Colors for Valentine's Day: a nail wheel

Pinks and reds, the classic colors this time of year. Obviously I'm not suggesting that everybody has to wear pink and red from now til Valentine's Day, because (a) you would tell me to go stuff myself and you'd be right to, and (b) I'd hate it if everybody did it, and it's not something I do myself consistently. I do it when I feel like it, but this year, I've been out of the pink mood and haven't worn it much in months, or red either, and now they're both starting to sound appealing again.

Now I have to admit that I like pink and red partly because they look good on me. I wear pink and red tops a lot, and I have a ton of pink and red nail polish because of that, too. But red looks good on almost everybody, and everybody can probably wear some shade of pink, too. So I did a nail wheel with some representative polishes from my stash. I only did a few reds, because even though it's not actually true that all reds look alike, still, there's not as much variety of reds as there are pinks. Also, I found out the hard way that very pale pinks just don't show up well on a nail wheel, so I just skipped them this time around except for the one confetti polish. But I tried to hit a range of colors in between there!

I know putting the little heart on the wheel is corny, but it was mostly so I wouldn't have to write VALENTINE'S DAY across it. (You may can see that I drew it in green Sharpie first, like the numbers, then I went and doodled around it with a fine-tip Sharpie, because, well, I was bored. All this pink is giving me flashbacks to junior high or something.) -- Maybe my own defensiveness about this is something we should discuss, actually, because sometimes my reaction to pink is weird. As I've already said, I really like pink, I wear pink clothes with great regularity and pink nail polish even more, but I seem to react oddly to an excess of pink. I usually won't wear Strobe Light because it trips that "too much pink" trigger in me every time, and that's maybe partly why I look at my own wheel with the silly heart on it and roll my eyes. Maybe I think pink is best in small doses.

So my issues aside, these are all polishes that came out of my own stash. Obviously, one at a time (or two, if I'm layering), I like them just fine!

1. Purple Poodle (Orly)
2. Santa Red My List (China Glaze)
3. Lilith (Zoya)
4. Alegra (Zoya)
5. Juicy (Zoya)
6. She Loves Me, I Love Him Not (Orchid)
7. Peru-B-Ruby (OPI)
8. Riley (Zoya)
9. Red Carpet (Xtreme Wear)
10. EmpoweRED (Rococo) with its matching toner on tip
11. Dita (Zoya)
12. Japanese Tea Garden with Aphrodite's Pink Nightie on tip (both OPI)
13. Japanese Tea Garden (OPI) with Pink Pineapple (Revlon Parfumerie) on tip
14. Status Symbol (Essie)
15. Redrum (Dollish Polish)
16. Rory (Zoya)
17. Shelby (Zoya)
18. Lara (Zoya)
19. Girls On Film (Nostalgic)
20. English Rose (Rimmel) with Hard Candy Jailbait on tip (I misidentified it earlier as Shy)

A ton of Zoyas here, but I had a good range of Zoya pinks to choose from, and Zoya hardly ever discontinues anything, so they're all still available, far as I know. Not all of these polishes are still in production, though, and I'll note what I know about that as we go down the list. I tried to concentrate on ones that are at least still possible to find. I should note that I did get the one China Glaze free (as I end up saying at least twice a week), but everything else here I paid for.

We're starting with 19, because that's how I took the pictures, I don't remember why!

(19) is Girls On Film - which says "temporarily unavailable" on Nostalgic's website, so its availability is unclear. But there are tons of these confetti polishes around so it's possible that there's a substitute for it from another brand, if not. (Ooh, here's a really pretty candidate!) This is the only one of these confettis in a creamy base that I own, and I wasn't sure about it at first, but it keeps growing on me. (20) is Rimmel English Rose, which is sort of a slightly-boring rose pink that I think of as somewhat old-fashioned, but it's still pretty. I wanted to try Jailbait, the Hard Candy, over something, so I picked the Rimmel, and it looked pretty cute, I think. ShyJailbait is an old Hard Candy color (as you can see, it has a completely different bottle from the ones that are currently available) so if it's still available from HC at all, it probably has a different name. But again, there are lots of topper sort of things like this around. And then coming around to (1) we have Purple Poodle, which is not really purple but magenta, with purple microglitter. This is a current color, as far as I know - I bought mine at Sally Beauty just last week.

