That's really not as terrible as I thought. On the other hand, I count 20-odd polishes plus the 5 minis. If you look at it that way, it's something like 8 polishes a month, which is kind of a lot. (Two a week, on average. That really adds up.)
I was thinking, didn't I buy some Pretty Serious? But no, that was in May, so out of the date range that I set.
---------------------------------------------- Ways you can help with Harvey relief
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Selections from the list above:
(yeah, ok, I bought some non-nail-polish stuff in there, too)
It's sort of a metallic "rose silver" (that's what the website says).
(I'm hoping this will be more flattering on me than Orly Rage, which I thought I would like but which just looks awful on me.)
Here's a history of the phrase "That's what she said" because this feels incomplete to me without mentioning the name of the polish when it's something interesting.
Also, we finally got mail last night - they haven't been delivering mail all week due to Harvey, of course - and as I figured would be the case, my Enchanted Polish that I ordered was in the mail. It's the first one I've ever bought. I will naturally have pictures of that later on.
Harvey is not supposed to hit us head-on, so we'll be fine, I'm sure. We're mostly just likely to get rained on a lot.
And well, that's true, for my husband and myself, as it turned out. We got rained on a lot, we couldn't really go further than the parking lot of our apartments for several days, we couldn't go to work (and our work ended up closing for most of that time anyway). But that was about the extent of our personal inconvenience. Where we live turns out to be the high ground of the whole town, I think, and furthermore, we live on the second floor. The power went out for a while on Friday but has stayed on ever since. And we had plenty of food and reading material and computer games to while away the time. But if you spent much time watching the news, you may have seen people who live not a mile from me. Where we live is some distance away from a big creek (we are not in the area near the reservoirs that were overflowing, we are on the other side of Houston from that) and the creek quickly overtopped its banks Saturday night and started crawling up through the neighborhoods around it. There was a little water at the far end of our street, and I'm told if you went further it quickly got deeper. That's about all I know that you couldn't get from the news or from Facebook (and I stopped looking at Facebook after a while, because too many people I know were telling stories about the water in their houses, and it was freaking me out, quite honestly). We were incredibly fortunate.
(Added, and I wish this had occurred to me before: Ways you can help)
I could stick a nail polish picture in here just to remind you what blog this is, but I've still got the same manicure (I Wand It That Way over Pixi-lated) that I had on a week ago. (Tomorrow it's going to have to go.) -- Well, ok, here's a repeat. The mani picture kind of sucked so here's just the wheel swatches - Pixi-lated is the blue on top and below that it has I Wand It That Way added:
(I really was going to post this later, but I accidentally hit post, so oh well.)
I thought I had exactly 25 SquareHue polishes, but as usual, there are strays. The lovely 5x5 grid is not actually correct. It matches the number on my spreadsheet, but what I finally figured out was that I didn't add the three I got most recently to the spreadsheet, so the numbers are off. I actually have 28, and I'll add those in later on.
My SquareHues are scattered chronologically all over the past several years - I bought a few sets in late 2014, cancelled in early 2015, subscribed again for a few months at the end of 2015 and into early 2016, and have started up again this year. And I also bought one 2016 set in a sale recently. So I have at least a couple of sets for every year since 2014. 2014 had a city theme, 2015 went decade by decade, 2016 was an adventure theme, and 2017 is various kinds of dances. I have them separated below by color, not by set, though.
I always try to take pictures of Square Hue bottles from the back, because the front label covers the polish up.
This is Odhani (from 2017), Lake Louise (2016), Akamai (2016), Lodgepole Pine (2016) and Na Prikope (2014):
The three polishes that weren't in these pictures were from the oldest and the newest sets, as it happened; they were Via Della Spiga, from the Milan set in 2014, and then Norteña, from Marinera, and Lengha from Kalbelia, both from this summer.
(I'mna have to think about favorites. I'll do another entry for that, when I decide something.)
Note that the link above for Via Della Spiga is a destash post and I remembered that, but it wasn't in the box with the rest of the destash candidates. But it's a really pretty red and I think I had been waffling and that's why it wasn't there. I suspect it's staying for now.
"Lippie" is not a word I ever say out loud - and I probably haven't typed it very often, either. But there it is in the title, anyway.
