Vanity Flare

This is Triple Shine Vanity Flare:

I liked Triple Shine and I was a bit disappointed that Sally Hansen didn't give it a longer try. That said, this is just your middle-of-the-road medium red-violet creme. I'm sure I have several things that are fairly similar - including, apparently, AbsoluteNY Purple Neon, below Vanity Flare on the wheel, except I'm not sure that's the color Purple Neon was when I first got it. That's a question for another day, though. Aha, look, here's photographic evidence, even if the photo is from my old iPhone 4 and is totally crappy. And actually it appears to be Vanity Flare that's not the same color as it used to be - it's considerably lighter.

Stockholm Syndrome

This is Smith & Cult Stockholm Syndrome:   

I've got several things similar to this but these grayish-purple colors always fascinate me. If this has as good a formula as the other S&C I tried (that would be Bitter Buddhist) then I will be really happy to have this.

Added: my intention is to find the other things I have that I think are similar to this and compare. But I'm not sure when that will happen!

Starrily x Kelli Marissa

Here are two of the three polishes that Starrily released with YouTuber Kelli Marissa:

Galaxy Gang is on the left, a purple with scattered holo and some shift; and then Deep Space, on the right, is multicolor flakies in a black base.

I'll link Kelli's video below; she says the idea is to be able to do a galaxy manicure with the three polishes. The third one is a holo topper, and since these were $15 each I felt like that was the one I could best do without. Getting two of them was a stretch, much less all three. (Starrily does have a low threshold for free shipping - it's $25, so two of these are enough to get shipped for free.)



I'm wearing Galaxy Gang now, but the picture I have totally doesn't do it justice. I'll put it down at the bottom anyway.

These are my first Starrily polishes; they came extremely well-packaged, in little individual boxes inside bubble wrap inside a small mailing box. Here are the small boxes:

Very cute!

Bad picture of Galaxy Gang:

Butterflies & Rosebuds

This is Julie G Butterflies & Rosebuds:

I think this is the only Julie G polish I own which is not a texture. We don't have Rite-Aid stores around here, and I don't know of anyplace else (brick-&-mortar) that sells Jessie's Girl/Julie G. (You can buy it from their website, but I've never gotten around to buying more. This color is a core color so it's still current, though.) This is a great color - I notice on the website there they just call it "fuchsia shimmer" but it's much more complex than that makes it sound. I have a ton of fuchsia shimmers but this one stands out because it looks blackened. It's similar but not a dupe to The Last Petal, which I saw in some people's top polishes of 2017. (I was surprised when I looked at the pictures of both of them - I would have said 'til I looked that The Last Petal was darker.)

Feel The Chemis-tree

I thought I had posted this one a long time ago, but I can't find it so here is OPI Feel The Chemis-tree (from the holiday 2017 Love OPI XOXO collection):

It seems to have the same pigment that Turn On The Northern Lights (from the Iceland collection) does, but in a different-color base. TOtNL is blue-violet, and this one is plummy red-violet.

(For the record, I did post a manicure with this but apparently never posted this picture.)

NOTD: Rainbow Wishes

Well, after the pink Hot Couture mani crashed and burned, I had one more work day to go last week, and I wanted to do something that at least hinted at being pastel. Given that I'm not big on pastels, in general, the couple of weeks before Easter are usually the only time that I wear pastels very much. And what I came up with wasn't really pastel, but it was sort of in the ballpark.

I showed a swatch of this a couple of months ago - it's NailsInc Rainbow Wishes, which was in the Sparkle Like A Unicorn set. Here's the swatches for comparison:

By itself it looks pink, but over black it looked blue-to-purple shifty like it does in the bottle. I didn't really want to use black so I put it over a navy-blue instead, Orchid Playmaker. And I really like how it turned out. It's maybe more blue than purple, but the purple highlights are still there. Very nice.

Added: after I took this manicure off, I decided to try Rainbow Wishes alone, since it looks quite nice in the swatch above. But I didn't like it too much. The shift does still show up, but two coats are still very sheer and too much nail line shows for my taste. Sometimes that doesn't bother me but this one did. I really like it with the undercoat so why waste it wearing it alone?

Layered NOTD part 2: Hot Couture

I showed this one yesterday but I was falling asleep when I wrote that and kind of stopped in the middle. So continuing on from where I left off, this is two coats of Look At My Bow! and two coats of Color Club Hot Couture:

and I put matte top-coat on it. I'm not sure whether to blame this on having tried to finish while I was sleepy, or on too many layers. So here's the layers:

1. Cuccio base-coat
2. Look At My Bow!
3. Look At My Bow!
4. Hot Couture
5. Hot Couture
6. Matte All The Things

Hot Couture is a pale-pink top-coat with a lot of sparkle, and it's pretty thick. So I'm inclined to think it was putting the second coat of that on which caused the trouble. You can see here that the top nail, in the picture, is messed up, and it's not really wear. After I took this - or maybe it had already started on the other hand before this, this polish just started peeling off in big chunks. By the time I got home from work it had peeled completely off three nails on my left hand. The right hand (pictured) didn't ever get any worse than this. It was almost like I used peel-off base-coat, only I didn't. Anyway, it was really pretty while it lasted and I'll have to remember to give this combination another try this time next year!

(Hey, it's baseball season!!)