Stash: base-coats

Frankly, I picked base-coats to go first before top-coats because I have fewer of them, and therefore it's not so daunting to do. I'm not sure why I have fewer - to some degree this seems like a chicken-and-egg thing, I have fewer because I use them up, but I use them up faster because I have fewer (compared to top-coats, in particular, as you will see). One of the few nail-related things I am quite methodical about is that I always wear base-coat, so I'm sure that's part of the equation. Mostly that's because I don't want to stain my nails any more than I can help, and also because I think it helps with wear, which - unless you're one of those fortunate people who have nails that really can keep a manicure unchipped for 10 days or more - is always a problem.

The selection below is not really representative of what I've worn in the past. Those are the ones, after all, that got used up, as I said. I do think I'm on the second bottle - and probably last, since this formula's discontinued - of Colorstay. Most of the ones I have now are frankly somewhat higher-end than what I've worn in the past, which as far as I can recall, mostly involves Sally Hansen. I've gone through a couple of bottles of Insta... (hmm, Insta-something, I think, but not Insta-Dri, which is polish & top-coat - aha, Insta-Grip!), and at least one of Complete Salon Mani base-coat and before that, I was probably using Hard As Nails for base-coat, because that gets you back to the dark ages before I knew all this other stuff existed.

By the way, I seem to be primarily using Makeup Alley (aka MUA) reviews to link to here. Reviews of boring stuff like base-coat are just not as easy to find as for shinier things!

top row:

• Rimmel Base Coat Top Coat Pro - I think I put this one at top left so that I could get it over with first; I don't really approve of the whole concept of combined base- and top-coat. (It came in a combo-pack with a bottle of nail polish, or I wouldn't have it at all.) MUA reviewers at the link above seem to agree with me here - although I didn't have as terrible a time with it as some of those people. It was just okay.
• Revlon Colorstay - as far as I know, this is discontinued, but I haven't exactly been haunting the Revlon aisle lately, so I could be wrong. (MUA says yes, it's discontinued. But even so, it might well still be findable at various discount places, if you're really moved to go look for it.) Anyway, I've gotten good results with this in the past, and it is (or was) reasonably priced, and so if it's gone, it's kind of a shame. (But Colorstay Gel is not supposed to need a base-coat, right? So I guess that's the reasoning there.)
• Orly Bonder - I like Orly Bonder. I have used it a lot. I can't say I'm in love with it but it works.
• Chick Base Coat - another one that's discontinued. I've liked most of Chick's products I've tried and I expect to like this one too, when I get around to it. (Some of these, I've saving until the other stuff is gone...)

bottom row:

• Nail Foundation (Butter London) - You can't tell it since the bottle is not transparent enough to see, but this bottle is damn near empty. I have used the heck out of this stuff. It's got a high list price but you can get deals on it, and if you find one, I have to say it becomes totally worth the (lower) price. (I'm not sure anything at all is really worth full-on high-end prices, in the end.) Anyway, there are mixed reviews up there but honestly, I have had very good results from this. Also it's in a big bottle with a long brush that's pretty good at fishing the product up from the bottom of the bottle, and that becomes important when you get down low there.
• Get Even (Zoya) - I really only bought this because it was said to be important to keep your ridges from showing on Zoya's matte polishes. I use it on other occasions, too. It's even more gluey and goopy than other ridge-fighting formulas, but it works.
• Bridge the Ridge (from American Classics, the same people who make Gelous) - obviously, another ridge-fighting polish. My aunt gave it to me for Christmas and I haven't tried it at all yet, I'm waiting on some of these others to run out first! It only has a few reviews but they seem positive enough.

(And now it's time to go to bed - I've had an Ambien, and when you start seeing patterns on what's supposed to be a plain white background, then it's time to go to bed because it's kicking in. 'Night.)