So Colourpop, famed for their lip products, finally got around to doing nail polish. I had never bought anything from them before, but they give you a $5 coupon on your first purchase, and shipping is free at $30 so that's how much stuff I bought. I got polishes and a couple of lip products for good measure, just to try them out.
First here's the lip things. I wasn't sure what I wanted, here - I always hear people talk about their matte lip products, but I usually won't wear mattes because they always feel so dry to me. So I just kind of poked around by color until I found some things I thought I'd like. Since I'm so partial to berry/purple colors, that seemed like a good way to go at it, and this is what I ended up with:
I think these are both from different collaborations. I guess Virginia is the name of a character in the show Claws, which I've never seen. And you can see the name of the collab on the lip pencil - iluvsarahii - the color is Mamacita, which is a very very dark berry purple. I've tried it and it looks good on me but it's really dark. It's not exactly an everyday color. Virginia is an Ultra Satin color, which is a nice middle ground between the mattes and the very glossy ones, and it's a bright berry. I like it.
And then there's the nail polish. Here's the verbiage they're using to promote it on the website: "Super pigmented Polish! It's long wearing, and of course made in the USA and Cruelty Free." Near as I can tell, these claims are correct. It is very pigmented, very close to a one-coater at the very least, and (with I Wand It That Way on top of Pixi-lated, no other top-coat) even on my difficult nails, it has lasted 5 days with only slight chips in the last day or so. Until yesterday it was completely pristine, which never happens with me.
It came in little boxes, which you can partially see in the picture above. Once out of the boxes they are in square bottles like SquareHue bottles.
In fact I went and pulled out a Square Hue bottle to compare:
They are both .45 oz - the bottle itself looks identical but as you can see the caps are different. The brush is what I would call a medium size - not extremely wide, but wider than some, including than Square Hue's. It did the job just fine.
Notice that Pixi-lated looks more blue in the top picture but not so much in these other two. With Wand It That Way on top, I'd say it looks more blue-green. Without it, I thought it looks somewhat more blue. It's not as pale as it looked in my NOTD picture. The rest of the cremes are quite pale, but Pixi-lated is somewhat darker.
This is Colourpop's verbiage for these; I thought they were cute. Pixi-lated (or, Pixie-lated, per the website, but that's not what the label says) - "No need to adjust your settings, this robin's egg blue is true blue." First Wings First - "With a swish and flick, this pastel lavender is pure magic" I Wand It That Way - "Believe us when we say, this clear with bright pink duochrome glitter is our fire"
What I bought is half the initial collection - the others are a very pale pink (Be Fairy Afraid, which is a great name), a pale green (Dust A Dream), and a holo top-coat (One Wish, Two Wish) which is sold out. Last I checked the other five were still in stock - they do have a limit of two bottles per color.
It looks more red in some pictures and more orange in others (see below). I would say that it's poised right in-between - a dark coral-red. I'm finding that these colors do pretty well on me, even though they're technically "warm."
I talked about buying these at the bottom of this post, but I almost forgot to talk about them once I got them. So let's talk about the KL Polishes that I bought in the sale. And below I'll get to the possible-dupe topic.
The sale was buy any 2 polishes, get Magic City free. I had already been eyeing these other two polishes - Porter Miami, from the summer collection, and That's What She Said, from the spring collection - so I figured I might as well go ahead and get them and get the free one.
That's What She Said is a metallic, but the other two are cremes, as the bulk of Kathleen's polishes are so far. (I know she wants to build up a core set of cremes, but I wish she'd release more not-cremes, because I've really liked most of the non-creme polishes she's released so far.)
I'll link Nine Zero's video again below - the thing that I was most interested in there was that Jess said that Porter Miami is really close in color to Pacific Blue (the original formula). So I tested that out and I found that she's right. Color-wise, they look exactly the same to me, although Pacific Blue is usually a one-coater and Porter is not.
(I swatched Mesmerize as well, just for a comparison. It was darker when I compared the other blues a couple of weeks ago and that hasn't changed.)
Jessface90's video:
I'll get swatches of the other two that I bought up later on.
Also this came very quick and as always, they came in an envelope but well-padded and wrapped and they were fine.
