Celeb City, Hurricane

This is Xtreme Wear Celeb City and Square Hue Hurricane:

Celeb City is a super-bright silver metallic - not quite a chrome, but close - and really I rarely wear it because it's so bright it's kind of annoying to me. (I should try matteing it down and see what happens.) Hurricane is the darker one above it, it's sort of a very grayed-out silver or maybe it's really just a gray with a lot of silver shimmer in it. (Square Hue calls it a "platinum metallic" but as a person who lives in hurricane country, I can tell you that I think of it as the gray of storm clouds.)

I talked more about the names of the polishes in the Square Hue 2000s collection the other day, so I'm not going to repeat all of that. See over here. As far as availability, Hurricane is not listed on the Square Hue singles page, and I don't see Celeb City on the Xtreme Wear page either. So if you wanted these I guess you'd have to look outside the normal channels. Celeb City was around for a while so I don't imagine it'd be too hard to find, though. Hurricane might be more difficult. (On the other hand there are dozens of polishes like Celeb City, at least. Not so many like Hurricane.)

City Of Ashes, Luna

This is Esmaltes da Kelly City of Ashes and Zoya Luna:

These are not anything alike, but I think I didn't really have anything much like City Of Ashes so Luna just got randomly stuck next to it. Or maybe it wasn't so random, actually, because now that I think about it you can describe these in the same way: they're both silver glitter in a gray base. They're just not at all the same gray - or even the same glitter. City of Ashes is fairly large silver glitter in a medium-gray base. Luna is silver microglitter in a pale gray base, like, dove-gray. You can't really see it in this picture because all you can see is the glitter, but I swear, the base is gray. It's not on Zoya's website any more because it's discontinued, so I can't point to it there - let's see, here's The Swatchaholic, looks like you can see the gray there, a bit better. This was from the utterly insane UltraGlitter collection, way back in 2009 - that was before I discovered Zoya, myself. But you could still get these a couple of years later when I finally did, and I wish I'd gotten at least one more of them, really. Luna is really awesome jelly sandwich material, that's my favorite thing to do with it.

Esmaltes da Kelly is a Brazilian indie, I believe - you can get some of her polishes on Color4Nails, but not this one. At the time I bought it I didn't even really know what the hell it was, but Llarowe was having a sale and I was like, oh, what the heck. It doesn't even say the brand name on it, and I wasn't paying that much attention when I threw it in my cart, so I had to puzzle that part out later on. Since everything about it is in (what I assume is) Portuguese, I'm not 100% sure what the name refers to, either, and Google Translate is not much help. But the only City of Ashes I know of is the Cassie Clare book, so that's what it's named after in my head, anyway.


Added: I went on at some length about COA being a "mystery" in this post back when I first got it.

Trailer Trash, Never Forget

This is Hard Candy Trailer Trash and Square Hue Never Forget:

What was I thinking when I put these two in the same picture? It's pretty much the ridiculous and the sublime, name-wise. (Or at least an attempt at the sublime, I'm not sure I'd say it was successful.) But actually the polishes are pretty similar antique-silver-foil things, although Never Forget is slightly more grayish. I don't have good notes on this but I believe that Trailer Trash is more sheer, because I know I spent a whole winter layering it over practically everything I wore, some years ago.

Hard Candy used to have a bunch of polishes with names like this, in the old days - Trailer Trash, Jailbait, Scam. I've always thought they were pretty funny, and I was sorry when the newer (less hip, more Walmart-friendly) version of Hard Candy got rid of the goofy names.

Meanwhile, more recently, Square Hue walked themselves into the name problem when they did the "Decades" collection in 2015 - the problem of what to do about the 2000s, that is. I suppose that they knew what they were gettng into. (They really were trying for the sublime and the ridiculous, though - it's a three polish set, for the 2000s - the others are Hurricane, presumably for Katrina, and... wait for it... Idol. As in American Idol, yeah. They're all silver/grays, too, so I'll be probably talking about the other two of these really shortly.) Honestly, I think doing a 9/11-themed polish was a mistake. Giant tragedies and nail polish just really shouldn't intersect, in my opinion - that pretty much goes for both Never Forget and Hurricane. Your mileage may vary, of course. (I'll just refer back to this entry when I get to Hurricane in a in a few days.)

You can't get Trailer Trash except maybe on eBay. (Hmm, it's only $13.99, actually - guess it's not that HTF.) You actually can still get Never Forget as a single bottle from Square Hue.