Stash: glitter and creme strays

More strays - some glittery top-coats, a couple of cremes, and Pretty Gritty, which is almost a class by itself (I'll get to that below):

top row:

• Black Creme (Wild Shine) - I had a picture of this in the old bottle, but since this is not the same bottle style, I felt like I had to put this one in for completeness' sake. As far as I know, it's exactly the same basic black creme that I talked about back in the very first installment of cremes. (I do have to admit, though, that I particularly wanted the new bottle because of its very small footprint. I wanted to start keeping it out with my "manicure basics" - i.e., base-coat and top-coat and all that kind of thing, and I liked the idea that it wouldn't take up much room.)
• Pretty Gritty (Rescue Beauty Lounge) - I suppose this is technically a shimmer, but it's an unusual one, which is how it ended up in the post with a bunch of glitters. It's a dusty purple with gold shimmer, and it's really beautiful. This is from RBL's collab with Refinery 29.

bottom row (except for the lone nail art polish, these are all top-coats):

• TNT (Formula X) - from the Effects Top Coat line, this is cobalt blue matte hexes of various sizes in a clear base.
• Boom (Formula X) - this is from the same line as the one above, and it's exactly the same idea - mixed matte hexes, but this one is a cornflower-ish blue. (Here's a mani over dark blue.)
• Fairy Snot (Chick) - iridescent top coat, which shimmers in a multicolored way, very pretty.
• Hot Couture (Color Club) - another iridescent glitter similar to Fairy Snot, above, but in a rose-pink kind of base. This looks awesome over paler pinks, that's the main way I've worn it so far.
• Bad Chick (Sinful Colors Nail Art) - I just don't do nail art, as much as I kept trying to persuade myself in the past that I was going to start. So this polish has mostly just sat and moldered. I did use it once, for painting stripes on a 4th of July mani a couple of years ago. There's not really much to say about a white striping polish, anyway. It's white, it has a skinny brush... and it's apparently discontinued, since it was seen at Dollar Tree back a couple of years ago.

(I felt compelled to put in both bottle styles of Black Creme, but I didn't take "completeness' sake" so far as to take pictures of backup bottles where both (or all) the bottles look completely alike. (The only color polishes I have three of are Black Creme, as of last week, and Colorstay Rainforest, because I bought two more bottles when it was on clearance. I also have two bottles of Colorstay Amethyst, and there are a couple of top-coats I have multiples of, but I think that's it.)

Stash: treatment products

I went through everything else in my stash (well, almost everything, there's still more strays coming), and at the end it seemed a bit weird not to talk about the other bottles in my stash - the top-coats and the nail hardeners and other miscellaneous bottles o' stuff. This installment is the things that are neither a color polish nor specifically a base-coat or top-coat, but instead have some other purpose. Base-coats and top-coats are each going to get their own installment, also to come.

top row:

• Green Tea and Bamboo Strength (Sally Hansen Nail Nutrition) - I'm a fan of Sally H's nail treatment products, generally. Nail Nutrition has 2 formulas, Strength and Growth. I've tried both of them and I like both of them. I've mostly settled on strength formulas rather than growth for treatment products generally, because I've given up on trying for grow my nails terribly long. However, I used up a whole bottle of the growth formula before I got the strength one, and I haven't remembered to use the new one as much. The link above is from Makeup Alley and it has reviews of both. I didn't especially think the growth one helped with growth, that I could tell, I just liked the way it made my nails feel.
• VitaSurge Strength Gel (Sally Hansen) - this is a different type of product, a gel with little bubbles of stuff (vitamins, I guess!) which you're supposed to massage into your nail bed. I usually forget to use this, but I like it as far as I can tell from my limited use of it, at least! This also comes in Strength and Growth formulas, I believe, but I haven't tried the latter one, in this case. This does not come with a brush, instead it has a little sponge wand. I usually just use the sponge to spread it around and then massage it into my nails with my fingers. It claims that you will notice results after 5 days, but I would have to remember to use it for 5 days in a row, I assume, to test that claim, and that's just not going to happen.

bottom row:

