Teigen

This is Zoya Teigen:

I had this in with the reds but it's really more of a dark pink, with some copper sparkle. It's from the Ignite collection, which Zoya called "liquid metal" and which I believe was a big seller. (Others I have from this collection are Sansa, Remy, and India. Hmm, actually I count six of these so I may have the whole set - the two I didn't see on the first pass are Autumn and Yuna.)

Added: not that anybody really needs help looking things up on Zoya, but this is a current color.

Wicked

This is Essie Wicked:

This is a very old Essie color, but it's still current. It's Essie #249 and I think it originally came out in the (late?) 90s when Chanel Vamp/Rouge Noir was all the rage. I got my bottle from KarenD a few years ago so I don't know exactly how old it is, but this is one of the few colors that's been steadily in production all that time. Anyway, very dark & vampy and all of that - almost black in some lights, which makes it different from the rest of this wheel. (The other dark swatch at the top of the wheel in this picture is Ignite, which I talked about the other day, but it's not actually near as dark.) You can see in the bottle that Wicked has some magenta highlights but it's a creme, not a shimmer and you definitely don't see any flash like that on the nail. Essie calls it a "sinister red" which I find sort of comical but Essie always seems to be drawn to the dramatic.

Added: a piece from Byrdie with lots of info about Vamp/Rouge Noir - which dates back to 1994, originally. It seems to me that I've seen a late 90s date for Wicked but I haven't been able to find that again. Finding historical info on nail polish (and I mean, well up into the 00s, even) is often really difficult.

There are a lot of dupes for these, I believe, but the only one I have that I think is really close is Revlon Vixen. This blog post is a couple of years old, but shows several of them.

Glitterati

This is Illamasqua Glitterati:

You can see from my tick-marks on the wheel that two coats of this is pretty darn opaque. It's dark-red glitter with what looks like a dash of holo glitter. This was a holiday set that I bought back at the same time they were closing Sephora by OPI out. There was this and a dark green, and while these have been discontinued for ages, I would be surprised if they aren't findable, because they hung around on clearance for ages at Sephora, and when that happens some usually end up on eBay (like here). Viridian is the name of the green that goes with it, but Glitterati is really what I bought this for.

(Aha, here it is on my nails in late 2013, so I've had this one a good while. And here is the haul post for all the Sephora stuff - with pictures that you have to scroll way down for. I happened on the SOPI closeout so early that I wasn't sure it was a closeout - a lot of the prose at the top is me wondering about that!)

Victoria

Here is NailsInc Victoria (a mini):

I don't really have a lot to say about this one - it's just a dark-red creme. But it's pretty.

Added: it finally occurred to me to check - this is still a current polish. I checked Sephora because I know they carry NailsInc, but I'm sure there are other possibilities as well. (Mine came from a set I bought at Sephora, which had a full-size NailKale base-coat and several minis, but I don't think that set is around any more.)

EmpoweRED

This is Rococo EmpoweRED:

I bought this, oh, several years ago now - my spreadsheet says 2014 - and once I knew what year to look at I found the haul entry almost immediately, because I knew it was from a bunch of stuff I bought from a 50%-off after-Christmas sale from Space.NK. This was a duo, and the other piece of it was a "toner" that was supposed to darken it. It did darken it some, four years ago, but not all that much. But I knew when I bought this that it was an experiment. I don't know anything about how it was supposed to work, technically speaking, but whatever it used to do, when I tried it again the other day, I couldn't tell that it was doing anything at all, now. (Maybe it lost potency, or something? I don't know.) So while I still have the toner, I'm giving up on trying to get it to do anything (mostly I'm just keeping it because it's a set, you know?) and I just swatched the EmpoweRED polish itself. And on that basis, it's pretty, but it's very basic-red-cream. I thought in some lights that it was slightly orange-leaning, and then here it looks like it could be slightly blue-leaning. So probably in reality it's just neutral, meaning it doesn't especially lean either way.

