Bargaining with myself (badly)

(Thursday)
It's not very clear from my previous post, but I think I put the Colorstay on late Monday night, and wore it all day Tuesday and then put Daul on top of it Tuesday night. And I haven't had to touch it since then - all day Wednesday and Thursday - and tipwear is still quite minimal, so that's very good by my standards. I'll evaluate tonight and decide whether to try to keep it another day.

I did buy a couple of nail polishes but I made it to the middle of the month so that's not too bad. I bought two polishes at Walmart - I had said I could buy one thing, but since the one thing could have been one expensive polish that would have cost much more than the two I got were together, I think that's okay. I just tweeted that perhaps my next deal with myself will be that if I don't buy anything (much) else for the rest of the month I can try to buy something from KBShimmer's fall line when they come out on September 1st. There's several things there that I'd love to have. (Added later: ...but see below for more on that.)

What I bought was Sally Hansen Diamond Strength Royal Invite, a purple shimmer, and Hard Candy Crush on Lava, which is sort of similar to Bad Fairy/SH Lava, although I don't think it's a true dupe for either. (At least, I read a review somewhere that said so, although I've lost the link to that. I'll look for that later and I might get a picture later, also.) But anyway, it's a cool glittery duochrome thing that looks really beautiful in the bottle. I'm excited to try it. It's also the first time I've tried new-formula Hard Candy - all the ones I have are several years old, from before they started being sold at Walmart. Actually I think they may have gone through a couple of rounds of changes since I last bought any, because I know I looked at them at Walmart a year or more ago and they looked completely different then from what they look like now. But anyway, that's all water under the bridge at this point!

The part where I buy a bunch of stuff is lurking under the jump.

Orchid displays and this week's manis

(Monday)
When last heard from, I was complaining about Essie magnetics that don't work properly. And even after I got all that settled, I kept thinking my nails still looked sort of boring - I pretty much do this whenever I wear a creme nowadays - so I went looking for my bottle of Lizard Belly, because it occurred to me that it might look good over Crocadilly. And I didn't find it. I don't really like it when I mislay expensive bottles of nail polish, but on the other hand, it's got to be around here somewhere, and during the search I found Chirality Kale, which is another green holo and is actually probably closer to the same base color as Crocadilly, so win. (Added later: and they did end up matching quite well. Lizard Belly is considerably darker, so I doubt that it would have matched near so well.)

Random linkage:
Somebody on Twitter linked to this makeup.com piece about what to do with broken makeup, including nail polish - and lipstick, which is probably my most-broken type of makeup. (I have also managed to break up many powder compacts over the years.)


(Tuesday)
Today's mani is Colorstay Amethyst, and then tonight I put Daul over it because it already had tipwear. I patched the Colorstay up before I added Daul and just did one thin-ish coat (plus Seche Vite), and it looks lovely. I haven't worn Daul in ages; I need to remember to wear it more! (I just tried taking a picture under that same light that I have been saying I thought blue-shifted everything, and sure enough, it came out way bluer than it actually looks - so I'm not even going to post it this time. It doesn't even look like Daul!)

However, I do have some display pictures to post, which I keep forgetting about. These first few were taken a month or so ago. This was an Orchid display which I found on an endcap (next to the card aisle, as you can see):

These displays do seem to have non-core colors - more on that below, but this one had some names like "Cobra Bite" and the like that I don't remember seeing before. (A typical Orchid name is more like "OK, 1 More Margarita" but some of them are shorter and less comical than that.)

And then the Nicka K brand which I had previously only seen at the largest H-E-B store in the area turned up at my store that same day. (I even took a picture of the non-nail display, something I hardly ever bother to do.)

 

Then last week a football-themed Orchid display turned up:



I turned some of the bottles around to see what they were named:

I'm not sure how well you can read this without clicking over to the larger picture, but they are Grass Stains, I Bleed Maroon, Orange You Glad You're From Texas? and Coin Toss. The maroon and the orange were the only ones tied to a particular school (A&M and Texas, respectively - this is a thing that most Texans know without thinking about it twice, but the rest of the world, probably not so much). The others were generic football-themed names similar to Grass Stains and Coin Toss, although I've forgotten now exactly what they were. But I'm pretty sure that most of those aren't core. (Orange You Glad You're From Texas? might be, though, and maybe the maroon, too.)

