July SquareHue: Marinera

I have to be honest and say that the first thing I thought of when I saw this name was tomato sauce - which is actually not spelled the same - marinara is the sauce, in case you're like me and you're not quite clear on this. (I did know immediately that that was surely wrong, just because it doesn't have anything to do with dancing, and that's what SquareHue's theme is for this year.) So it turns out that the marinera is a couples dance that seemed very familiar to me but I'm quite sure I could not have told you was from Peru. I hate to admit to this much ignorance but I figure I'm better off getting it all right out there up front. (I saw a reference to this dance as being from coastal Peru, so I'm clinging to the word "marine" to help me remember how to spell this. I'm usually a good speller, but those seemingly-interchangeable a's and e's are definitely giving me trouble.)

Anyway, this is the box I got:

Like last month, I only got two out of the three polishes; the third one was described as a straw color so I was pretty certain right away that it was not going to be something I was interested in. (After all, straw is pale and yellowish and I am not a fan of pale colors or of yellow colors, either.) The two polishes I did get are Limeña, a warm red with coppery shimmer, and Norteña, a dark plum creme. Both very pretty. I did more proper swatches and I'll get those up later. (As far as the names, Limeña just means a woman from Lima. Norteña means "northern" and applied to a person it'd presumably mean a northern woman, since these words are both feminine forms, but it seems to particularly refer to the style of music that goes with this dance, as best I could determine.)


Next month's dance is the flamenco, and the three polishes were a pearly dark olive, a "light terracotta" which doesn't sound like my thing, and another red. As much as I'd like to see the olive color, I decided to skip the August box since I wasn't much interested in either of the other two. (Maybe I can find somebody to swap polishes with - if anybody ends up with that flamenco olive and doesn't want it, let me know and maybe we can work something out!)


I noticed that SquareHue's polishes now say .45 oz where I thought it used to say .5, and that turned out not to be my imagination. I pulled out an old one to compare. (If you want to know, I think the purple polish in this picture is Baby Baby Baby, from the December 2015 collection, next to Limeña.)

Basically, the exterior of the bottle seems to be exactly the same size, it's just that the interior of the bottle is hollowed out a bit more in the old version of the bottle than in the new. I looked at several bottles to make sure that's what I was seeing, and the shapes varied a little but the interior of the new bottles seem to consistently be a little shallower. The difference is only, what, 1/20th of an ounce, so it doesn't take much. (It doesn't particularly bother me that they're smaller, I was mostly just curious to see where the difference was.)

(I am trying to remember to write SquareHue - one word - instead of Square Hue, two words. I mostly became aware of that because Google has corrected me a couple of times. My tag is still two words, though, if you decide you want to look up what else I've had to say about them!)

Ocean Drive

This is KL Polish Ocean Drive, from the summer Miami collection:

I posted a mani picture of this the other day, and I'm mostly reporting back to say that while I like the color of this a lot, be warned: it's a stainer. It stained my nail beds a little bit - that part is not so bad. The bad part is, it stains the skin around your nails, and it even stained my thumb where I was holding the cotton round. It came off eventually, but that's really kind of a pain. I can't say I wasn't warned, because there was a review on the website that mentioned it. I just thought the color was so pretty I ignored that. I really did like it a lot and I'll probably wear it again, but the staining issues will make me think twice about it.

Zoya Destiny (w/bonus meme)

I finally got around to trying Zoya Destiny, and I really like it:

It's a coral/red-orange texture. The red-orange part is usually crucial for me, because the yellower a polish gets, the less likely it is to flatter my skin tone, but this one swings far enough to the red end to be fine, I think.

This is two coats of polish and two coats of top-coat. I decided after two coats that it was opaque enough to suit me, but I think VNL-haters will probably want three. (And don't think that just because I used the word "hater" that I think there's something wrong with that. There's definitely not.)

I realized after a while that I hear the word "destiny" in my head in Darth Vader's voice. I never really thought much about this, but of course it's a meme:

Honestly (now that I'm thinking about it) I don't think this is a dramatic enough polish to deserve this very dramatic name. It should be a vampy color, not a summery one. My guess is that they were thinking of this as a dramatic, fiery color - it is bright, of course, but still, not all that dramatic, to me. However, this is still a nice polish, despite that bit of cognitive dissonance.

Oh yeah, and I don't think I ever posted the swatch picture, so here's that too:

This is two coats without top-coat.

Vestido de Gala

This is Jade Vestido de Gala - I think the name means "party clothes" or something to that effect. I showed my stash from several brands of international polish yesterday, and I decided this was my favorite from that bunch.

I have several polishes from this "Special Glitz" line - they are fine glitters in a jelly base. You can't tell it from this picture but the glitter is mostly holo glitter - there might be some regular glitter mixed in, but it's the holo that you notice. This is one coat on the nail wheel; it darkens up considerably on the second coat. And it's quite textured, as I recall - it's not a textured polish per se but you probably want Glitter Food or maybe an extra coat of top-coat for this. But it's really really pretty. (All of the polishes like this are pretty, mind you, but since this one is my beloved berry-color, naturally it's my very favorite.)