• Instant Artificials (Salon Sciences) - you can buy this at beauty supplies, but this bottle came from somebody's blog sale, because I wanted to try it out for cheap. Again, I forget to use it regularly, but I like it as far as I can tell. I don't try to substitute it for a base-coat, normally, but I think this one is more like a base-coat than most of these others. (Update: Once I finally started using this, I fell in love with it. I couldn't find any new bottles in Sally's stores (although some stores may have it) but it's available on their website.)
• Beauty Secrets polish thinner - I know the bottle says Seche but what's in the bottle is not Seche. See below for the story about that. This is another one that I don't use often enough to say yea or nay on it, myself. (The link above has a lot of information about how polish thinners work, chemically-speaking, which is helpful.)
• Vitamin E Nail & Cuticle Oil (Sally Hansen) - again, I forget to use it because I usually am using the ones below. But it works fine.
• Cuticle Oil (Chick) - this is by far my favorite cuticle product - although in practice, I alternate randomly between it and Badger Cuticle Balm, which I talk about a bit more at the bottom of this entry. The Chick oil is tangerine-ginger scented and it smells divine. Unfortunately Chick is out of business to the best of my knowledge. (I did buy two bottles while these were on clearance at Llarowe, though, so I'm still good for a while. I'm sure going to miss it when it eventually runs out, though!)
• (upside down) Beauty Secrets Hardener - I have flaky, peel-prone nails, but I'm hard on my nails - as I've said here ad infinitum - and so it's hard to know how much of that is diet or body chemistry or whatever and how much is because I use my nails as tools and then bang them against a keyboard all day. But this product does seem to help, in my fairly limited trials of it. I need to use it more regularly and then I might have a better idea about how much it helps!

(I said at the top that these are not base-coats, but actually some treatment products say that you can use them instead of one. In my experience, you're better off not listening to any such claims, though. Put the treatment product on first and then a base-coat on top of that, and you'll usually get better results.)

As far as the Seche Restore bottle, I bought it from some random Amazon seller, and I didn't open it for a good while - like, a couple of months - and when I finally opened it, it was an empty bottle. I don't know who the seller was anyway, but I'm not entirely sure this should be held against them because I didn't give them a chance to make it right. It's entirely possible that they didn't know it was empty, either - it may well have just been a mistake at the bottler. And so much time had gone by that I just said, "Eh," and went and bought some Sally-Beauty-brand thinner instead, and poured some in the empty bottle. (So I have still not actually tried Seche Restore at all. I gather it's particularly good for those gooey half-empty bottles of Seche Vite.)

I didn't take a picture of my cuticle balms, because they're scattered all over, but I have three different ones, all of which I talked about over here. For practical purposes, Badger Balm is the one I use most often. It comes in quite a big tin and is hella cheap for the amount of product you get.

Stash: stray glitters and flakies

Like I said a few posts back, I knew I had a good many strays that didn't get into the first round of stash pictures this time around, and most of them are polishes I've either bought lately or worn lately - or in many cases, both of those things. (Calling them strays makes me think of various lame jokes about having rounded up the herd, but I'll try to refrain.) Here's the first installment, which is flakies and some glitters (with a few more glitters to come in installment two):

top row:

• Neeka (Zoya) - a slightly grayed-out purple, similar to Zoya Lotus in basic color, but with a fine gold microglitter. (I wrote about this one not long ago, and I was complaining because I had wear issues with it. I haven't yet retried it to see if that was just a freak occurrence or whether it's an ongoing problem for me, though.)
• Butterflies & Rosebuds (Julie G) - a dark fuchsia with a ton of tonal microglitter. This is a really beautiful polish; as VV says at the link there, it almost glows. (mani from 2014)
• Flake Your Booty (Painted Polish) - as the name implies, it's a flakie, but it's blue. I've never seen a blue flakie before. I tried it once over Nail-Robi, a dark blue, and it was beautiful (but I don't think I have pictures). I want to try it again over something else and see what it looks like - a blue-green, maybe, or a blue-violet? that seems like it would work...
• Shine Of The Times (Essie) - I talked about this just last week - it's more what I think of as the standard color for a flakie - copper shifting to green, more or less. But it's also got an extra-heavy concentration of flakes, I think. (more swatches)
• Aurora Borealis (Lucky 13) - this is a different type of flakie, to my mind, than the more standard kind above - this kind has smaller flakes and goes on more like a clear-base glitter. I am actually wearing this as we speak - here's the picture I put up the other day. It's really exceptionally beautiful. (I've been saying that a lot so far in this entry, but these are some great polishes!) Color-wise, it's pretty similar to Shine Of The Times - coppery shifting to green, mostly, although it seems to have bits of some other colors as well.

bottom row:

• Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey (Lucky 13) - blue jelly with silver glitter of various sizes and shapes, including some stars. The link is to Accio Lacquer, and she describes this polish as having "limitless depth" - and while that's maybe a little bit out-there (as befits a Dr Who-themed polish, really) the jelly does definitely give it that illusion.
• Locavore (Rescue Beauty) - I just bought this lately and I haven't worn it yet - I tend to wear glitters more in the winter than the summer - but boy, is it pretty. It was on clearance and I gave in to temptation, since I was already doing a RBL order (with my birthday RBL coupon). It's a small glitter with green, blue, and violet, I think - it's one of those that's small enough pieces that it's hard to pick out the individual colors. (RBL doesn't have it listed any more so I guess it's gone away now.)
• Hue Left A Message? (Finger Paints) - Hmm, I'd forgotten, if I ever knew, that this is a near-dupe for BL Rosie Lee. Holly says it's more muted but close (and she's talked a number of times about how much she loves Rosie Lee so I'd say she's fairly expert on the subject!) - anyway, this is a packed glitter in a fairly subdued rose color. I haven't gotten around to wearing it yet.
• Purple Palette (Finger Paints) - I couldn't find much for this online, and the picture at the link shows it looking much more blue than I think it actually is. I may have to swatch this one myself!

2 months of Ipsy bags

So here's April's Ipsy bag, a bit late:

The white box is a perfume I'd never heard of (but then Ipsy's all about stuff you never heard of); here's a shot where you can see the bottle, a little rollerball:

It smelled pretty good, but I am super-sensitive to everything these days and something in it gave me a headache. I'm going to give the Essence mascara away (despite the adorable packaging) because my eyes are far too sensitive for mascara, as I've said before; I gave up on that one long ago. I've had the StarLooks lip gloss in a previous Ipsy bag, and it was okay, but I'm not big on the texture of lip gloss so that'll probably end up going away too.

Here's the inside of the "nude" package, which is an eyeshadow from The Balm:

Funny. I'll probably try that one out. And I've already tried the Theorie hair serum, but I put it on so sparingly that I can't say I can tell any difference. The jury's still out on that one, too. So overall, probably not my best month for Ipsy. I did really like the little raffia-style bag! Very summery.

Here's the official list from April (the theme is "Beautifully Bohemian"):

1. Starlooks lipgloss in Cuddle
2. Jor'el Parker Femina fragrance (8.8ml bottle)
3. Essence Lash Princess mascara
4. Theorie argan oil hair serum
5. theBalm Nude Dude eyeshadow single in Fit (shimmery copper)

=========================

Here's May, except I misplaced an item:

I haven't tried the dry shampoo, which appears to be full-sized, but full-size items are rare enough here that I was impressed. (I knew something was up when I got a larger-than normal pink mailer.) This bag is very cute but feels flimsy, although it is lined. I'll try the eyeliner (I seem to have less trouble with eyeliner than with mascara, in my recent trials with this) and I love getting brushes. The tube was moisturizer which I'll report back on. I located the missing item after I took this, of course; it was an Urban Decay lip primer pencil, which I'm sure I'll try out, and also some little samples of lipgloss.

The May theme is "Jetsetter" and here's the full contents:

1. Oscar Blandi volumizing dry shampoo spray, 5 oz. (I wonder if they substituted a larger size at the last minute or something on some boxes, because Ipsy's online list says 3.2 oz. Interesting.)
2. The Organic Pharmacy Double Rose Rejuvenating Face Cream
3. Bellapierre gel eyeliner in Ebony
4. Luxie Beauty eyeshadow blending brush
5. (not pictured) Urban Decay 24/7 Glide-on lip pencil in Ozone + bonus Revolution high-color lipgloss

I've tried several more of these since I wrote the above. I've been experimenting with the gel pencil and it does stay on well. I like the face cream. The dry shampoo is okay - I've tried several brands of dry shampoo now and I can't really say I'm in love with any of them. I think it's partly that my hair has such weird texture now, and so much volume on its own that I don't much want anything that adds more volume. (I may have to go get my hair cut soon, anyway, because it's driving me crazy. I think my hairdresser got carried away with the layers the last time around.)

NOTDs: AB/black & Hipnotic

This is 2 coats of Aurora Borealis over WnW Black Creme:

This is a picture of my right hand instead of the more normal left - even though I'm left-handed, I almost always take pictures of my left hand. (I'm fairly ambidextrous but that still seems a bit odd, and I'm not entirely sure why that's my habit.) In this case, I took pictures of both but I thought the angle was more interesting on this one. Anyway, AB does what flakies tend to do and shimmers and shifts around depending on the angle and the light. (For example, here's the picture I took on its previous outing, which looks quite a bit different.) It definitely inclines toward green/gold/copper, though, I would say. (And actually in the light I'm in as I write this - fluorescent - I see what might be purple.)


