Mira

This is Zoya Mira:

This is a really nice color, a mid-toned blue-leaning purple creme that's just a tiny bit dusty. It's one of those colors where I say, "I should really wear that more" (which, if you've been reading lately, I've been saying a lot).

Still available from Zoya. It's a classic, really.

(I got a new set of nail wheels and they're the oval ones like this where you can write on the front, and I am thrilled, because those are my favorites. I could deal with the round ones but I'm surprised how much I found that I care about this.)

Color Club stash

I really don't have all that many Color Club polishes.

L-R, this is Raspberry Rush (scented), Eternal Beauty (holo), Snow-flakes (silvery flakie topper), Hot Couture (pale pink topper), It's Raining Men (blue-to-purple duochrome), We'll Never Be Royals (purple-burgundy-orange multichrome), and Nail-Robi (purple-leaning blue creme).

I'm missing one mini that I forgot about, and there's one polish that I discarded. But I've written about both of those, for sure: the mini is Editorial (which I liked so much I bought two bottles of it), and the one I threw in the trash - because it had faded horribly - was Gimme A Grape Big Kiss, which came from the same collection as Raspberry Rush and was scented.

(Added, because I don't know why I didn't think about putting the old pictures here before.)

Editorial (on the left, but I think you could probably figure that out on your own). I believe it's supposed to be a dupe for Chanel Peridot.

And this is the only picture I could find that showed the original color of Gimme A Grape Big Kiss (It's the one in the middle.) And if you want to see the color it faded to, that's what's in the link on its name further above.

(This came from this post in very early 2014, and if you think this picture is out of focus now... well, it's fuzzy at any size, I think, but it's also possible you may be seeing it at a higher resolution than the original size. I cropped the down because it had other stuff in it; I think this was taken with my old Canon camera and the resolution is not great. That's why you don't see me repeating those old pictures a whole lot.)

I've got label pictures below, but first let me think about favorites. I had We'll Never Be Royals in my 2016 favorites, but then I decided I didn't love it as much as I thought after I'd worn it a couple of times. Nail-Robi is really beautiful, but it's a creme and I really haven't worn it a lot. Ditto Eternal Beauty - except it's a linear holo, of course. Linear holos are not really my favorite things, in general, either. Honestly, if I just get to pick one, I think I'm going with Hot Couture. Top-coats are often my favorite things, anyway, and this is a really awesome one.

So ok, that's decided, and we can go on to labels. Color Club has a bad habit of releasing bottles without any name on it. I've seen lots of complaints about this from other people, too, over the years. I know Eternal Beauty was unlabeled - I remember getting online and double-checking to make sure I had it right - and I think Gimme A Grape Big Kiss wasn't either. And neither was either one of the minis. I think the rest of mine were labeled, as you can see below (well, if you can read them):

(Snow-flakes, apparently, rather than Snowflakes or Snowflake - I think I've seen it called all of those at one time or another. The hyphen in the middle bothers me, really, but I usually take the bottle name as canon unless I have some reason to think it's not what they actually meant.)

And then this:

I just messed up the label on Nail-robi, it's not that it didn't have one. And I mentioned Eternal Beauty above, but I have also complained previously about the fact that all of the holos have really vague names that give no clue to what color they are. I mean, everybody does that some of the time, but from a company with a history of not labeling things properly in the first place, it's doubly annoying. Just number them if you don't want to give them a proper name, but give us a way to tell what is what.

Grey Area

This is Xtreme Wear Grey Area:

Despite the name, this is not really a gray at all, but rather a grayed-out brown creme. I'd call it a dark taupe, really - I think it's very elegant. Maybe the name is meant to be a play on the way that taupe is a "grey area" of its own - or is that stretching it?

(I also am caught here between the two spellings - gray vs. grey. I think "grey" looks more elegant but "gray" is the more common spelling in the US so I generally go with that, just in the interests of being consistent - which works fine until you come up with something like this that spells it the other way!) (added: I didn't even notice for days that I spelled the name wrong in the title.)