Stash: assorted international brands

I've decided to combine some of the brands that I only have a few of - I'll never get through this tour of my stash if I go one by one. So here we have some various non-US brands.

This group is all British:

This is Model's Own Hyper Gel in Pitch Purple, No 7 in Pillarbox, A England Saint George and Briarwood, Barry M in Silver Glitter (which was an LE polish).

I have four of this brand, so they get a picture to themselves. This is Jade, which is a Brazilian brand:

Three of these are the same formula, Special Glitz, which is a jelly full of fine glitter. I really like those. The names are Echarpe de Seda (dark red), Vestido de Gala (plummy red), V.I.P (orange), and the outlier is Stiletto, which is just a medium green creme. I used to get these from Llarowe but I don't know if they have a US seller these days.

And then this is just what's left over. I have a couple of Illamasquas which must be with the higher-end polishes, and I have Nfu Oh 51, which is just MIA, I haven't seen it in a while now. I'm sure it's here somewhere and it'll turn up, though. Oh, and I didn't put the Kikos in with these, either, but I know they're around somewhere in another bin.

Layla is an Italian brand (as is Kiko) and these two are CE61 and CE39 (which is sort of a grayed out purple). You can see that the bottle of CE61 is about halfway empty - I've worn that one a lot. I really liked the purple one also but I haven't remembered to wear it as much. Then the wavy bottle is Dear Rus, which is South Korean, and this is #601 - it's a nice gold-and green glitter which I always forget to wear. And last is Glitter Gal Lizard Belly, which is a dark gray-green scattered holo.

I decided that out of these polishes, Vestido de Gala would be my favorite. I did a new swatch for it and I'll post that soon, but meanwhile here is the old one. (If Nfu Oh 51 was here it would probably have been a contender, but since it's not, I decided it was ineligible. I'm picking from what I actually had on hand to photograph.)

Let's Go Crazy

Here's Deborah Lippmann's obviously Prince-themed Let's Go Crazy:

So this has settled a good bit, and I really couldn't get it to shake up to the point where it looked really mixed-up in the bottle, but as you can see I still got a pretty good glitter payoff on the nail, just the same. It's a mixed glitter in a purple base, which I feel like should love... but somehow I don't, quite.

My sister bought me these three Lippmann glitters which you can see swatched here as a birthday gift  a couple of years ago - she works at a department store and presumably didn't pay retail for them, but I still feel kind of guilty because except for Mermaid's Dream I don't really love any of them. I looked at swatches and gave her a list of things I thought I wanted, but I don't really love either of the conventional glitters I have from Lippmann. I like microglitters and I like things like Mermaid's Dream which are kind of offbeat glitters, but for whatever reason I am very "meh" about these. (Although actually, considering how popular that line was, I'm not sure if you can truly call Mermaid's Dream unconventional, either. But hopefully you know what I mean.) I think the last time I talked about this I said I needed to wear it and see, and I haven't worn it but that's still the case. I can't quite make myself give this away so far (it's a Prince polish, after all) but if I keep avoiding wearing it, maybe I should.

Non-permanent haircolor

I've been coloring my hair with this stuff from Sally Beauty and it seemed worth talking about. They've been in the process of changing the packaging but I believe this is the old packaging:

You buy most of the bits and pieces for this separately, which is weird for those of us who are used to the little kits from Clairol or L'Oreal. This is the color that I got, it's Burgundy Brown.

I used to use a Feria color years ago called Chocolate Cherry which I really liked and which was sort of similar, so this one seemed like a good bet. (I don't think a real auburn would be flattering on me but the ones with red-violet tones seem to do well.) Right after I used this the first time, I thought I was going to hate it, but then when I washed it the first time it lightened up some and after that I thought it was perfect. It lasts for 20 shampoos, which is a good while if you don't wash your hair every day. My experience was that it fades very gradually and unobtrusively.

I used Feria (which is L'Oreal) when I first started coloring my hair, probably 15 years ago or more now - I started getting noticeable gray when I was still in my 30s. Then for a while I got it done in the salon, and then (in the time when I was unemployed) I started doing it at home again, and I tried a number of different things, Nice & Easy and the boxed brands like that. I'd let it grow out for a while and it would always start annoying me eventually and so I'd eventually color it again. Then one day last year I let the hairstylist talk me into getting a "gloss" or demi-permanent color - I'd always had permanent color before. "Gloss" for haircolor turns out to be a trademark owned by Redken, but I did really like it, so later on I went in Sally's and asked whether they had something similar and this is what they steered me to.

I bought a kit with the applicators and the little pan (and gloves, which were really awful ones but did the job) and then you buy the developer separately and the "sealer" to put on afterward. It's all amazingly cheap if you're used to salon prices, and I'm pretty sure it's at least as cheap as the boxed stuff in the end. It seems much quicker than doing permanent color, and it's much easier on your hair, because it has fewer chemicals. If anything it seems to make your hair easier to handle. (I assume I'm not the only person around whose graying hair has become much more troublesome - so anything that helps with that is wonderful.)

Since it's easier to deal with overall than permanent color, and the results so far have been great, I'm really sold on this.