Assorted purchases, and more green polish

I should note first that I posted an entry on Thursday about a mani that included Jesse's Girl Glee, and never linked it on Twitter like I usually do, so some of you probably missed it. That's here, if you're interested.

(Saturday)
Last night I put on the Pretty Serious polish that I got at Llarowe, Party by the Pool. And it's gorgeous. Now it's a jelly, and it has the usual jelly problems - it's streaky, it's really hard to apply evenly, it takes forever to dry, etc. And it took 4 coats to get it the way I wanted it to look, but it's worth it. (I've already managed to mess it up, so there probably won't be a picture. Plus it's been cloudy all weekend so my usual natural-light pictures would be even worse than usual.)

The Lacquerologist (who is a professional nail tech) has a good piece about Vinylux, which is something I've been wondering a bit about. I might have to try out a color or two at some point. It seems like a good compromise between regular nail polish and gel.

I looked at Incoco's website the other day because somebody (Karen?) linked to it - that might've been on Twitter, actually, rather than on her blog - and now it's the ad on practically every website I look at. They do have some pretty designs, I gotta admit, but I just have not given in to the nail sticker thing yet. I can buy a whole bottle of nail polish for that price, and get far more than just one or two manicures out of it.

(new mani and some stash additions after the jump)

Zuza and Glee

Well, I am in between doctor's appointments - later I am getting new glasses, woo! - and I should be working but I can't seem to concentrate. So you're getting a nail entry instead. (Which is probably just as well, because I'm not working this weekend, and so I presumably won't get around to writing an entry then. Long dull weekend shifts tend to produce either a blog entry or a whole lot of pinning or, if it's slow enough, both.)

Today's mani has lots of layers already and might possibly have more. Or else I might take it off and start over, who knows. Anyway, this is what it is currently:

1. Orly Bonder
2. Tenacious Teal (Color Show)
3. Tenacious Teal - as discussed previously, it is streaky and isn't really completely opaque at two coats, but I was sure I was going to put something else over it by the time I got to this point so I didn't care. If you're going to wear it alone, you definitely need three unless you're putting on really thick coats!)
4. Zuza (Zoya - my, "Zoya Zuza" is a mouthful, isn't it? For some reason, I never thought about that before.)
5. Glee (Jesse's Girl)
6. Seche Vite

For some reason, Zuza over T-Teal didn't grab me. So I continued on with Glee, which I have posted a picture of over T-Teal before. But since that completely fails to capture the glorious glittery goodness of Glee, here is a picture I snapped in the coffee-shop window just now:

Still not a great picture, but better than that other one. It's already looking a tiny bit chipped, which is why I'm contemplating starting all over. Or I might throw Maisie or something on top of it and make it go another day or so. But Glee is really pretty - almost what I'd call a foil.

Fairy Dust II

I'm wearing sort of a jelly sandwich - or, well, a sandwich, anyway. The "bread" of the sandwich, so to speak, is Zoya Juicy*, which I was talking about in the last entry because it was one of the first Zoyas I ever bought. It's a sheer, but it's not technically a jelly or even a crelly, as far as I know. (I know a crelly is a cross between a creme and a jelly, but I'm not sure I'd know one if I saw one, quite frankly.) In any case, it's a dark pink, and it's quite sheer - I put on 4 coats and still had plenty of visible nail line. That doesn't particularly bother me, but I guess I was in experimentation mode again, and this morning I added a fairly light coat of Khroma Fairy Dust (not the e.l.f. Fairy Dust that I was wearing the other day) and then put another coat of Juicy on top of that. It came out quite nice. It really looks more red than pink by the time you get that many coats on.

Really terrible picture:

You can't really tell much here, I know. This was the picture with flash, which I don't usually use in my bedroom. But the one without flash was even worse. You can tell that it's reddish and sort of glittery. Really the glitter shows through quite well, though. (And in some lights it looks much pinker than I initially thought - sort of a strawberry color!)