Closeup of the wheel:

This is 2 to 5:

(2) is Santa Red My List, which despite its name is pink. (Purple Poodle is not purple and Santa Red is not red. I think there's a trend here.) It has a nice foil-ish finish on it that I like, and this is from the holiday collection, which I have seen around in recent weeks, so it's possibly still findable. (3) Lilith is a duochrome, and actually is not showing up on the Zoya website, now that I said that Zoya rarely discontinues things. It has a blue flash that's interesting, but other than that it's similar to a million other fuchsias. (...and for the rest of this entry I'm going to stop talking about alternatives unless I know something more definite, or this is going to get really repetitive.) (4) Alegra has a similar finish to the China Glaze - it's a packed microglitter - but it reads more as a red-violet on the wheel. Then (5) is Juicy, which is different because it's a sheer. They don't call it a jelly, but that doesn't mean you couldn't play around with it and do the kind of things you can do with a jelly. (Hmm, I might try a jelly fade!)

Closeups, which overlap a bit with the last one:

2 and 4 look pretty similar in this picture, but looking at them in real life (2) the China Glaze reads more as a reddish-pink, while (4) Alegra reads much more towards purple.

 6 to 9:

(6) is Orchid She Loves Me, I Love Him Not, which is a very packed microglitter. It's very pretty and sort of violet-leaning, and if you like it you may need a swap-buddy in Texas, since Orchid is only sold at HEB and HEB is only in Texas. (Maybe they'll have a sale soon and I can stock up!) Anyway, (7) is OPI Peru-B-Ruby, which is an almost-red but leans pink, and it's nice and shiny and pretty and I think still available. (8) is Zoya Riley, which is a deep raspberry color that's a bit different - notice in the wheel pictures that Riley actually reads darker than either of the reds here. And (9) is the Xtreme Wear, Red Carpet, which is a nice, fairly sheer, glittery red, which looks like it has a hint of violet in it at 2 coats but turns more obviously red with more coats. I believe I'm on my second bottle of this one.

Here's 5-8 getting darker and darker.

10 and 11:

OK, so I wasn't sure about this Rococo duo and how well it worked - it's called Empowered or EmpoweRED, and it's a really pretty red along with a toner you use to darken it. I tried doing skittles, and it definitely does make it darker. I did my whole hand with the red and left my thumb plain and did 1, 2, 3, and 4 coats of toner on successive fingers, and you can tell the difference. It just isn't a dramatic difference. I've been on a quest for the perfect blackened red, and this isn't it, but still it's pretty. My pictures of the skittles didn't come out but let's see if you can see it on the closeups below. By itself it's on the light side of red; with a lot of toner, it's more on the dark side (*insert your own Star Wars joke*). (But you can't see much of this effect, at least on my monitor, so you'll have to take my word for it, but it's there.) Oh, and then as an afterthought to this picture, we have (11) Dita - which is actually a pretty awesome color, it's somehow the most tasteful bright pink you can imagine. Zoya calls it a "saturated purple-toned berry-red creme." In some ways, it is the perfect bright pink.

It annoys me that you can't see the toner effect here, because you could when I took the picture!

12 and 13:

12 and 13 have the same base: OPI Japanese Tea Garden, which I noticed was for sale on some fairly major website I was cruising lately, so it is still available. I'm not so sure about Aphrodite's Pink Nightie, which is what is on top of it on (12). (But again, frosty pale pink, there are probably a million of them.) I think I mentioned this a month or so ago when I was doing my original pink wheels - these two polishes were one of my very early experiments in layering, and I still think they go really well together. But Pink Pineapple looks pretty good over it in (13), too, so eh.

