick one is Birthday Sprinkles, I believe, and the brown Liquid Suede is Brooklyn Thorn. I tried mixing the brown here with a Colourpop dark-pink that I haven't been wearing, and I got a color I actually like. So I may give that one a real-life trial later on.)
These are the two OPIs I bought from Ulta in the Black Friday sale, for $5 each. They didn't really have all that many polishes to choose from on the website, and this was what I decided I wanted most out of the choices available.
This is Berry Fairy Fun:
Shiny red-violet with what looks like pink flash. Honestly, right now I don't know why I thought I needed this. I mean, it's pretty, very pretty, but I'm pretty sure I already have at least a dozen things that are similar. This is from the Nutcracker and the Four Realms collection, so it was new, what, about a month ago? (Did anybody actually see this movie? I haven't heard a soul mention it.) I had a couple of other polishes from this collection written down as things I might possibly want to get - Black To Reality (which is blackened red) and Envy the Adventure (which is, as you probably guessed, green) - but I just didn't feel like I needed to buy that much stuff. So this is the one I picked.
And then I got You're Such A Buda-pest, which is from the Euro Centrale collection, I think that was several years ago now, right? This one is in the permanent collection now, I believe. I haven't looked to see what other people actually said about it but I know that a lot of people really loved it. And honestly, looking at the swatch, I'm not sure that I do have anything much like it. I have periwinkles that are more blue, and I have lots of darker purples, and a few paler ones, but I'm not at all sure I have anything on the more purple leaning-side of blue-violet like this. I think I may enjoy this one. (I will probably enjoy the other one too, I'm just not completely convinced of that at the moment, as I said above. But it's totally in my wheelhouse so odds are I will change my mind.)
All that stuff I bought last week is starting to arrive. I actually bought some more after I posted - more nail wheels, more KL Polish (they had a one-day BOGO!), and some totally boring stuff like a booklight and cough drops from Amazon, because Amazon sells mint sugar-free Hall's and the grocery stores around here don't, any more. And Rob may have taken his new leather jacket to bed with him - we had a cursory discussion about waiting for Christmas and he wasn't having any of that. Am I wrapping the OPIs below? heck no. So I can't really say much, even if I wanted to.
Here's the Ulta haul from Thanksgiving Day:
L-R across the back: Beach Babe salt spray, Clean Freak Dry Shampoo, Beach Babe shampoo (I have tried it and can report that it smells eerily like a beach), and Blue Sea Kale (etc.) mousse. The only one of these exact NYM products I have tried before is the dry shampoo. I have tried a different brand of salt spray and I do like the beachy-hair vibe it gives you, so I thought I would try out this cheaper version. -- I'm probably not the generation that a brand called "Not Your Mother's" is meant to appeal to but I'm kinda fond of them really. (My mother went to the beauty shop once a week until I was ten or so and got a bouffant, up until the blow-dry revolution came around in the 70s and she finally stopped. So it's certainly fair to say it's not the products she used!)
I'll talk about the nail polishes later - well, I'll say now that the purple one is You're Such A Buda-pest, which I never got around to trying before. The other one is a new release. And then there's that brush in the front row, which is from It Cosmetics and was $10 and I wanted for reasons that are kind of obscure to me now, but I'm sure I'll figure out eventually.
(I think I'm developing a brush fixation. I have a whole 'nother brush set from Sephora you guys haven't even seen yet.)
Oh, and once again Ulta's shipping is super-fast. I ordered this on Thursday, and it was here on Tuesday, which probably means that like all the other Ulta employees, the shipping department worked over the holiday weekend.
So here's what I bought in the Thanksgiving weekend sales, in general - I won't go into too much detail since I usually do that as stuff arrives, anyway. I bought a good bit of polish and other things too, but I don't think I went completely nuts. I didn't really buy much if anything on Black Friday proper - I did the Ulta order early on Thursday night and most of the rest in trickles over the weekend.
Ulta had Not Your Mother's haircare on BOGO so I bought four things there. One thing I wanted (the scalp scrub) was out of stock by Thursday afternoon already. And I got two OPIs for $5 each. They didn't have a huge selection on the website (and when I looked again on Friday almost all of what they did have was gone). The only other thing I bought was some tins of Body Shop body butter - it was a set of three and I'll probably keep one and give the others away.
