7/24/09

Today's Color

This is Sinful Colors, Show Me The Way. The crumbum picture doesn't do much for the color, it's much more glittery than it seems here. I am warming up to this color, it's a little ho-hum after just taking another green off my nails, but that will change when I change it to For Audrey.

This polish went on okay -- three coats shown here -- but it's not as shiny as I'd like and it has the unfortunate effect of looking kind of bumpy (although it is very smooth). Anyway, I'd wear it again.

Sinful Colors Show Me The Way

7/23/09

Where Do We Go From Here

I'm still wearing this god damned OPI Green-wich Village on my nails and I kid you not when I say it still looks exactly like this. Not a chip, nothing. Maybe it's the new top coat? Which I will have you know I got free at Ulta. Anyway, normally this would be a good thing but now it's bumming me out because I usually like to wait for one manicure to give up the ghost before I start the next one. Yeah, first-world probs.

So, for the next one I'm going to use the Sinful Colors Show Me The Way that was selected last time. But I'm going to go ahead and put up a poll because whee, time-wasting! The poll is in the sidebar deal there to your right.

For now I'm linking to these colors because my photos do a crap job of really capturing these colors. I use a fixed focal length lens on my camera and it's hard to get close-up shots with it, plus I am usually too lazy to put the zoom on, so...for the time being, please enjoy the pictures taken by other, more industrious people.

UPDATE: Never mind, the stupid poll widget gadget thingo won't let me include a link (which, really -- GENIUS, Blogger.com), so I'm just including the list here. Sigh. Leave opinions in the comments.

China Glaze, For Audrey
China Glaze, Purple Panic
Milani, Key Lime Shine

7/20/09

Antiquing

My mom has this habit of slipping me cash when I leave her house after a visit. This started in high school or college, when I would leave home for a play rehearsal or work or whatever, and she would run out the door after me with a five dollar bill "in case you need a pop or a magazine or something." She still does this, sometimes with a ten or a twenty due to The Inflation. So I told her how I'm all a-twitter over nail polish lately and when I left my parents' house this morning she handed me a ten dollar bill "to buy some nail polish."

So yes, I made a bold and now somewhat false statement that I wasn't going to buy more colors until I tried all the ones I own. But I can't disobey my mother.

In order to make the most of my $10 windfall, I stopped at the dollar store, hoping I might find something sort of weird, and lo, I discovered a treasure trove of Maybelline Express Finish matte polishes from the 1990s. I never had these polishes the first time around, but I did have a bottle of something called Matte Maker, which rendered any polish non-shiny. I have always been kind of sorry I got rid of that stuff, although you can of course buy similar formulas now.

Eff why eye, this nail polish thing is not entirely a recent development, it just represents the awakening of a long-dormant strain of beauty product obsessing. In college I was always a sucker for eyeshadow. Circa 1996 it was tiny hair clips and fake henna tattoos, and then it was lipsticks, then hair products. And I bought my share of silver glitter nail polish -- aspirational beauty for the post-millennial possibility of space travel, I guess -- for Y2K revelry. And then somewhere along the line I ditched most of it.

Anyway, I think for a while I kind of got in a rut with my look and I've been addressing that in a number of ways, and one of those ways is that I'm having a good time with some ridiculous nail polish colors. And yes, I feel like kind of a dipshit even saying, "my look," but you know what I mean. Or maybe you don't, which is fine. I am having a good time. This is a good summer, which sounds weird for someone who got laid off two months ago, but I guess you just never can tell about how things like that are going to work.

Dollar store treasures

So here are my antique Maybelline nail polishes, a mid-1990s time capsule of sorts. I got Matte Grey, Matte Ruby, Matte Sapphire and Matt Grape. I may try them at some point soon, or I may save them for fall. Fun in a bottle!

Oh, All That Stuff Is Here Now

It occurred to me that maybe some regular readers of my other blog were getting tired of all the nail talk, so I moved all the nail talk to its own place. So, you can ignore it if you want to, but you're here already, so stick around and see how it goes.

Now over the weekend I asked the Internet what color I should put on my nails next, and the Internet was all, "Ooh! Ooh!" and picked the color. And then I went to Ulta and it cast a spell on me and I bought a couple new colors. So I painted my nails Green-wich Village by OPI.

OPI Green-wich Village

To be fair...the Internet picked green, and this is green, although this is more of a froggy Kermit green rather than a oh-no-you-ripped-off-my-skin-and-now-you-know-I'm-an-alien-lizard green. Which is not to say I'm not excited about wearing that green, I am. I'm just going to do it another time.

Anyway, maybe it's time to do a sort of poll thingie on the sidebar there, we can leave it up for a while and put this matter to the populace. Because it's important? No, no it isn't important. But it might be amusing, sort of.