Mother Of Dragons/Winter Is Coming

It's Game of Thrones Day, I guess! KL Polish's "Winter Reign" collection wasn't all GoT-themed but the two I bought were.

First we have Mother of Dragons:

KLP calls it "a metallic brassy green polish with gold glitter." I'm inclined to put it into that category I've always called "funky greens" but it's different from anything else I have.


Then for Winter Is Coming, I did my pictures somewhat differently than I usually do, because I have a comparison.

I didn't think when I ordered Winter Is Coming about Kleancolor White Metallic, which I bought back before the holidays. Here is the swatch comparison:

I don't really think they are dead-on dupes, but they are close enough that I don't think most people would be able to tell the difference. (I haven't tried Winter Is Coming on my nails, yet, though.) The other side of the coin is that KL Polish has always prided themselves on being 12-free, and Kleancolor, despite its name, has a reputation for being anything but. I checked their website and they're not representing themselves as being anything-free. (They do say they strive to have "the Kleanest quality products at wallet friendly prices.")

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!!

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!

Mojito

This is Pretty Serious Mojito:

This is of course #5 on the wheel, and you can see that it looks pretty opaque, but then since it's over a white background it's hard to be sure. I haven't worn it so I can't say for sure either, but clearly I need to at least experiment around with it some. I think it has a green flash (thus the name), but you can't see that here. If I remember to experiment, I'll report back. Or maybe I'll actually wear it!

I don't think you can get this polish any more. I bought it in the clearance sales when PS was clearing out their old stock, and I haven't bought anything so far since they've been back from their hiatus. (Nope, not on the new US website, at least.)

Fairy Lights (NOTD + swatch)

Here is Pretty Serious Fairy Lights:

This looks pretty good, considering that I had had this on for several days before this was taken - however, I have to tell you that my right hand* looked considerably more ragged. Still, with a pale polish like this, I doubt that anybody but me noticed. (Looking at that picture, now I'm wondering if anybody noticed my ridgy nails, but I doubt it.)

Here's the swatch of Fairy Lights:

I know you can't see a whole lot in the swatch, but you can see enough to get the idea, a bit. I believe when I bought this, I thought what I was getting was something a bit different than it turned out to be. It was on a page with some of the Cocktail Crush top-coats, and I got it in my head that this was part of that set - it was a fairly reasonable assumption, really, that since they looked alike in the pictures, they were really alike. I remember wondering why I bought this and Mojito too - but Mojito is a top-coat and Fairy Lights really isn't. It's a silvery-white with some pastel sparkle. I mentioned this in the haul entry. It's not 100% opaque even with three coats, so if you have issues with having any visible nail line at all you may not want this. But aside from that this is a really beautiful polish.


*Not long ago somebody asked me if my right hand was my dominant hand, and I was like, "Weeeelll..." because I am actually left-handed. But I've always been pretty ambidextrous and while I write left-handed, I do some things both ways (this used to be occasionally very useful for things like playing pool) and others right-handed. I learned to manipulate a mouse right-handed because I didn't know there was such a thing as a left-handed mouse, back when. So oddly, nowadays my right hand actually seems to be more dominant, mostly because I play computer games on a PC with a mouse, I think! And one of the ways this noticeably shows up is that the nails on my right hand generally get more wear than the left.

Leia

This is Zoya Leia, which was on my 2016 favorites list:

Zoya describes this as "a sheer, opalescent white with flecks of fuchsia, green and gold" - it looks like a white shimmer when you put it on alone. When you layer it over a dark, as you can see in the (half-)swatch with the arrow pointing to it, it comes out more as a sort of pinky-purple shimmer.

I think this is pretty clearly a reference to Princess Leia's white dress, which is why I had to wait a couple of weeks after Carrie Fisher's death to even be able to talk about this polish. I was a teenager when the first Star Wars movie came out, so Carrie Fisher wasn't even a lot older than me. To a geeky teenage girl, seeing that role-model was just a revelation.

I had already decided that this polish was on my shortlist before the news about her heart attack hit, so it's not here because of that. It's here because it's a beautiful polish.