This is a mess of a painting job, but I did think it came out pretty cute, overall. This is Finger Paints Hipnotic - 2 coats - over whatever I had on before that, which I guess was I'm Not Really A Waitress. (Hipnotic is very opaque, so whatever is under it isn't peeking out much, anyway.)

Karen had sent me this polish... man, a while back, I'm not even sure... definitely a year or more ago or probably more like two or three... and I just hadn't ever gotten around to trying it. I really mostly never did get the hang of magnetics, which is probably why I avoided trying it for so long! but this one did decently well, and I like the color. (In real life it wasn't actually as bright as it looks here.) So overall I'm still running at maybe 40% success rate with magnetics, but it's also still a small sample. I need to dig some more of them out and have another go with it. (I do know that the ones I've done the best with - Finger Paints and OPI - are the ones where the magnet design gives you a better look at what you're doing. It's hard to get the magnet close enough if you can't see.)

Essies from Karen

Karen gives away a lot of stuff on her blog, and I don't always enter her giveaways, because we're friends and it would feel weird to be winning all the time, were that ever to happen. (I've won one prize from her nail blog, previously, but that was years ago.*) I suspect that this is one of those things where I'm way overthinking it; I've never seen any indication from anybody in the nail polish community that it's considered bad form to enter your friends' giveaways - heck, nail polish bloggers are not that gigantic a group, I think if everybody recused themselves for people they knew, there'd be nobody to enter, sometimes! So anyway, once in a while when I see something I particularly like, I enter one. She had a huge giveaway for her 5th blogiversary lately, and there were a lot of cool things among the 12 separate prizes, but the one that called out to me was the Essies - particularly because it included Shine Of The Times, which I failed to buy while it was still available, silly me. (I don't remember what my other choices were. It occurs to me that there may have been less competition for the Essies since at least two of these are polishes that many people probably already own. Added: It sounds from this post like that was in fact the case.) Karen assures me that I won fair and square - and really, she's just not the kind of person that I can imagine fudging on things like that anyway, so I never imagined otherwise.

Here's what I got:
Sew Psyched - a gray-green with shimmer. (This sounded familiar to me, but I think I was thinking of one of the Square Hues from last fall, a similar gray-green, but without the shimmer). (here's some dupes from Karen, though, and it appears to have several: compared with drugstore brands, and compared with RBL Diddy Mow)
Shine Of The Times - your basic Hidden Treasures type of flakie (except I don't have Hidden Treasures, either) - except having worn it now, I can say that it's really, really dense compared to most flakies I've worn. (I had seen this said somewhere, but man, I was not prepared.) I mostly noticed it shifting from coppery-orange to green. (also here's another dupe post from Karen for flakies)
Wicked - The link here is to the Daily Varnish, and she compares Wicked to I'm Not Really A Waitress - not in color, but in the way it's Essie's unofficial signature color in more or less the same the same way that I'm Not Really A Waitress is OPI's. It's even older than INRAW, too, apparently, although they've both been around since the 90s. As far as color, Wicked is much plummier and darker than INRAW - I'd classify it as a red, but a vampy (and slightly jelly-ish) wine-red, not a bright one. It does still seem to have some of the application issues that DV talked about - although there's certainly no noticeable chemical smell from my (presumably somewhat newer) bottle. It is streaky and wants to pull a bit, though.

Now I'm thinking about what other brands' signature colors would be. The ones that come to mind are reds - maybe Carmen, because it's Zoya #1 (although I think there would probably be other contenders there - Charla? Jem?), and Cherries In The Snow, maybe, for Revlon - that one dates back to the 1930s, I think. (Anybody got thoughts on this question? What would other brands' signatures be?)

Back to the Essies: I haven't managed to get a picture of these so I ganked Karen's picture of them (I'm going on the assumption that she will be okay with this, since I'm certainly not trying to take credit.)

(The same link is up above, but for the record, that came from here.)


*The box Karen sent me is in this picture from 2011, and I assume that the polishes are in there somewhere too, but all the polishes are scrambled around so much that it's hard to tell!