*That link is Scrangie's review from 2008, in which she complains about it being sheer and streaky. I didn't have any problems with streakiness at all, though, for the record. The VBL was pretty much gone, too, by the time I got the glitter and the 5th coat on!

Finally a fuchsia (plus spoons)

Today's mani: Zoya Alegra. Nice dark metallic fuchsia. Actually I have had it on since Friday, and it's chipping a bit so I am likely to have something else on by tonight or at least tomorrow.

Karen told me that she had worn one of the Orchid colors that I sent her, and she has now posted an entry about it. (It's prettier on than I realized, and I had even seen it in person!) (For reference purposes, what I sent her is in this entry. And all the lovely stuff she sent me in return is the bottom picture in this entry.)

In other news, I happened to do the math on my spreadsheet and I have 38 Zoyas, which is certainly by far the most nail polish I've had of one brand at one time. If you could count up every Revlon I've ever owned in my life - since that goes back to oh, 1972 or so - it might exceed that, but probably not by a whole lot. I've been thinking that the next time I buy anything from Zoya, it ought to be their own top coat and base coat, which I have never bought, since I hear that it really does last better when you use their own system. It's an investment in all those polishes I already have. (But that still doesn't mean I'm going to go out and buy that now. Maybe at some point soon.)


I have probably actually bought 40 bottles of Zoya altogether (starting in late 2011, so in less than two years), because I'm on the second bottle of Chloe, and I threw my bottle of Tallulah away because the lip was broken and air had seeped in.  I know for sure about the late 2011 thing because I looked it up on my Zoya account to see, the other day. The first thing I ordered was a bunch of spoons, and after that I ordered Kierra, Karina and Juicy. (Juicy is a lovely sheer pink and I don't know why I haven't worn it more. Kierra and Karina are both wonderful fall colors, and I wore both of them a ton.)

So here is my entire spoon collection, which I found stuck in a box. Most - maybe all - of the loose ones are from that first order. Several of the collection ones came later.

(My bedspread is possibly not the best background in the world for this picture. From a distance, some of the spoons are almost indistinguishable from the brown background!)

Often if you order something, they automatically send you spoons for new collections - so above is Touch, which I think was new around the time I first ordered, and there are a bunch more of these collection sets below. (So some of you will have seen a lot of this stuff already, but some of you won't so I'm posting it anyway!)

These are ones I have purchased since (Delilah, Karina, Dita, Juicy, Lilith):

(and so are these: Kierra, Mira, Harmonie and Indigo)

These I have not gotten around to buying so far - the reds on the left are Caprice, Valentina, Carmen (which if you can read close enough, is ZP001, the first Zoya color), Garbo, Andi, and Kimmy. The blues are Tallulah (which as I said, I did buy but had to discard, and eventually might buy again) and Twila, and the greens are Ivanka, Midori, and Suvi.

Collections:

Except for Touch, I think I own at least one polish from all of these sets. (And Beach and Surf in particular - I'm fairly sure I have at least half of those, if not more.)

And, just for completeness' sake, here is a back view of one set:

(Note that nothing here is sponsored. I didn't even do affiliate links today!)

Warm pinks and cool reds

Note: Zoya links are affiliate links, but I'm not being reimbursed or rewarded in any way for the rest of these links. It's just my own little obsessions.

Nordstrom's Butter London deals of the moment (this is the part I'm oddly obsessed with):

• The Backstage Basics set is back (this is the one I ordered last week but haven't yet received), with Hardwear topcoat and Nail Foundation basecoat, Thames (a green), travel-size remover, and a nail file, for $24. This still seems to me to be the best deal, but compared to regular retail for these items, these are all good deals!
• A "starter set" with Hardwear, Horse Power Nail Fertilizer, and Pillar Box Red Nail Lacquer for $27
• "Coral Crush" and "Emerald Crush" trios - 3 polishes each, for $30 (and just about all of those are colors I've seen people rave about, although I'm not stopping to list them here)

(Today's mani after the jump)