Destash: There's Snow One Like You

This is China Glaze There's Snow One Like You (a texture):

This polish does give a pretty nice "snow" effect. I kept thinking "maybe as an accent nail" but somehow I could never work up any enthusiasm about it. I finally gave up and put it in my destash box, meaning I might get rid of it eventually (although frankly some of the polishes currently in that box have been there for a year or so and haven't gone anywhere). This is one of the holiday set that I got free from China Glaze several years ago, although since I don't have all that much good to say about it, I don't think anybody's going to complain about disclosure one way or the other, do you? (And I think it's probably discontinued, anyway.) I got this polish in 2013 and kept saying, "Well, maybe I'll try it sometime" as mentioned above but never did. If you count it up it's been four holiday seasons ('13, 14, 15, and 16) and I have yet to actually put it on my nails. I think that it's time to face the fact that I'm just not likely to ever wear it. (I'm nicer about it that the people who called it "cottage cheese," though, you have to admit.)

Stash: black, white, & gray

I did pictures of most of the rest of my stash back in the spring and early summer, but I broke down at the end and there was some stuff I didn't ever get around to doing, mostly black/white/gray and then silver. And of course my stash is growing, and all of those won't fit into my shoebox-sized boxes that I was using before, so this one is b/w/gray, and then we'll have to see if I can shoehorn all the silvers into one box next!

I tried to put most of the blacks toward the top and gradually get lighter, with the whites on the bottom left - I have far more blacks and dark grays than I do lighter things, as usual with me.

Left to right and top to bottom:
Top row: Square Hue Via Montenapoleone (from last month's Milan collection), Triple Shine Slick Black (glass-flecked), Cult Nails Fetish (a rubber finish), Sonia Kashuk Starry Night (black with silver glitter), Wild Shine Black Creme
Second row: RGB Slate, L.A. Girl 3D Effects in Black Illusion (a holo)
Middle: Hard As Nails Steely Gaze (which is the unlabeled one under the RGB - it lost its label at some point!), Color Show Clearly Spotted (from the Polka Dots set), Orchid Steel Guitar, Hard Candy Vibe (an older formula - it's a very shiny black), and next to that and under the Orchid bottle is an unbranded and unlabeled black - but I have come to think that set is actually L.A.Colors
Next to the bottom: Square Hue Parizska (gray with silver glitter, from the brand-new Prague trio); under that is an unlabled white (also probably L.A.Colors) and Chirality Symbiote (a holo), then the gray with the label turned backward is Essence Beauty Beats in As Long As You Love Me (this is a Bieber polish, but I promise that's not why it was turned backwards!!), and then finally Outlast Midnight Magic, which is from the group of glass-fleck type polishes that I was talking about yesterday - it's a black base with a lot of blue and metallic shimmer to it
Bottom row: China Glaze Texture in There's Snow One Like You (a white textured glitter which I have had no luck getting to go on where it looks decent so far - I tried last year and I'm sure I'll try again this year now that the holidays are rolling around again), Sinful Colors Nail Art (basically a striper) in Bad Chick, Xtreme Wear Wet Cement, and finally 2 Dollish minis, I Want To Believe (from Ultimate Fandom Deux, it's a blue-gray with scattered glitter) and They're Hereeee! (a holo glitter from last year's Halloween collection - it reads awfully gray in the bottle but as I recall it went on much bluer than it looks here)

As you can see, I'm not big on whites - I do wear light grays a fair bit, though. And some of the silvery ones are pretty much in the dove-gray sort of ballpark as well - I pulled all those today too so hopefully I'll be able to get those up soon.

Ultimate Fandom again

I was poking around in my list of indie polishes, and I happened to notice Fandom Cosmetics' tagline: "Live Long and Polish" - I like it.

I am in the middle of applying Dollish You Know Nothing Jon Snow. I'm at 3 coats and there is still visible nail line, so if you're VNL averse, you might want to avoid this one. I think I am stopping here, though. (I'll try to get a picture of it if the sun will ever come out.)

I tried These Are Not The Droids You're Looking For yesterday, and it read too Christmassy to me - metallic and jewel-tones. I don't think it has to be Christmas to wear that combination but, I dunno, I am always more in the mood for that sort of thing in the winter. So I decided to save that one for a bit.

Before that I had on The Deathly Hallows over RGB Slate, which I liked but never did get a picture of. The main thing I have to say about that one is that unless you're a lot more adept at dabbing techniques than I am, it takes a lot of coats to get a decent amount of glitter in there. I had on basecoat + Slate + several coats of TDH + 2 coats of topcoat, so a good 7 coats of polish, and it was so thick it finally started coming off in big chunks. So I liked it, but it takes some work to get on properly.