12 and 13 are visible both in the last close-up picture and in this one too. But I think you can see them a bit better here:

(14) is the aforementioned Strobe Light (mentioned wayyyy up at the top), in this case over another classic, Essie Status Symbol. Bottle picture coming up:

In my experience, you can stick pretty much any pink under Strobe Light; it's so flashy nobody's going to notice the difference. Strobe Light is actually over ONE coat of Status Symbol; then I went, "Oh wait, it needs another coat! and just put the second coat over the bottom half where there was no glitter. I wouldn't do this on a real mani, but on the nail wheel it looks surprisingly ok. Status Symbol was still an Essie core color the last time I looked, but they have other colors that are very close, too. (Watermelon springs to mind.) (15) is Dollish Redrum, which may not be findable - there are other pink holos around, but none with as fun of a name.

Next we have this very girly trio of Zoyas - if you're not already acquainted with Rory, Shelby, and Lara, and you like pale pinks, you should be:

Rory is a microglitter, and slightly more purple. Shelby is paler than Lara. Shelby is really too pale for my coloring; I mostly wear it for layering. (Rory looks great over it!)

I happened to go leafing through my spoons while I was taking pictures yesterday, or I would not have remembered that those three all came from the same collection:

Beach & Surf has to be one of Zoya's all time best-selling collections. I seem to recall almost buying the whole dozen at one point, but I settled for these six. (The other three are Reagan, Carly, and Kimber.)

Aaand that's actually it, because we started with 19. I can't imagine that anybody who hates pink has gotten this far, so I won't apologize again for the pink overload. If you do like pink, maybe this has given you some ideas!

I'd love to hear feedback! Tell me your theories about why pink is so polarizing. Tell me your favorite pinks. (Two that come to mind that I don't own that everybody seems to love: Xtreme Wear Rockstar Pink and Katy Perry's Teenage Dream. Both glitters, so that may be why I have resisted thus far.) Beat me up for subjecting you to all this pink, if you like...

(And to repeat my disclaimer: nobody's paying me anything to say all this. There is not so much as an affiliate link in this entire entry. I did get the one China Glaze for free, but it was a straight-up blog giveaway and not given to me for review, even!)

Purchases

I am not a terribly organized person - if you know me or you've been reading here very long you have probably figured that out! So it's not very surprising that there's overlap between these two pictures of recent purchases, because I mislaid the first picture for a while and couldn't remember what was in it when I took the second one. (I did think briefly of going back to redo the second one, but this time of year, the light changes fast and the sun was low enough by then that I didn't think I could get a decent picture.)

L-R:

• ModLacquer Chupacabra mini
• ModLacquer Goblin mini
• Zoya Chita
• Zoya Katherine
• Zoya Chyna
• Essence Beauty Beats As Long As You Love Me (the Bieber polish)

The ModLacquer minis are tiny - I think it's 4ml - but I wanted to try Chupacabra so badly that I didn't care. Goblin is very cool-looking too - a green/brown duochrome. Let's see, I've talked about Chita and Katherine more than once already, I believe, and the Bieber one, too. I haven't worn Chyna yet because I'm saving it for my pre-Valentine's Day spree of reds and pinks, which is probably about to commence at any moment. (In fact it may more or less have started already, but I'll get to that in a minute.) In anticipation of that, tomorrow's post is more than likely going to be about red and pinks. I did a nail-wheel for the occasion, even.

That was the stuff that's arrived at my house most recently. I can't actually say that I've purchased most recently, because as I think I've mentioned already, I bought some stuff from Holly's blog sale and it's still in transit. (I haven't seen today's mail so it may be here already.) Here's what was still in the bin that I've been throwing recent purchases into:

(starting with the one on the far left, then across the top)

• China Glaze Agro
• Orly FX Intergalactic Space
• Orly Purple Poodle 
• Rococo EmpoweRED
• Rococo EmpoweRED toner
• Rococo Stone Cold Karma
• Pahlish Blood of the Mountain
• Pahlish Pyrite
• Zoya Chita and Katherine
• Jin Soon Gossamer

I just realized that there is a Rococo missing - Darkest Emerald. It's untried as yet, so I'm sure I'll get a picture of it sooner or later. Also, if you're wondering about the EmpoweRED thing, check back tomorrow. It's on the new nail wheel. (You may notice that the red Zoya was also missing, but I realized that when I took the picture, since I knew I had three new Zoyas, just like everybody else in North America. I just didn't bother tracking it down.)

