Nail wheel 20

This is my 20th nail wheel, which feels to me like I've reached some kind of milestone.

1. Darkest Emerald (1 coat) (Rococo)
2. Silver Glitter (1 coat) (Barry M LE)
3. After Party (1 coat) (Icing)
4. Show Stopper (1 coat) (Sinful Colors)
5. Glitter All the Way (1 coat) (China Glaze)
6. Editorial (1 coat) (Color Club duochrome)
7. Miss Universe (1 coat) (Essence Colour & Go)
8. Travel in Colour (C.Glaze) over It's Genius (Essie)
9. Sugar Plum Fairies Gone Wild (SOPI) over Fig (Sinful)
10. Purple Poodle over Domestic Goddess (SOPI)
11. Purple Poodle (3 coats) (Orly)
12. Rich Raspberry (2 coats) (Colorstay)
13. Fall Mood (2 coats) (Colorstay)
14. Rags to Riches (2 coats) (Rimmel Lasting Finish)
15. Posh (Zoya Matte Velvet) (with top coat on tip)
16. Be Merry, Be Bright (C.Glaze) over Posh
17. Poppy Field (Serum No. 5) over In Through the Out Door over Rich Raspberry
18. In Through the Out Door (Pipe Dream Polish) over Rich Raspberry
19. Amethyst Accent (Finger Paints)
20. Rockin' Renaissance (Finger Paints)

Online shopping

Tip for people with retail websites: If you have a store, no matter how big or how small, it's pretty important to keep your front page updated, at the very least! This seems like it would be obvious, but apparently it's not to everybody. If it's March and you have a sale on your front page that expired a month ago, I'm totally not going to buy anything -- because that looks like you haven't actually looked at your website in the last month, and that makes me nervous about giving you my money. (That's a real example which I just saw; I'm not going to name the store, but it wasn't a nail website so it's unlikely that it belongs to anybody who's reading here.) I was pretty much an early adopter of online shopping, and if there's something I've learned over the years, it's that there's always another online seller - if you want to buy a thing, but something about a website or a seller doesn't smell right, metaphorically speaking, then go find another seller, no matter how much you love whatever it is you were about to buy. Nail polish, with its thousands of often-unique polishes, almost seems like an exception to my "always another seller" mantra (which I developed navigating the wilds of old-school eBay), but I try not to buy into the mindset of uniqueness too much even with nail polish.

I've been on a kick of buying stuff from blog sales lately. For the price of one higher-end polish, you can get half a dozen of somebody else's cool cast-offs, usually only used once or twice. I figure it's a good way to try out new brands! Here's part of the latest round of blog-sale purchases (from A Little Polish) plus a couple of items from Glisten & Glow:

• (top row) Funky Fingers Burgundy Scales - which I think is supposed to be a crackle, but which failed to crack at all on my nail wheel (but I think it cost a quarter, so eh)
• G&G Nail & Cuticle Balm
• (bottom row) Instant Artificials basecoat
• Liquid Lacquer Ice Hotel In Hell
• Glitzology Falloween
• G&G HK Girl topcoat

Every one of these was a new brand to me. I really like all of them so far, and I adore the cuticle balm, especially. I got the aloe & green-tea scent, but the scent is really light, in any case - I really don't notice the scent unless I stick my nose right in the tin. As far as the polishes, I'm wearing Ice Hotel in Hell right now - I'll get a picture of that up later in the week. (Falloween is probably going to have to wait - it seems too explicitly a seasonal polish to try out six months early!)

Emerald City

I talked in a post a while back about how nobody seemed to know what color Radiant Orchid was, but actually last year's Color of the Year seems to have the same problem, in a way that surprises me. Opinion on Radiant Orchid seems to have settled down a bit now, to a middle-of-the-road red-violet, but at first it was really all over the place, and that's not that surprising because I don't think most people carry a very clear picture in their mind of what color "orchid" is, much less "radiant orchid". (Purples seem to confuse people, anyway, but that's a whole 'nother blog post.) But I would think that most people DO have an idea of what color "emerald" is.

(NOTE: See the bottom of this entry for a list of recent Colors of the Year, if you have no idea what I'm going on about here.)

Maybe I'm giving people too much credit, or it's a generational thing, I don't know. Maybe people don't obsess over color like I do. (I'm sure that's true, in general - but probably not of my fellow nail polish junkies!) I grew up in the era when The Wizard of Oz was an annual television event - I'm not sure where that tradition came from, exactly, but I know it was true for years and years, that it was on TV exactly once a year. I guess whichever network it was had a contract about it, but back then when there was no internet we didn't think much about that. It just showed up once a year and everybody watched it, pretty much. So that's one thing that shaped my perception of "emerald" - it's the color of the Emerald City, of course. And the other thing was pictures of jewelry in catalogs. The emeralds in those old catalogs were usually a little darker than Emerald-City green, but they were a pretty similar color, on the whole. So I have a definite opinion. Emerald is a dark green, but it's green. It's not a bit blue-green, it's like you took a color like "kelly green" - a St. Patrick's Day green - and made it darker. .