KL Polish - several polishes at 40% off
Zoya had everything 50% off and free shipping at $30 (that was the Sunday-Monday sale) - I put five polishes in my cart, decided two of them looked too much alike and deleted one - and then made up the last $10 I needed to get to the free shipping limit with those new wide brushes. I know I like wide brushes, generally, and I can just switch them out as I use different Zoya polishes.* (Most of the polishes I bought were from the holiday collection, I think - two of the new Pixie Dusts, for one thing.)
other stuff: JCPenney - a leather jacket for my husband, 60% off. And tonight I looked at Erin Condren's website and that 30% off sale and ordered a few more things from that.
* Zoya had a note up that said they did a survey of customer preferences about brushes and it came in split 50/50 between regular and wide, which was why they just made the wide brush an add-on item. I think $2 is a lot to pay for a brush but at 50% off that seems much more reasonable.
You know, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (along with Small Business Saturday!) seem to have merged into one long weekend of sales - heck, mostly the whole month of November is sale-o-rama now. At least the offline frenzy seems to be dying down a bit lately, probably because more people are shopping online. I didn't hear anything about anybody getting trampled this year, anyway.
I still haven't done that NailsInc post I said I was going to do, but here's a preview:
I started an Ulta order because I kept hearing people talk about Physicians Formula The Healthy Foundation and I decided I wanted to try it.
This is the lightest color (LC1, for light cool) but it's really not all that light. They don't have a huge range of shades like so many brands do now - they need to catch up on that. (Actually I wonder if they have much choice - in most drugstores they seem to be allotted a pretty limited amount of space!) Anyway, I've tried it and the color seems fine for me. And then I decided to buy a brush, because the one I've been using is shedding bristles. I didn't want to pay a fortune for it, so after looking at several things I ended up at Ecotools:
It had good reviews - and I do really like it. It's not round:
so it's maneuverable. It's got a ton of bristles - they're really packed in there! Also the handle's a bit unusually-shaped and isn't all that long, which works well for me because I have small hands, anyway. It's apparently just over 6" long:
(The rest of the Ulta order is nail polish, so I'll do that tomorrow.)
Since July is ending and I won't have any more excuse to do Christmas in July as a theme, here's most of the things I see in my unposted file that are what I think of as legitimate holiday colors. By that I mean, somewhere close to a true red or a dark foliage green, or a gold or silver metallic. That's the Christmas color-scheme of my childhood, anyway. (I don't really even do Christmas to speak of any more - for me it's mostly a fond memory of Santa Claus, etc., back in the day.)
Most of these are polishes I've had for a while now, and they're probably all discontinued. (You can't even buy Illamasqua in the US any more, can you?)
This is Illamasqua Viridian, and it actually came from a holiday gift set, along with Glitterati - they're the only Illamasqua polishes I own. It's very pretty but I haven't worn it much.
This is Sephora by OPI Ruby Without A Cause - it's a red with... well, something a little off about it. I can't quite put my finger on what it is. It almost looks blackened, but I feel like there's something more complex than that about it. - Oh, huh, I just googled and this blogger says it has some shift, and some green shimmer. So yeah, that's enough to account for my feeling like it was a bit off. Especially from a polish that's probably five years old or a bit more, that's pretty out-there, really.
This bottle is a mess and I'm sort of embarrassed to show it to you, but it's definitely a Christmas polish, so here you go:
This is an old Ulta mini from a Christmas set, called Bad Santa. The bottle caps were that rubberized stuff and this one got really sticky, to the point where I couldn't stand to touch it. So I painted it with god-knows-what polish that I didn't care about - actually probably a couple of different polishes. Hey, it did stop it from being sticky! Anyway, cap aside, the polish is a nice red metallic, slightly on the pink side.
And finally, here's old gold:
It's Cover Girl Boundless Color in Gold Rush, - just a gold topper, over black, here. This is one I think of an old-school line of polish, but I think they actually made it up until maybe 2010 or so, so it's not as old as it seems to me, looking at that bottle style.