I'm wearing Blood of the Mountain, which is what I meant when I said I might have started with the reds and pinks already. It doesn't feel like a Valentine's color, but it is red, a very dark red - it really does look like blood, especially in low light. It lights up beautifully in the sunshine, though. (I had a couple of tries at capturing it in the light, but I never got even a halfway-decent picture. Go look at somebody else's, instead.)

Stash - Revlon

The Revlon portion of my stash:

L-R across the top and then bottom:

• Revlon Parfumerie Pink Pineapple and China Flower (both as yet untried)
• Scandalous - a purple glitter (more on this one below)
• Vixen
• Plum Attraction
• Strawberry Electric
• Not So Blueberry (scented)
• (starting the bottom row) Nail Art Neon (dual-ended wand) in Ultraviolet
• Orbit (Nail Art Moon Candy)
• Blackout
• Colorstay Amethyst
• Colorstay Rainforest
• Colorstay Basecoat
• Colorstay Topcoat
• (old) Colorstay Always Sheer Bliss - these are sitting on top of the little bottles of topcoat that came with them! one for each color
• (old) Colorstay Continuous Cranberry and topcoat
• Chroma Chameleon Topaz
• (upside down) bottle of Top Speed topcoat which I have now talked about three days in a row!

Oldest

I mentioned that old bottle of Top Speed, and here it is, along with some other things that I picked out as being among my oldest polishes that I still own:

• Top Speed topcoat
• Jet-Set Departure
• Cover Girl Boundless Color Gold Rush
• Colorstay Continuous Cranberry
• Colorstay Always Sheer Bliss

(I wasted a ton of money over the years on pale pinks, especially the super-pale ones like the one on the right. I don't know why I kept thinking if I tried another brand I'd decide I liked it!)

I don't know how accurate my memory is about when I bought what, really. I suspect all of these are maybe 4 years old, at the very least, because that was when I started to get more seriously interested in nail polish, and at least a few of them are considerably older than that. I think actually some of my OPIs may be just as old as these or older, too - in fact, I know some of them date back at least to sort of the mid-2000s, although that's about as good a date I can put on them at this point. (I do know that we moved cities in late 2008, so I can date things by that if I have any memory of where I bought them. The OPIs mostly came from Kroger's in Galveston, thus pre-2008.) It's hard to look at OPIs and think, "That one's old," though, because their bottles haven't changed much in years.

Somebody somewhere was talking about the first polish they ever owned, and mine was a Revlon. I can't remember the name of the color right now but I think I would recognize it if I saw it - it was in production for years after I bought it sometime in the mid-70s. It was a very bright fuchsia, and at the time it seemed a bit daring! That might not be the first polish I ever wore, because I have a vague memory of my mother letting us paint our nails a few times before that, but it was the first one I ever bought with my own money.

Bieber sandwich

This was one of those manicures where I just kept doing layers until I arrived at something I liked.

Intergalactic Space had some noticeable tipwear, after I washed my hair, and I was trying to decide whether to try to go another day with it - only then I broke a nail, and so I just threw in the towel on that. (It wasn't too hard to get off - I suspect all those layers of Katherine underneath the glitter helped a bit!) I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I started digging around in the "recently-acquired" bin, and ended up with the Justin Bieber polish. It has a name but it's a bit long and I suspect this polish will forever remain filed under "Bieber" in my brain. (It's "As Long As You Love Me." I think. I assume that's one of his songs.) Anyway, it is a pretty polish, despite its origins - gray with shimmer - but I have to admit that I partly picked it because I knew I could layer over it. The next thing I picked out of the bin was the snowman polish, because it was silvery holo shimmer and it seemed like it would go well with the gray.

