And now for something completely different

Well, it feels different to me, anyway. I've been wearing warm colors - oranges and metallics - for the entire last month, and now I'm wearing purple. PURPLE. It's wonderful. Zoya Roxy over Carly, which looks great!

Top coat and base coat

I'm no expert on the technical aspects of nail polish, not at all. (Loodie is the nail blogger I think of who falls most into that category.) But I thought I'd talk a bit about top coat and base coat, from my experience.

I was thinking this morning (while I was waiting on my nail polish to dry) about how much the climate I live in makes a difference here - when people online talk how long it takes their polish to dry, most of the time it's considerably less than I find it is for me. But I live in the land of high humidity (on the Gulf Coast) and presumably that's the main reason for the difference. I spend a LOT of time waiting for nail polish to dry. (I tend to do something like read during that time, or goof around on the computer. Keeps me from picking up something else that might be more likely to mess my nails up.)

I like Sally Hansen's basic Insta-Grip and Insta-Dri base coat and top coat, but I haven't been using either of them lately. I do have a half-empty and slightly gooey bottle of Insta-Grip that's my backup basecoat these days, but when I went to the grocery store to buy another one, they were out. My grocery store has a whole aisle of nail polish, so they usually have a lot of selection, but that day they were sadly short on base coats. They also happened to be out of Orly Bonder, and a couple of other things I thought to look for, but they did have Sally Hansen Complete Salon base coat, so that's what I came home with. I had never used it before, but like most things Sally Hansen, I quite like it. It seems to do a good job - of course it costs more than Insta-Grip, too, so it should!

I have several different top coats I've been using, but since Fleck Effect also doubles as a top coat, I've been using that most of the time and not using the general-purpose ones. (I like the way that multiple coats of Fleck Effect looks - I was using three, a lot of the time during the summer - and a nice side effect of that was that it really makes your polish wear well. I am rather famously hard on my nails, so I like anything that'll extend wear life!)

Today's (redone again) version of the Rage combo I keep talking about is:

1. base coat (SH Complete Salon)
2. Flagstone Rush
3. Rage
4. Rage
5. Orly Pearl Wisdom
6. Orly Diamond Love (both of these last two are pretty sheer, I couldn't tell that either one changed the color significantly)
7. and for good measure, Chloe (and even Chloe only shows up a little - I see a flash of it occasionally, but that's all)

Small update: I found somebody talking about Rage on YouTube who also said that Rage looks different in the bottle - here. (I hadn't seen her videos before, but I like that one.)

What the Nail!?! Tag

They call this a tag, I would call it a meme, but I suspect it's the same thing either way. This came from a video, but I don't do videos so here is my texty version. (I did this in the middle of the night the other night, more or less, and then left it in draft mode and forgot about it for several days. So, y'know, the answers may be heavily colored by that whole "middle of the night" thing.)

(Holly's video is here, and she got it from Zenorah, whose video is here.)

Questions!
1. You are stranded on an island, you have all the necessary tools such as remover, etc... What polish do you have? I tend to get a bit crabby (crabby, desert island, get it?) about questions like this. I suspect if I was actually stranded on an island that I would not care about nail polish much. (Also, I lived on an island for 20 years. I can tell you that even though it was a big island, the very thought of not being able to get off makes me crazy.) But if I did... well, is a top coat allowed, also? I guess I would go with dark-pinks-plus-Chloe like I wore all summer. That seems island-appropriate enough. 

2. What is your least favorite polish? In my personal collection right now, I'd probably go with OPI Decades of Shades, which I mentioned a couple of entries back. Other people seem to like it but it just does not suit me in the least. I also have some Hard Candy pastels which don't seem to work on me.

3. Which polish best reflects your personality? I suspect that the kind of thing that I wear often - things that are not radically different but have some oomph to them, like glitters or Fleck Effects or layerings. I figure this reflects that I am a middle-aged woman who is not as stodgy as people tend to assume! (The assumptions that people make are another thing that makes me crabby. What can I say.)