Added: I just noticed in this picture that this is Trailer Trash layered over what looks like black:

(the same nail is visible in the first picture above as well) - I'm pointing it out because I mentioned that I used to use this for layering, and I forgot that I had tried it while I was doing the swatching for this wheel.

New makeup

I bought a little set of lip stains from Sephora, plus some Maybelline products from the grocery store. I really am on a roll of trying out different liquid lip products lately - I'm a bit behind the curve on that, as usual. Everybody else I know who's into makeup has been buying them for a year or two now.

This little set is still available on Sephora's website as of the time I'm writing this. It's only $12 so it's nicely priced, although these are very small - only about a quarter of the size of the full-size ones. But on the other hand that's actually the equivalent of a full-size one for less than the price of the full-size one (which is $14) so I guess that's still pretty reasonable if you want to try out different colors or for a gift. If you've been following my many lip purchases lately you know that I do both those things - I break these sets up and keep the ones I like the best and give the others away. (The people I give gifts to are gonna be out of luck if they like the same colors I do, I guess!)

The box didn't say what was what and there are only tiny, barely-legible numbers on the bottom of these, but what I deciphered there does seem to match up. The four colors (L-R if I've gotten this right) are 14 Blackberry Sorbet, 1 Always Red, 5 Infinite Rose (which is the peachy one), and 7 Cherry Blossom. I swatched them on my wrist and they came out fairly true to what you see here, except that the blackberry one is somewhat darker than it looks here. (I tried to take a picture but it didn't come out too well!)

The other thing I bought was Maybelline foundation and concealer, at the grocery store. They had a buy one get one 50% off coupon, and I knew I wanted to try their concealer. After some waffling about what other item to buy, I bought this "Instant Age Rewind" foundation:

 I did what I usually do, which is to buy the palest color of concealer, but not the very palest foundation. After some waffling, I bought "Buff Beige" foundation and it seems to blend pretty well. I didn't really need foundation but I was interested to see if this was anything different. (I'm not really sure it is, but it seems ok so it may end up in the little makeup kit that lives in my car. Right now I have the Mally powder foundation in that kit, and I don't really love it.)

And lastly, here's the samples that came with the Sephora purchase, all perfumes this time:

I've tried all but the "Wild Child" one, which is a one-use sort of thing so I want to save it for when I'm actually going out. I sniffed the Moschino Fresh and the Sud Pacifique and they both smelled pretty good. (I remember the Moschino fashion show where there were some looks with this theme - apparently that was Spring 2016 - but I didn't know they'd actually come out with a perfume to match it!)

TBT: Carter

For Throwback Thursday: Zoya Carter (a Pixie Dust), with and without topcoat:

In this case, I completely prefer the top-coated version. It is just so gorgeous.

NOTD: Briarwood

I'm wearing A England Briarwood:

It's a holo, but you can't really see that in this light. Here I'd say this just looks like your basic dark brown with maybe a little bit of red-tones. I can see the holo in it when I look close, but it's cloudy here today so I never got to see it light up at all. Hopefully the sun will come out later in the week while I still have this on.

I thought about mixing it up and wearing, y'know, purple or something (I have that purple China Glaze from the fall collection, that was what I was thinking of) but then again I did wear purple last week under my sugar skull decals (a much paler one, but still definitely purple) and I figure I need to wear the browns now because I know better to think I will wear them later in the winter. It's weird because I like browns, but I don't wear them often at any other time of the year. Maybe I need to shake up my habits there.

Steel Guitar, Steely Gaze

This is Orchid Steel Guitar and Hard As Nails Steely Gaze:

These are awfully similar-looking dark shimmery grays, on the wheel. (Of the two dark grays, I'm pretty sure Steely Gaze is on top and Steel Guitar is below that. Steely Gaze is maybe just a hair darker, but it's hard to tell.) I'm not sure if you can get either of these any more - Sally Hansen seems to have discontinued all the Hard As Nails colors, because I only see the strengthener listed. Orchid is a store-brand, and while the store in question (H-E-B, a grocery chain) is only in Texas, there are a few colors online - but this doesn't seem to be one of them. That's not to say it's discontinued, I'm not sure about that part. I know there were still far more than 7 colors in the store the last time I looked. (This link on their website should get you eventually to those 7 polishes, as well as showing you other Orchid-brand products, mostly skincare products and soaps. They also have nail polish in a pump bottle that I really love, although that's apparently not on the website either.)