It's not anything really unusual but it's a really pretty middle-of-the-road purple creme. (This is some years old and I don't think Ulta makes this line at all any more.)
This is a sort-of-similar shade of purple with some shimmer, NYC Prince Street:
I think I paid about 75 cents for this when you could still get NYC at CVS. (Can you get NYC at some dollar store somewhere or is it true that they don't sell it at all in the US any more? Seems like I read that latter thing somewhere but I don't remember where. I don't see NYC in any store I routinely shop at these days, anyway.)
I've already showed most of these polishes, but here's all of the ones that I bought in my big Ulta order:
L-R: Hands Up (Sinful Colors Vanessa H collection), Space Glam (Essence Out of Space Stories), Grape Shifter (Insta-Dri), Purplexed (Miracle Gel)
I've told parts of this story in the last couple of weeks, already, but I started out looking at Ulta's website because I wanted Space Glam, in particular. Then I started thinking, well, I was already intending to buy my husband cologne as an anniversary present, I can just buy it from Ulta. I knew he liked this one because I had bought him the smaller size from Sephora once before. (I think that smaller one is cologne and the larger one that I bought this time is eau de toilette, but I didn't think he would care, particularly, and I seem to have been right.) Because of Mother's Day, there was a free tote bag with a qualifying fragrance purchase, and it apparently didn't matter if it was a men's cologne or women's as far as the gift is concerned. I ended up with a nice big sturdy denim bag that looks like it'll hold up for a while. And then there was another gift with a $75 purchase, which was a cosmetic bag and 22 samples, most of which were premium size. After the cologne and the one polish, I was practically to $75, anyway, so I - guess what - used the excuse to add another couple of polishes. I probably got a little carried away, as usual. (Purplexed, in particular, is awfully similar to things I already had, so I think I could have done without that one.)
For the record, this is John Varvatos Artisan Acqua eau de toilette, above - I had never heard of this brand until a year or so ago, and we only found it because of a Sephora sample.
The pink thing is the cosmetic bag - I think there was another choice, but I don't really remember what it looked like other than that I thought this one was cuter. And that's some of the samples you can see in that bag, but nere's another picture where you can see a little more of the contents.
I'm too lazy to lay all that out for a picture, but I did actually make a list (but see below, I found Ulta's flat lay instead):
Black Opium sample
Tory Burch Bel Azur sample
DK Cashmere Mist sample
Your Facial mini scrubber
Skyn iceland Hydro Cool Firming Eye Gels
UD Hi-fi Shine in Naked
Too Faced Hangover Rx Primer
Porefessional primer (Benefit)
Lancome Monsieur Big mascara
Nyx Soft Matte Lip Cream in 18 (dark pink)
B&B Hairdresser's Invisible Oil Primer (1 oz)
Tarte Ready Set Radiant skin mist
Ulta Beauty Cream Eye Shadow & Liner in Naked Truth (nude)
Real Chemistry peel
MAC Strobe Cream
Pureology Hydrate shampoo, 1.7 oz
Pureology Hydrate conditioner, 1.7 oz
Peter Thomas Roth Irish Moor Mud (cleansing oil)
Shishedo Essential Energy Moisturizing Cream, .35 oz
Obviously this collection (or sub-line? I don't know) is Out of Space Stories, and here's swatches of all of them from the South African blog Ordinary Misfit. (Now I'm trying to decide if I need any more of these!) Anyway, I got this polish from Ulta online - the whole gigantic Ulta order I ended up doing started because I saw this polish somewhere else and I wanted to try it out. (Although I was intending to buy the biggest item, the cologne for my husband, anyway; this just caused me to get it from Ulta instead of from Sephora.)
So it looks in those swatches linked above like it's metallic rose-gold, and the article that I was looking at pretty much described it that way too, but that wasn't really what I found when I put it on:
This is this is not a great picture, but I'm posting it anyway because I think it shows what I'm talking about. This is two or possibly three coats, I wore this a week ago and I've now forgotten. You can definitely see my nail line if you look for it, in this picture, but this is one of those things where in real life it seemed opaque enough that nobody was likely to notice. I don't think this picture really does the polish justice, I like it a lot. It's a "rose gold" but in this case that turns out to mean mauve-ish pink with gold metallic sheen, rather than a more traditional pink-toned metallic.