(I found this entry where I talk about this polish - you have to scroll down a way - and I was annoyed that I couldn't see anything the toner do anything in the swatches back then, too.)

Pretty Gritty (NOTD + swatch)

Here is Rescue Beauty Lounge Pretty Gritty:

It's a grunged-up purple with gold shimmer. This is two coats plus Seche Vite. It's close to being a one-coater but I thought it wasn't quite (quite) there.

I named this my favorite polish of 2015, but I haven't worn it in over a year, I bet. It's awesome. It's not because I got tired of it that I haven't worn it, but just that I have the attention span of a gnat sometimes.

This was part of the awesome R29xRBL collection. I have two of them - this and Bubblegum Punk - and I love them both and totally wish I'd bought more. (I poked around on eBay and there are still quite a few RBL polishes available for fairly reasonable prices - $20-30, or not much more than they cost when RBL was still in business.)

Added: note this manicure picture from 2015 where it looks much brighter. I don't know if the polish has actually darkened over time, or if it's just the light.)

The stash project lives on!

Red is not necessarily red.

Here's an example:

I've been reswatching some of my reds, and several of the reds that I would have said were very traditional reds came out quite pinkish-looking - or maybe it would be more accurate to say they're magenta. Note the difference between this one - Sinful Sugar Sugar - and the fire-engine red on the swatch below that. I guess if they weren't right next to each other it wouldn't be so obvious, but still, it's a very significant difference..

Over two years ago now, when I started my big stash-photographing project, I started out with a post about red glitters, and then one called "Red is red" where I said that while all reds aren't necessarily the same, a lot of people never notice the differences. I was deliberately oversimplifying at the time but I don't think I was truly wrong about that. A lot of people will never notice the subtleties of nail polish, of any color, but do we nail junkies really care about that? For the most part, I'd say the answer is no. That's what makes us nail junkies.

(The chattering about my stash below is probably very tl;dr but I feel compelled to write it all down anyway.)

This week's Topic Tuesday topic was, show how you organize your stash. I looked at that a week ago and went, well, mine's a mess so I'm not talking about that - but I think actually that started something percolating in my brain. Those who have followed me for a long time have seen me go through multiple stash reorganizations over the years. I can't seem to quite settle on one way to do it. We live in an apartment so putting up a lot of shelving is more trouble than it is worth. I have a big collection of deep plastic containers of various sizes that I've mostly used for nail-polish storage, but I've gone back and forth between organizing my polishes by color, by brand, and even by season. I like the concept of "by season" because to a large extent that's really how I wear polish - but organizing my stash that way has been a bust. I have enough trouble remembering where I put a particular polish even using a much simpler system and the seasonal idea just made that worse. I think by brand is probably the easiest way, as far as finding things goes, but every time I've tried that I end up going back to doing it by color. And I think I'm giving up on seasons too and just going back to colors, again. It just seems to match up with how my brain works better. (And I've outgrown the collection of boxes, for the most part, so I'm going to Helmer-type drawers instead.)

So I started re-sorting polishes - I've got some really large plastic Container Store bins that I'm using for the colors I really have a lot of - and almost as soon as I started that, I started thinking about reswatching things I'd swatched before. There were a lot of bad pictures early on and then I remembered that I had a list of what needed retaking so now I'm working on both of those things more or less simultaneously. (My husband hates tripping over bins of polish, though, so that's giving me an incentive to keep working on the reorg part rather than just leaving them in the middle of the living room indefinitely.) And I'm amassing a bunch of swatch retake pictures (somehow the one above got on that list even though I had done a swatch entry for it before) but mostly those are not repeats, so I'll probably be back to posting those several days a week for the foreseeable future.

(I think it's probably not really true that I'm giving up on the seasonal concept completely. Probably what I'll end up with is a hybrid system - like, put my little collection of pastels together and you have "spring" - same with the very dark polishes for fall/winter. Then there's the very showy glitters which mostly get reserved for the holidays, the oranges and browns for the fall, and so forth. I only stick with seasonal polishes part of the time, but there are a good many that I think of that way.)