Unlabeled, Tiara

This is another one of those unlabeled minis that I have a bunch of, and then another mini, Orly Tiara:

I haven't swatched all of these unlabeled ones, but this one is particularly interesting because it's a glitter mix that I don't otherwise have, I believe - larger hexes and a lot of small silver pieces. That's the top swatch of the silvers. Tiara is two down from that - it is a very packed glitter, seemingly.

The unlabeled ones seem to correspond to LAColors polishes so there may be something similar out there if you look. But it's late and I'm not going to go do the homework of finding out for you!

Sugar Rush, unlabeled

This is Julie G Sugar Rush, which is another of their Gumdrops polishes, plus an unlabeled mini:

I showed Hot Cinnamon from the same collection not long ago - it's more red, where this one is more like a dark coral-orange. (There is actually another orange polish in the collection, too, which is more of a yellow-orange, but as I've said, I don't wear yellowish colors, so I didn't buy that one.) Sugar Rush is really my favorite, though. It walks the red-orange line so nicely. And this mini is really a pretty similar color, only without the texture, of course. (I just looked, and Hot Cinnamon and Tangerine Dream, the yellow-orange one, are both still available, but Sugar Rush, apparently, is not. Go figure.)

Hipster Chick, unlabeled

This is Chick Hipster Chick and an unlabeled yellow-green metallic:

Hipster Chick is the yellowest polish I can imagine myself actually wearing. The unlabeled polish looks lime in the bottle but is much more yellow on the wheel, and I would never consider wearing it without something much more neutral underneath it. (But I haven't ever worn it and probably I should just put it in the destash box.) Hipster Chick I really like, though. Probably it helps a lot that it's actually more neutral than it looks - that is, it leans yellow but much less so than the unlabeled one next to it on the wheel. And it's got scattered holo glitter in it.

By way of explanation for my attitude about yellow and yellow-leaning colors... I've mentioned this before and undoubtedly will repeat it again later: yellows make me look yellow. I don't wear yellow clothing, I don't own a single yellow polish. They're just unflattering on me. Some yellowish-greens have slid into my collection over the years but I don't own much in the way of yellow-oranges at all. Metallic gold seems to look ok, but that's different, somehow - in fact I'm intending to substitute the metallic golds for yellow on my trip around the color wheel since that's the only thing I own that's even close. That should start in a couple of days, in fact, since I only have one more yellow-green to go after this one.

Re availability: Chick Polish hasn't been heard from in ages that I know of. I really liked them, so I'm sorry that they're apparently gone. These unlabeled polishes came from a set that was called "Color Theory" but I think that what they are is L.A.Colors, so if by some chance you're in love with this polish, that's a place to check.

Dear Tiffany + an unlabeled polish

This is AbsoluteNY Dear Tiffany and an unlabeled polish:

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

Henley Regatta, Thames, and the blue/green issue

This is Butter London Henley Regatta and Thames:

Henley Regatta was the first Butter London polish I ever bought. It's a bright blue-green, heavily packed glitter. I really love it, but it has that problem where it sometimes flakes off in big pieces - which I later learned is apparently an issue with many of BL's glitters. I bought Thames later, and it was described as an emerald green - but it looks to me like exactly the same color as Henley Regatta, except instead of being a glitter it's a heavy shimmer. Questions like this happen at every transition on the color wheel, but for some reason it seems to me that the blue-to-green transition is one where people really have big disagreements about which is which. (I'll have some more examples of this coming up.) I don't actually mind that Thames isn't emerald, understand; I think it's a really pretty color. But it's not emerald.

"Teal" is also problematic. I've already shown you a couple of polishes with "teal" in their names (Teal Of Fortune, Teal The Cows Come Home) but both of those read pretty much blue, to my mind. I would actually call both the polishes above teal - and I guess I would the one below, as well (which is unlabeled):

The color as it appears in the bottle and the color you end up with on the nail are pretty much entirely different, here.

(Then there's turquoise, which can be blue-green - the actual turquoise stones sometimes lean very green - but a lot of the time is used to mean plain old bright cyan blue. Talking about color is just a very chancy thing, let's face it.)

Posh Plum, unlabeled

This is SH Xtreme Wear Posh Plum (minus the glitter, which I'll talk about in the next entry) and an unlabeled red-violet.

The unlabeled one is actually really pretty - I'm not crazy about a lot of these unlabeled ones, but this one is nice. Posh Plum is a pretty cool red-violet with a nice duochrome sort of effect.

As far as availability, there may be an L.A. Colors polish that corresponds to this - that's what these unlabeled minis seem to be - but I've never made any real effort to sort that out. There are a couple of current colors that look similar, though. I also took a look at Xtreme Wear colors and Posh Plum does not seem to be a current color. As I've said before, plain red-violet cremes are pretty common, but this is not a creme, and I don't know of anybody else that has a duochrome like Posh Plum's.

Notes:
Posh Plum swatches here and here.

Dita, unlabeled mini

Here we have Zoya Dita and an unlabeled (probably LA Colors) mini:

The mini is much sheerer; Dita is bright, but somehow also subtle (I looked this up and I notice Scrangie also had trouble describing this one back in 2009 when it came out, which makes me feel better). It has a bit of a retro feel to it, which is maybe why they named it after a burlesque artist. (Zoya rarely seems to say who their colors are named after, specifically, but Dita Von Teese is the only Dita that comes to mind for me.) Anyway, you can see on the wheel that Dita is somewhat darker than it looks in the bottle.

(I may end up retaking this set of pictures - this one seems okay but I was noticing that the ones for the rest of the wheel were reflecting oddly. If this one comes out better in the new round I'll add the new one here.)

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.

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.)

Shredded neon

When last heard from, on Sunday, I was wearing Black Illusion. I did like it (although I think I'll like it even better in the fall - it's just not a summer color!) but I went running off to work with no top coat on and inevitably, by the end of the day it was starting to chip. -- I had stuck a bottle of top coat in my purse, even, but never used it, so it didn't do me a bit of good by being there.

So I took that off Sunday night - and it came off extremely cleanly, as holos generally seem to do - and actually left my nails bare overnight, which I don't usually do. I was planning some sort of patriotic manicure for the 4th, but it seemed too early for that, so I decided to try that Maybelline ShatterShredded (it's a crackle, ok? but I keep forgetting what it is that Maybelline calls theirs) - Magenta Mirage. I don't really buy whites in the normal way of things, but there was a white mini in that Color Theory set from Christmas and I've been trying to remember to use those lately, so I used that. It was a normal white, in my limited experience of whites - that is, it was streaky. But it looked okay after two coats. So then I tried the crackle. I was trying to put it on very thin, and I probably need some more practice at it. Some nails came out really nice and some looked kinda crappy, and some didn't crack at all.

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?