Tilted Halo is a bit of a pale gold, although not as pale as the two I showed yesterday. Rage is something different, a rose-gold metallic. Neither one of these are fantastically flattering on me - I had high hopes for Rage and I remember being terribly disappointed about that one. Most people love it, though.
The Ulta was from a long-ago holiday set of minis so it's presumably not available. I haven't double-checked on Rage, either, but last I knew of, Rage was still an Orly core color. Rage was terrifically popular when it came out - and presumably since - and I bet there are dupes of it out there, but I don't remember ever having come across one. (I bet I'd find some if I googled, but since I don't even like it on me, why bother?)
These are two mini-size polishes, Ulta N-Evergreen and Mod Polish Chupacabra:
N-Evergreen is from a "Wicked Wonderland" set some years ago (that's why it's Nevergreen instead of Evergreen, see) and it's just another slightly blue-leaning forest green glitter. I'm not sure if Chupacabra was actually a Halloween polish or not, at this late date, but it's unlike anything else I have - I think that it's more of an olive-green base but the glitter is more of a forest green. That's as near as I can figure out, anyway. It's just some kind of hella-cool unconventional glitter mix. Halloween is usually when you can find these things so snap 'em up when you see them. (I found a couple of sets of swatches of these and they basically agree that it's brighter green glitter in a black jelly base. Those are here and here. The latter one says the collection was called Cryptid, and that does sound familiar. It also seems to imply a Halloween collection - because "crypt" right? but still not 100% sure about that.) I don't think either of these are likely to be available any more, in any case. I have Mod Lacquer on my indies page but it looks like that link doesn't go anywhere any more.
(Oh, and the cap of the Ulta polish looks so weird because it was sticky and I was so frustrated with it that I actually took some random older polish and polished the cap so it wouldn't be sticky any more. It doesn't look pretty but it helped.)
This is Ulta Salon Celebutante and Formula X Legend:
I have another polish called Celeb City, which is bright silver, and I always get mixed up about which of those is which - but I've been making double-sure to check the labels as I swatched and this is definitely Celebutante. I don't really think there's any particular color associated with celebrities, is there? So it's presumably just a randomly-applied name and that's why I can't remember the difference. On the other hand, Legend is a rather dramatic polish but other than that I can't say that I associate this color particularly with a legend, either. (I'm becoming a critic of nail polish names, now. Great.)
So anyway, Celebutante is a red-leaning purple, with no noticeable shimmer, and Legend is a dark, dramatic grape purple with shifty tendencies - I think I see some blue in there, maybe some other stuff too. I'm not really sure how I ended up with these two next to each other on the wheel, because they're certainly not much alike.
I poked around on the Ulta Salon list and I don't see Celebutante listed. I'm pretty sure I've had this for several years so it's not too surprising. And I rarely buy Formula X unless it's on sale, so the odds are that it's discontinued, because that's usually the only time they mark it down. (I poked around on this page looking for it but there are so many subsets of Formula X that I easily could have missed it. It's late.) (Looks like I had the right idea, though, it was from the Shifters collection - and there are only a couple of colors left in that collection, and Legend isn't one of them.)
This is Square Hue Victorian End (from the 1900s collection) and Ulta Empty Stocking (from a "Wicked Wonderland" set of minis):
Both of these are really nice dark purples. Victorian End is a little on the dusty side, and it looks like it leans a bit on the red side, as well. Empty Stocking is the one that says "Ulta" on the wheel, because the name on the bottle is tiny and in black print and it's utterly illegible against the dark polish - I had to go back later and reason out what the actual name of the polish was. It's very dark and I think maybe it leans a little blue, but it's so dark it's hard to be sure. (Compare to Vice, above these two - Empty Stocking looks darker and Vice looks a bit redder.)
