Purple Poodle

Here's Orly Purple Poodle:

I talked about this way back in January but I've been retaking pictures and that picture was another one that I wasn't entirely happy with. I still can't get the glitter in this to show up on the nail wheel, though. It's still true that the base of this comes out exactly the same as Houston We Have A Purple (despite the fact that they don't look alike in the bottle!) - this one just has an added fine glitter to it. (This is the same swatches I used back in January, though, so maybe I need to go back and have a go at re-swatching this at some point.)

Bye Feluschia!

This is Wet n Wild 1 Step Wonder Gel in Bye Feluschia!

I can only assume that the name is meant to combine the meme "Bye Felicia" and the color "fuchsia" - right? (Sort of a portmanteau word.) It seems to be one of those fuchsias that have a good bit of blue flash to them - I have several like that. This is the first polish I've bought from this particular line, though. I've read a bunch of reviews and most of them seem to agree that "1-step wonder" is a bit of an exaggeration. Some people love these, but I also found a lot of agreement that they do better if you don't try to take the one-step thing too literally. Anyway, it's a pretty polish and I'll definitely be trying it out. (It might not be til after the holidays, though, at the rate I'm going. I have too many new polishes!)

(Added: I forgot to add that for all the so-so reviews on YouTube, this did make Allure's Best of Beauty list for 2016. They say to use your regular base-coat underneath it.)

Kiko

I'd never tried any Kiko polishes - they're relatively new in the US - but they have good reviews, and they had a buy 3, get 3 thing for Black Friday. They're only $3.90 for the ones I bought, so 6 of them were only about $12. Note that they do have several other lines; I know there was at least one that was cheaper and one that was more expensive - but these were the ones I had seen the good reviews of, so I went with that.

Honestly, I opened up the box and went, what the hell, did I buy the same polish four times? because I kept unwrapping all these purple polishes. (OK, I didn't really think that - I knew they weren't actually the same - but I did think all these purples looked awfully similar. The two in the middle especially.)

Here's all of them:

At $15 you also got free shipping -  that's why I added the cuticle pen that you see sitting at the top.

You can see my tick-marks on the wheel - I ended up doing three coats of most of these on the wheel - with one exception. I'm happy about finding the one one-coater, but honestly, I don't get that upset with having to do three coats on a polish in this price-range, either. With an expensive polish I tend to get a little more testy about it.

(Note that on the wheel, the four purples don't actually look all that much alike.)

I really just went by the swatches on the website, in picking these out, I didn't try to look up the different colors. (Although actually there are tons of swatches out there, mostly from European bloggers, seems like.) I was mostly thinking of it as a chance to try out the brand.

Kiko's an Italian brand and I gather is a popular brand in Europe generally. I found several different names for some of these polishes and I imagine that's because of the names being translated back and forth. (In one, cranberry became "blueberry" which is slightly odd, at least in English.)

Let's start with 497 "Pearly Indian Violet," because it's said to be a close dupe for Chanel Taboo.

It's very dark and pretty, and I always like pearly, so I probably will like it fine. I don't think you can see this much on the swatch, but it's almost a "blurple" - you can see a little of the blue-violet color at the bottom of the nail. I can't actually speak to the Chanel connection since I don't own that (or in fact any Chanel polishes) but there are plenty of comparisons around if you google.

This is 493 (Vino Perlato) and 495 (Pearly Vanda Burgundy):

More of the nice pearl finishes - 493 is redder and 495 is noticeably more of a burgundy/violet color.

This is 277 (Microglitter Cranberry) and 278 (Microglitter Dark Orchid):

These two seem to have exactly the same formula - it was pretty sheer, but I like it. (When I think of microglitters, though, I tend to think of the packed kind, and that's not what this is, just so you know.)

...and last there's 245 (Pearly Dark Ruby) which is the one-coater:

The two dark purples are the most obviously similar, but even they aren't anything alike past being pearly, dark purples (which, ok, for some people is as far as they'll look). This one is much more red-violet than the other one, which as I mentioned has a definitely blue-violet undertone.

I think I did pretty good on picking colors, on the whole. They're heavily weighted towards cool colors, yes, but then those are what I love.

Added: Just sort of as a matter of interest, because this is a new brand to me, I noticed that while the nail polishes are mostly extremely reasonably priced, that is not so true of the makeup. The makeup is more like Sephora kind of prices, while the nail polish is drugstore prices. Wonder why that is. (Although... the buy 3 get 3 sale was on everything, so that would have made the makeup much more reasonable. I just chose to use it on polish.)

Indi-glow

This is Xtreme Wear Indi-glow:

(This is a re-do, I also talked about it back here but the picture was bad.) The last time I tried to wear this I layered it over something else, and it didn't set, and I ended up just taking it off again. (See the very bottom of this entry.) But it's a pretty polish, and when I put it on the wheel it dried fine. It looks more blue in the bottle but more purple on the nail. I would say it's basically a blurple, with scattered iridescent glitter that's hard to put a color-name to. The base here seems like a jelly, but it gets pretty close to opaque in a couple of coats (unlike your average jelly). I think it looks more opaque and more matte in this swatch picture than it actually is, though.

Availability: not a current color.

NOTD: Hotel Particulier

I was being pretty snippy about Hotel Particulier when I showed it a week or so ago, but it turns out I do really like it.

If you enlarge these pictures you will be able to see a good bit of tipwear, but I had already had it on for a solid 48 hours before I took these pictures, so that's reasonable.

The way the bottle looks all metallic in these pictures doesn't bear much resemblance to the actual color on the nail (nor does the bottle picture that Lancome was showing on their website, which was the main thing I was being snippy about). On the nail it's sort of a purplish-brown microglitter - more brown than purple, though. It's very pretty, but then I'm already on the record as being a particularly big fan of browns this season, anyway.

For comparison, here's the picture I took before (and the only bottle picture I've seen or taken that looks anything at all like the polish):

And here's the picture on Lancome's website:

There's also an eyeshadow with the same name:

Both are currently available on Lancome's website. (They're probably LE, though, so don't expect them to stay indefinitely.)

Casablanca

Here is Sinful Colors Casablanca:

I showed this in a #tbt earlier today, and I just took this picture so it seemed like a good time to talk about this polish. I bought this one day, a year or so ago, without thinking much about it, and it almost seems like it's so pale I'd hate it, but luckily I don't. I'm not sure why, given my normal dislike of pale colors on me. It's basically somewhere in the middle between gray and silver, so I don't know, maybe something about that combination makes it work for me. You could call it a satin silver, maybe? Note that there's what appears to be a line down the middle of the nail - I checked, and that's definitely a brush-stroke, but it's also not as noticeable as it appears to be in this picture. I definitely would try to minimize my brushstrokes when using this, for sure. (Not that that's always easy to do.)

(If you look at the "shade" part of this picture - like on the right side of the bottle - the gray actually doesn't look all that light of a color at all. I think that the base-color here is darker than you think, and that's probably why I like it ok on me.)

I haven't tracked down the original post (added: it's here), but I remember that the first time I wore it, I used thick coats and it was a very humid day (in fact I'm pretty sure it was raining) and I messed my nails up because it took them so long to set. I'm sure some of that was the humidity, that day, but still I'd say definitely try for thin coats.

Re availability: it doesn't look like it's current from Sinful Colors. It was available at a not-too-unreasonable price on Amazon, when I checked.

TBT: Blue Rouge/Casablanca

For Throwback Thursday, Lynnderella Blue Rouge over Sinful Colors Casablanca:

I really like this. I talked about it (at great length) here. (This seemed like a good transition-into-the-holidays manicure, festive but not explicitly a holiday mani.)