4. Which polish could you wear all year round, to every occasion? I love reds, and deep pinks - I could probably deal with one of those year-round if it was necessary. (If I had to pick one, maybe OPI An Affair in Red Square. Or Peru-B-Ruby. Or hmm, any of several Zoyas.)

5. What is your favorite polish for your toes? Don't usually do my toes, because I don't wear open-toed shoes. I expend all my effort on my fingernails. But if I did them, it would probably be something bright.

6. What color makes you happy? I called this blog Delicious Color for a reason. I like color - which makes me tempted to answer "all of them" - there's no one color that I'm especially especially drawn to. If you ask me what my favorite color is, it tends to vary. I love purple, I love green, I love blue, and as I've already said, I love red and pink. I don't wear yellow (and only rarely wear orange) because it doesn't look good on me, but I like it on other people.

7. What is the most unique polish you own? I haven't gotten into indie polishes so far, so I'm not sure I have anything all that unique. I have some crazy glitters, but so does practically everybody nowadays.

8. Which nail trend do you like best?
a) bright neons - like them, but not so much for myself
b) soft pastels - not really my thing
c) sultry darks - this one, I guess
d) classy nudes - again, not so much my thing

9. What is the oldest polish you own? Not sure. The first polish I ever remember buying was a Revlon bright pink, but it's long (long, long) gone. I have some Jet Sets that are pretty old. 

10. Which nail polish has the cutest name of all? - I do enjoy OPI and their "cute" names but I can't think of one I especially love. (Late edit to add: maybe Warm and Fozzie.)

11. What is your favorite brand of polish? That has to be Zoya. Has great colors and great formulas.

Orly foils

I ask my husband periodically what color he wants me to paint my nails, and he tends to answer with something fairly nontraditional - I think the last time before this one, he said blue, and when I asked him yesterday, he said, "How about gold?" I only have two things that really qualify as gold - an old Cover Girl gold glitter, which I wasn't about to try (I save stuff like that to use around the holidays), and Orly Glitz, which I last wore just a couple of weeks ago. So since I didn't really want to wear either one of those, but I did want to make an attempt to follow his suggestion, I ended up pulling out some of the Orly metallics I bought last year. I have Glitz, and Rage, and Peacock (I didn't actually pull that one out, but I think it qualifies), and also something called Flagstone Rush that is sort of a brownish copper, a really good fall color.

So since I had just worn Glitz lately, I decided to try Rage. I remembered that I didn't really like Rage the one time I'd previously worn it, but I couldn't really remember why. When I put it on, I remembered why - I love Rage in the bottle, but it's just not a flattering color on me. It comes out pretty pale, and pale colors just do not really look good on me - at least I guess that's why. I don't usually think I look good in gold, either (or yellow - presumably because I have pale and slightly sallow skin, and yellow or gold brings that out). Oddly, Glitz looks alright on me, which is exactly the opposite of what I would have thought. 

I showed what Rage looked like to Rob, so he could see that I tried! and then I started layering stuff over it. (Although I might try layering Rage over something darker the next time, and see if that helps.) I did Flagstone Rush, and then I put a couple of coats of Pumpkin Spice over that - which did not come out near as glittery over Flagstone Rush as it did over RIP, but it did twinkle things up just a bit.

I got in a rush this morning and didn't put top coat on, so I may be re-doing the whole thing. I'll report on how that comes out later.

UPDATE: "Starting over" came out as Flagstone Rush and then Rage (2 coats), which looks much better. Still very pale, but not in a bad way. (But then this afternoon I broke a nail, so now that's messed up, also - which means I may be trying yet another variation on this soon - or possibly something entirely, entirely different. I'm moody that way, so you never know.)

Fleck Effect

I was looking at the few nail pictures I have, and the ones from this summer almost all involve Zoya Fleck Effect, mostly in Chloe. I'm pretty sure all the pictures below are Chloe over _____.

1. Chloe over some L'Oreal Jet Set color - I think it might have been Presto.

 2. Chloe over Zoya Juicy.

 3. I'm pretty sure this one has Chloe as well, but it's hard to see it over the red base coat. This could be any number of things go I'm not even going to try to guess.