Added: If you're curious about how I figured out what the polish name was, it was process of elimination. It's on my Stash by brand list; I think the original packaging had the names listed, but I also remember being able to read these names back a few years ago - at least when the light was good. I still can, off and on, but it's getting harder. But N-evergreen is of course the green, and Bad Santa is the red (I still love that name), and Tilted Halo and Twisted Tinsel are presumably the gold and silver, respectively. So that only leaves Empty Stocking. (I'm not real sure why an empty stocking is purple - because it's dark, I guess? Sometimes people who name polishes are really reaching. - It can't be an easy thing to do.)
I showed grayed-out purples in my last entry, and then I have a handful of odd browned-out purples as well. This is Ulta Chic Peek and Zoya Daul.
You can see the brownish highlights of Daul pretty well in the bottle picture, as well as the reddish-purple base color. On the other hand, Chic Peek doesn't look purple at all in this picture, either on the bottle or the wheel. It does have purple tones, though. (Huh, or maybe it's just all in my imagination, because all the swatches I could find of it look brown.) Well, anyway, it's stuck here now. Maybe I just had it lumped in my head with Daul because their glass-fleck-type formulas are similar - no, actually, the more I think of it, I've always thought it was purplish, in the same way that Winterberry is. Go figure.
Daul is a pretty famous polish. If you've been hanging around nail polish blogs, MUA etc. for a few years you probably know about it or at least have heard of it already. (If not, well, don't feel bad - "fame" in the nail-polish world doesn't really mean that much because the world of serious polish junkies is a pretty small place. Me and my 500-odd bottles are really just hanging around on the periphery. And fame for individual polishes is mostly a pretty fleeting thing.) I think Daul was one of a Zoya collection that was all glass-flecks - actually I read (or maybe saw on YouTube) somebody talking about this not too long ago - if I figure out who that was I'll update this. - I think it was YouTube: I watched several people's "top 10 Zoyas" videos, but I haven't figured out so far who in particular it was that was talking about the glass-fleck polishes. When I first started paying attention to Zoya these would have been new-ish, and that's why Daul made a big impression on me. Anyway, Daul looks red-violet here but it doesn't always look that way so much. I think it has an R-V base but layered over other things it can look very different, that's what's confusing me. (Added: the Zoya link, which I neglected to add the first time. R-V base with purple and gold. I guess it's the gold that I'm wanting to read as brown in some lights.)
Here's my little stash of Orlys. Let's see, the four minis came as a set: Razzmatazz, Hot Stuff, Tiara, and Groupie. The other bottle on the top is the same as one of the ones below: Pearl Wisdom. I have two of those - it was my go-to favorite topper back a couple of years ago. Bottom row is Bonder upside down, and then Sweet Peacock, Diamond Love, Pearl Wisdom, Glitz, R.I.P. (from the 2012 Halloween collection), Rage, Flagstone Rush, and Retro Red. Notice that these are all in the old bottles; the two new ones that I bought this past month aren't in the picture.
Then we have some assorted stuff (bad picture but it seems to be the only one I have):
Top left: Sation Holiday Spirit, and below that, Finger Paint Hypnotic, a magnetic (I only own the one from each of those brands); then going across from there are my Julie G's, all from the Gumdrops (texture) collection: Rock Candy, Blueberry Fizz, Crushed Candy, Hot Cinnamon, and Sugar Rush. The mini at the top left is an old Sephora store brand polish, predating S-OPIs, I believe. It's just called No.08. And then I think the Studio M and the two Color Clubs below it were also in a different picture, so they've already been discussed. The Ultas along the bottom are Chic Peek, Celebutante, and then 5 minis that came out of a "Wicked Wonderland" holiday collection from a number of years ago: Twisted Tinsel, N-evergreen, Empty Stocking, Bad Santa, and Tilted Halo. I tend to forget to wear these, but they're all very nice colors - nice enough that every time I remember their existence I say, "Why don't I ever wear these?" Tilted Halo in particular is unlike anything else I own - it looks gold but it's got a champagne tint to it that nothing else has. (And Bad Santa is just a great name.)
I'm hoping for a sunny day soon so I can photograph the brands I have left and get on to the next phase of this, but this time of year we don't have that many sunny days, even on the Gulf Coast. I'm trying to be zen about it: it'll happen eventually, right?