Stash part 6 - Black, White, Gray, and Miscellaneous

(I had this written up all ready to post, and then I forgot to actually do it. Oops.)

Don't take the appearance of a "miscellaneous" category here to mean that I'm done - I still have a large pile of blues and greens that I haven't even made an attempt to sort out yet. If I stick with one picture per post, that means at least two more, I think.

Miscellaneous includes some top-coat-type things and some glitters and foils that didn't fit anywhere else.

Top row:

• Gold Rush (CG Boundless Color)
• Glitz (Orly)
• Daul (Zoya)
• Tilted Halo (Ulta Professional mini)
• Vinyl (Hard Candy mini - looks black but I think it's actually a very dark purple)
• Chirality Symbiote (holo mini)
• white Sinful Colors Nail Art
• unnamed gunmetal gray (Color Theory set)
• unnamed black (Color Theory)
• Vibe (Hard Candy mini)
• unnamed white (Color Theory)

Bottom row:

• Mist You (SH Salon) (very sheer)
• Let Me Go (Sinful Colors - looks gray here but it's really more like mother-of-pearl)
• Pearl Wisdom (Orly) (I've always used this as a top coat, it's very sheer)
• Party of Five Glitters (Wet n Wild Fast Dry)
• Gray by Gray (SH Complete Salon Manicure)
• Wet Cement (SH Xtreme Wear)
• Steely Gaze (SH Hard As Nails)
• Jet Black (SH Hard As Nails)
• Starry Night (Sonia Kashuk)
• Black Creme (WnW Wild Shine)

I'm not sure why I have so many blacks. Starry Night has glitter in it so it looks different from the other two, but Jet Black and Black Creme are pretty indistinguishable. (And that's not even counting the two black minis.) On the other hand, I've gotten where I use black as a base a good bit, so I'll probably go through it all eventually. I certainly don't need to buy any more plain blacks for a good while, though!

Nail Art Wands, the bad and the good

(Sunday night)
Yesterday the Ivy League/Maisie combo was looking sort of worn, so I took that off and decided to try the Revlon neons again. I know exactly what I had in mind - it was something like this picture here. If I could get that effect, I would be happy with the white/neon combo. But I don't exactly know how they did that - do you do it with a sponge? I'm not sure. Anyway, I tried doing it with the brush and it didn't come out looking right at all. And I kept adding layers and it got so thick that I sat in bed later and scraped it off with my fingernails, it was still that soft. So yet another unsuccessful neon experiment, but I had fun playing with it, anyway.

I did decide that I heartily dislike that whole Revlon double-tipped wand concept, where nail polish is concerned. It's too unwieldy - I ended up with white polish spilled all over the place. I need something easier to use.

So I took off the remnants of that, last night before bed, and then I slept late and didn't have time to do much,  and I ended up just slapping 3 coats of Chloe over bare nails. It doesn't look bad, but I don't love it either - mostly because my nails are stained and it doesn't cover that up at all. But it does have a glazed pink-gold look to it that is pretty. (I'm pretty sure I did put a basecoat under there, although I'm not entirely sure what it was. Nail Nutrition, and maybe another basecoat over that.)


(Tuesday)
Well, Revlon has redeemed itself somewhat - I finally got around to trying the other dual-tip Nail Art wand I bought back in my Walgreen's haul a while ago, which was Orbit, from the Moon Candy collection. Polishaholic has some nice pictures of it, although it really doesn't look a lot like what I ended up with. I didn't try to take pictures because in this light at least, it's really subtle and I doubt that the phone is going to capture much. The base color is dark purple which seemed similar to OPI Who Are You Wearing, sort of a "blurple" (I still hate that word). I probably could have gotten away with one coat but I did two. Then I layered the glitter over it really lightly, and did a lot of coats. The glitter looks blue, but it's just pretty and shimmery and, well, subtle, as I already said - as subtle as it's possible for a largish flaky glitter to be, anyway. I started out by doing just the tips and worked my way down on successive coats, although I'm not sure that you can tell. I wasn't even trying to count the coats but it may have been five or six - like I said, I was trying to go light. I put Colorstay top coat on top of that, and all I had on for a base was Nail Nutrition. It's a lot of coats of polish, altogether, and I don't know how it'll wear, but for now, I really like it. Call it a win.

(I did manage to do all these coats without spilling any polish this time. You just have to hang onto the thing and be damn careful - which is not something I'm especially good at.)