Dusty colors seem to be very fashionable right now, so i figured this was a good time to throw this one out there, rather than saving it until it's properly fall and it gets buried in the wave of all the new stuff. This is not a flashy color, but it's a surprisingly sexy one.


Also, here's a previous post that talks about this polish.

NOTD: Fools Rush In

This is Lippmann Fools Rush In, which was in the Midnight Garden collection:

The real thing looks better than this - and more purple than this, at least on the screen I'm currently looking at - but this is the best picture I've gotten so far. It's a really pretty slightly-dusty blue-violet creme. But it doesn't seem to photograph too well.

(I put a note at the end of the last entry chronicling the sad end of the Cerulean manicure - but that was a layering problem and as I said, I don't think it was Sally Hansen's fault, particularly. Fools Rush In also chipped a bit after a long shift of tapping at spreadsheets, and I may have another go at layering with it. We'll see if that goes any better.)

NOTD: Cerulean

Here's Cerulean on my nails. I wore it for a day and it was chipping a bit here and there, and so I patched it up and put Zoya Maisie on top of it (which is a flakie - I haven't worn Maisie much but over the right polish it's really stunning, and Cerulean seems to work well).

This is Cerulean on its own, mind, and I do like it a lot. Now I'm plotting to find all these blue cremes I've gotten lately, and do a comparison.

Added: well, probably not Cerulean's fault, but I patched the chips and put 2 coats of Zoya Maisie on top, as I mentioned above, and it didn't set. It looked great, so I'm especially sorry it didn't work out. I never know whether to blame these things on incompatible formulas (3-free on top of NOT 3 free? seems possible) or our ridiculous humidity (almost always possible).

Deborah Lippmann Midnight Garden set

I would wait to show this "Midnight Garden" set til I had better pictures, but it's an exclusive to the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale, and it is still showing up as available on Nordstrom's website, so I thought I'd go ahead and mention it in case somebody's not already aware of it. The sale continues for the rest of this week - until the 6th, which is Sunday. The set is $29 and ships for free to the US (and if you have one of those $10 Nordstrom Notes they've been giving out to promote their rewards program still sitting around, which I did, that gets it down to $19).

Added: I happened to notice that the minute the Nordstrom's sale ended, this popped up on Deborah Lippmann's own site. So you can still get it - still $29.

These are mostly not new polishes, so if you have a lot of Lippmann you are probably not interested in this. But if you're like me and you don't, it's a pretty good deal.

It's five mini size polishes - left to right, they are Love In The Dunes, I Feel Pretty, Whatever Lola Wants, Naked, and Fools Rush In. Naked and Whatever Lola Wants are current colors but the other three don't seem to be. (I don't believe any of them are new, though, either.)

It is valued at $60, the box says, which seems a little high - do they really sell their 0.27 ounce minis for $12? (I suppose they might!) Let's compare this instead to the price of five full-size polishes - at $18 each, that would be $90. So getting the half-sized ones for a third of that price sounds like a pretty decent deal to me.

(I'm outing myself as a closet hard-rock fan here, but I keep wanting to type "Wicked Garden" for the name of this set, after the Stone Temple Pilots song. I've had to stop myself a couple of times. At least now I have that song for an earworm instead of the pop song I had before.)

Polish drawers from Amazon

Amazon Prime Day was a few weeks ago now, but I got one thing I really like so I wanted to show them. These are deep acrylic drawers that were marked down to $13 and change for a set of two. They're not gigantic and they're not super-heavy-duty but that also means they're not too heavy. So far I like them. They stack and they hold quite a bit of nail polish in each drawer. And you can pull the drawer completely out to get at what's in the back, as well.

Regular price is $18.99 so that's still pretty reasonable. I don't have any thoughts of putting my whole collection in these, but I might at least get another set of two later on.