Well, the reason I'm going on about this is because there's all these nail polishes that call themselves emerald, but aren't (in my opinion, anyway). I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this issue before, here and there. I think I first started noticing it with Thames, last summer:

Now I don't know for sure what BL's website said in July, but right now it calls it a blue-green. I think it may have been Nordstrom's fault I thought it was supposed to be emerald, and of course I don't have the website from then to look at (in fact as I write this Nordstrom's website is down completely - it says they're "making enhancements") - but you can see where I was talking about this last July, anyway. And in fact I never thought it was emerald at all, looking at the pictures - it was just that Nordstrom said so. (And okay, I will grant that it could pass for emerald if you're not looking close.) But then there came Viridian (from Illamasqua - Sephora's website calls it "peacock green"), and then Darkest Emerald Luxe (from Rococo) which I was talking about yesterday - it just doesn't look very green to me at all. So I'm confused, now, about whether my whole perception of what an emerald looks like has been off for my whole life!


I found a cool graphic with the last 10 official Pantone CotYs, going back to 2004, which is interesting. I think I've only really been aware of it as a Thing for the last 5 years or so, because I do remember some talk about Mimosa, and I definitely remember the flurry of talk about "Honeysuckle" (which was a pink) back at the beginning of 2011.
2009: Mimosa
2010: Turquoise
2011: Honeysuckle
2012: Tangerine Tango
2013: Emerald
2014: Radiant Orchid

More nail wheel overflow

This is another (almost-)full nail wheel - most or all of this is stuff I got in January.

1. Katherine (Zoya)
2. Silver Glitter (Barry M LE)
3. Show Stopper (Sinful Colors)
4. Afterparty (Icing)
5. Intergalactic Space (Orly) (1 coat)
6. As Long As You Love Me (Essence Beauty Beats)
7. Miss Universe (Essence Colour & Go) (3 coats)
8. Glitter All the Way (China Glaze) (3 coats)
9. (blank)
10. Chita (Zoya)
11. Chupacabra (ModLacquer)
12. Goblin (ModLacquer)
13. Darkest Emerald Luxe (Rococo)
14. Agro (China Glaze)
15. Rags to Riches
16. Fall Mood (Colorstay)
17. Gossamer (
    Jin Soon) 
    over Stone Cold Karma and Chita
18. Stone Cold Karma Luxe (Rococo)
19. Rich Raspberry (Colorstay)
20. Purple Poodle (Orly)

(detail under the jump)

Nail wheel overflow: Take Ten and more

Here's a nail wheel that I haven't posted before:

1-10 are the ten polishes in the OPI Take 10 mini set that was around at the holidays. 11-20 are just assorted Christmas gifts and new purchases from around that time:
1. Pirouette My Whistle
2. Alpine Snow
3. Bubble Bath
4. Tickle My France-y
5. You Don't Know Jacques
6. Cajun Shrimp
7. Big Apple Red
8. German-icure by OPI
9. Malaga Wine
10. Lincoln Park After Dark
11. Pyrite (Pahlish)
12. Blood of the Mountain (Pahlish)
13. Sunset Flare (Serum No. 5) (2 coats)
14. Chyna (Pixie Dust) (1 coat)
15. EmpoweRED (Rococo)
16. EmpoweRED Toner over EmpoweRED  (multiple coats - 4?)
17. Believe in Believing (Pipe Dream Polish) over China Flower
18. Poppy Fields (Serum No. 5) over China Flower
19. China Flower (Revlon Parfumerie)
20. Pink Pineapple (Revlon Parfumerie)


1-4:

It's hard to tell a lot on these very pale ones, but Pirouette My Whistle appears to be white and silver glitter (more specifically, I think, white hexes and silver microglitter) in a clear base. Alpine Snow is almost-white, where Bubble Bath is actually very pale pink, I believe. And Tickle My France-y is a nude pink, or you might possibly call it a pale mauve - and since mauve seems to be trendy this spring for the first time in ages, that's a distinction that might be important in some circles!

5-8:

Then we have the famous You Don't Know Jacques, which I guess you would call a dark taupe, and Cajun Shrimp, an orange-red, and Big Apple Red, a more classic red. And last in this bunch is German-icure by OPI, which seems to be on its way to becoming another OPI classic. It's sort of in that "chocolate cherry" range. (Look at Polishaholic's swatches down toward the bottom of this entry - she looks at a couple of possible dupes there, too.)