I have slowed down on Chloe lately but I'm sure I'll come back to it later. It looks great over practically everything. I think I had it on over one set of orange layers, pre-Halloween, as well.

(I also have another Fleck Effect color, Maisie - the blue-green one - but so far I haven't worn that one near as much.)

Social media

I mention in one of the posts from 2010 that I had been posting on Tumblr, and I still am, but now I'm using a different account and I had almost completely forgotten that the "Delicious Color" Tumblr account even existed. (It has some cute posts. I guess my idea was that I was going to make it into a craft thing, but then I forgot its existence, so that didn't go far.) The one I'm using now is mellificent.tumblr.com and it usually has very little about nails other than maybe an occasional reblog of somebody else's pictures. Also I warn you that it sometimes gets rather political. (You're welcome to look. I'm just sayin'.) And it does have craft stuff, fairly often, and sometimes some fashion posts. But mostly it's just whatever I see that appeals to me. Pretty much your usual kind of random Tumblr content, on the whole.

I do tweet a fair bit, occasionally about nails but more often just on general subjects - that account is @mellicious. Basically, if you see a "mellicious" or a "mellificent" on any given social media site it may or may not be me. Often one or the other of them is taken, which is why I tend to switch back and forth. I am not linking to my Facebook account here because (a) I don't post there much and (b) the whole "real name" business of Facebook's makes me antsy. I may relent on that in the future but for right now I'm not going there.

Also, the other blog that I mention having in the posts below is long dead. I switched crafts from beads to collage to papercrafting, and then sort of petered out completely on that. I'm sure I'll start some craft or other  again eventually, but for now, the bead blog is definitely dormant.

Fingernails

I think this is going to become a nail blog of sorts. I keep wanting to record what I'm doing with my nails and  if I do that in any detail, the posts become way too long for Twitter. I did posts like this on G+ for a while but I stopped doing that ages ago and for some reason I'm not especially interested in starting that up again - and this blog is sitting here unused, and the name is more or less apropos, so what the heck. This probably is not going to be what I think of as a "real" nail blog - meaning picture-heavy - because I seem to suck at taking pictures of my nails. I might post a few pictures now and then but they will probably be iPhone pictures and nothing great - as demonstrated below!

So, my early-November manicure is copper-themed. I think I have on a whoppin' 7 coats of polish at the moment, as follows:
1. Sally Hansen Salon Manicure base coat
2. OPI Decades of Shades (light brown), 1 coat
3-4. Orly R.I.P., 2 coats
5-6. Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice, 2 coats
7. top coat - I think I used Revlon Colorstay

R.I.P. and Pumpkin Spice are both coppery-orange glitters. (I would call them copper, myself, but other people seem to think they're orange, so I'm compromising on the description.) R.I.P. is hex glitter in a black jelly base, with a little silver microglitter thrown in for good measure. Pumpkin Spice is what I would call a "traditional" glitter - not a microglitter, not a large glitter - in what I think is a brown base. I bought R.I.P. last week (after reading Miss Holly's post about it which I will link below) and I imagine it's a limited edition polish; Pumpkin Spice is left over from last year, but I think it's still available. (I hope so, because at this rate I'm going to need another bottle soon.)

Here's (the iPhone picture of) my pre-Halloween incarnation of R.I.P., over black:

It does look very Halloween here. So trying to make it look not-so-Halloween, I started with the light brown, this time - specifically Decades of Shades, a color that I've previously referred to as "baby-poop brown" but which I keep to use for layering purposes. I figured that when you put the black jelly over it, it would look like a much darker brown, and it did. Then I layered the Pumpkin Spice over that, and I really like the results. It toned down the Halloween look without covering up the R.I.P. completely. (If I remember, I'll take another iPhone picture of it in the light, later.)

Other people's takes on these polishes:

R.I.P., from Misshollyberries:

http://misshollyberries.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/orly-r-i-p/

Pumpkin Spice, from Swatch and Learn:

http://www.swatchandlearn.com/sally-hansen-pumpkin-spice-swatches-review-layered-over-opi-espresso-your-style/