So, thus far we have:

1. Nail Nutrition (and no other basecoat, which might be why this is already chipping)
2. Bieber
3. Bieber
4. Snowman
5. Snowman (ok, its name is Sparkle, and I don't have any excuse about name-length on this one, but I still think of it as Snowman, just the same) - then I realized Katherine was still in this bin, too, and I thought, "Jelly sandwich!" and so...
6. Katherine
7. Katherine
8. Top Speed topcoat

The bottle of Top Speed that I used for this didn't even make it into my line-up of topcoats - it was a black bottle, and I suspect it's fairly old. (I know they're still making Top Speed but I'm not even sure what bottle it comes in nowadays.) I decided afterwards that this bottle is going to live in my glove compartment as an emergency backup until either it gets used up or it get hot enough that having combustibles in my car makes me nervous. But it's winter, even here, so that's a couple of months away.

(In fact we are supposed to have snow on Tuesday. I'll believe it when I see it.)

(Regarding the title: I started trying to think of even worse variations on the already fairly lame joke about a Bieber sandwich, but I decided that was bad enough, and I should stop there. You're welcome.)

Intergalactic Space

This is Orly Intergalactic Space over Zoya Katherine:

I bought it without ever having seen swatches, and I was a bit worried, but actually I quite like it. It's a black jelly with a lot of bronze glitter, very scattered larger white circles - you can see one on my index finger - and some other colors of smaller glitter as well. I love anything with bronze or copper, so I can be counted on to love this one as well, I guess. I had put Katherine on as a syrup mani, so it gets lighter towards the bottom of the nail, and I think you can see that a bit if you look close. (But not unless you're really paying attention!)

So where did I come by Intergalactic Space? you might wonder. Well, I said I was going to slow down on buying stuff, I didn't say I was going to stop. I went in Sally Beauty because I had a $5 off coupon that expired the end of January, and I wanted to use it before I forgot. I bought a big bottle of acetone and some nail files that were on sale, and then I bought 2 Orlys, because they were buy 1, get one free. (The other one is Purple Poodle, which I bought half for the name.) I did make it through a trip to Walgreen's and a couple of trips to HEB in the last week or so without buying any polish, but I also bought some stuff from Miss Holly's blog sale so I can't exactly feel virtuous. I didn't go hog-wild with that, at least.

Oh, and I also bought a snowman polish that was marked down, just because I never have had any of those and it was cheap. It was called "Sparkle" so it looked like something I'm likely to use!

Also, I saw somewhere that Sally Beauty was going to have Finger Paints on sale in February, so I am already plotting to get a couple of those. If I can at least keep from buying anything else until then, I'll be pretty happy.

Indies, part 2

First of all, it occurs to me looking at yesterday's entry that everybody in the world probably does not know what nail people mean, exactly, when they talk about indies. So here's a little bit of explanation (and if you don't want to read it, then skip down past the jump & the picture for the continuation from yesterday). The short answer is, indies are polishes that people mix up at home, in their basement or wherever. A few years back, you'd hear people who were into nails talking about "frankens" all the time, and it mystified me for a while, but I finally figured out that it meant home-mixed nail polish. (I guess the term comes from "Frankenstein"?) The most common franken, I think, was that you just took some glitter and poured it into a bottle of clear nail polish, to see what you'd come up with. So indie polishes are (at their simplest, anyway) just a refinement on that: some people got good enough at it to start making nail polish for their friends, and then they put up little stores for their polishes on Etsy, and voila! before you know it there's a whole industry of these things.

I saw an estimate one time a year or so ago that there were 1000 brands of indie polish, and if anything I'd guess that that's conservative. I wouldn't recommend going out and starting your own indie polish business now if all you want is to get famous and rich, because the market is pretty saturated. But it became an industry because people will buy these polishes, because the women making these polishes (as with most things nail-polish-related, it's almost all women) were doing far more interesting things playing with nail polish at home than what the big polish companies were doing. I suppose the secret, to some extent, is that the makers here are also the consumer, so they know what the consumer wants, where the big companies didn't. And a few of them have gotten fairly famous - I'm not so sure about rich. But there are definitely at least a few people who make their living at it!

(back to specific indies after the jump)