9-12:

The two darkest of the OPI set were Malaga Wine - which is actually darker than it appears here, I think, a nice glossy burgundy - and Lincoln Park After Dark, which a lot of people will already have, I know. (Although OPI junkies will have most or all of these 10 already, I imagine.) Then we move into other brands - these two were my post-Christmas purchases from Pahlish - Pyrite and Blood of the Mountain. I am already on record online as not being a huge fan of Blood on the Mountain - the holo-ness of it just doesn't come out unless you get out into really full daylight, and the rest of the time I thought it looked a bit more like dried blood than I'd like. (I guess I should let that be a lesson to me, right? Don't buy a polish with "blood" in the name and then be surprised when it turns out to actually look like blood.) I do really adore Pyrite, though - it's a gold foil in varying shades, giving it a really antique look on your nails. Highly recommended, and as I think I mentioned the other day, there are only a few left on Pahlish's website.

13-16:

Okay, 13 is from the Serum No. 5 Glowmelon collection, meaning it's supposed to glow in the dark. I never have seen any evidence of that myself (partly because I don't much care!), but it does really do a nice "sunset" glow in the sunlight, which is good enough for me. It has enough pink to it that I can wear it without it making me look excessively yellow. 14 is Zoya Chyna, the Pixie Dust. It glitters a lot more than is visible in this picture, and the glitter is dark red. It's beautiful. Next we have the Rococo EmpoweRED duo. 15 is the red on its own, and 16 has multiple coats of toner - I think it was 4 coats, maybe. You do see a visible difference in the colors between 15 and 16, but it takes a lot of coats of toner to get there.

17-20:

I decided to try a couple of things over China Flower, because that was what we had handy. First is Believe in Believing, a Pipe Dream Polish, over China Flower. Believe in Believing is various large fuchsia glitters in a pink jelly base. Poppy Fields has largish square glitters and smaller glitters in a red jelly base, and I believe it also has a sprinkling of black glitter - perhaps to represent the stamens of the poppies. Then 19 is Revlon Parfumerie China Flower, a red that perhaps leaned just a bit pink, and then 20 in Pink Pineapple. They smell very nice - not too strong at all.

13&14 bonus:

I think I mostly wanted to post this picture of the orange Serum No. 5, Sunset Flare from the Glowmelon group. It has a lovely pinky-peach tinge that wasn't showing up in the larger picture.

Mardi Gras nails

Here's my typical slightly-offbeat Mardi Gras manicure: I put a full 2 coats of China Glaze Agro first, as a base. Then when that was dry, I added partial coats of Milani Gold Glitz - I wanted some of the green to show, still. Then I put Glitter All the Way over the coats of Gold Glitz, but not over the Agro parts. THEN, for a final extra bit of glitz, I put Essence Evil Queen on my right index finger. (It's big glitter of a lighter purple, and shows up more as flash than as color, mostly.)

(The nail polish oddly seems to match the fabric behind it, doesn't it?)

Swap goodies and new purchases

I've got new stuff I haven't shown off yet, it occurs to me. First of all, Karen and I have another swap in progress - I haven't mailed my end yet (although it did make it into a box, so I'm making progress) but I've already gotten hers. -- I am resisting the inclination to feel guilty about being slow, since last time it was the other way round and I mailed mine first! Anyway, here's what I got:

Lots of cool colors, always a safe bet with me. This is

• a mini Sally Girl Matte Topcoat
• Layla CE39 (aka Southern Lights)
• Studio M Gift of Sparkle
• e.l.f. Gina Girl, which is from the Disney Villains collection and is one of the Maleficent polishes
• two Julie G Holiday Gumdrops, Sugar Plum Fairy and Mistletoe
• and... a Sinful Colors magnetic which I have mislaid the name of right now, but it's a nice blue-gray, in any case, and I am all about the blue and the gray lately!

Here's the two Finger Paints I got at Sally Beauty, and two Orchids:

This is Amethyst Accents, Rockin' Renaissance (a texture), Steel Guitar, and Playmaker (which is out of that football season set I showed a display picture of ages ago). I bought more Orchids which are going to Karen - I already told her she was getting mystery Orchids, so I don't want to demystify them before they even leave my house. These are the ones I decided to keep.

And here's the latest round of stuff that came in the mail - two Barielles and a Cult Nails:

This is Jordana's Skinny Jeans (which I guess is sort of an 80s reference?), Fetish (black with a wax-finish), and Elle's Spell (a flakie). I don't think I'm expecting any more nail mail except for some treatment stuff from Glisten and Glow - because so many people seem to think they're wonderful that I had to try them out! I got HK Girl and some cuticle balm, and naturally I'll be reporting back on that later.