The Dollar Tree Pillage*

Is it crazy that when I get new polish I cannot wait to get home and post pictures of the bottles? I think yes.

So anyway. I’ve always haunted Dollar Tree stores to see if they have any good old polishes, but I’ve never found any, like ever. But, Collette inspired me with her enormous Dollar Tree haul the other day, so I got down to business today.

I hit 3 Dollar Trees before I ran out of steam, and the only one that really had anything was the first (really, really big) one. I might try a couple more stores that I know of, pretty soon, but they’re kinda small stores and I now figure that it must be the bigger stores with the nice polishes. I shall keep looking though, because I know there are more that I want – I only found two of the mattes, which is just not going to work for me.

OK, so this is what I got. With the exception of a couple of the striper poolishes, these all came from the first store I went to. The cashier seemed suspicious when I brought all these to be rung up. She asked what we were “up to,” and somehow didn’t believe me when I said I was a collector!

OK, so the stripey polishes – Art Deco by L.A. Colors – awesome!!!!! I only had a few before this. And now eleven more! I got every one they had:

• yellow: my dad declared this one “ugly” but he approved of all the pinks
• bright green
• green glitter
• blue glitter
• intense pink
• bright orange
• red glitter
• silver glitter
• baby pink
• black
• magenta

I managed to only get one dupe! OK but oddly…I have already broken two of these since I’ve been home with them tonight – one just by knocking it onto its side on my desk – the bottles just snapped apart at the necks! Weird?

And now the polishes!!! Every one is by Maybelline, and here they are again, unboxed, because I’m excited about them!

First, let’s talk about their existence at the Dollar Tree. OK, these all (except for Red Comet) seem to be normal, non-boxed polishes that were repackaged in generic Maybelline wrapping specifically for the Dollar Tree.

And…I think they are OLD, right? I keep a fairly close eye on nailpolish displays, and I don’t really remember any of these in the past few years. Plus some of them have price tags on them from other stores:

How long has it been since A) Maybelline nailpolish was under $3…or heck, under $4! and B) since stores used sticky price tags instead of scanners???? I found a reference on one blog saying that the matte collection is from the late ’90s, and I feel like that’s gotta be about right for a lot of these. Cool!!!!!!

OK, and now on to the polishes themselves. There were tons more than the ones I got, but no interesting colors besides these – just a ton of pinks, mauves, and reds. I…pretty much got every interesting color I could get my sweaty little hands on. And I’m pretty sure I squealed a lot. And there was jumping.

The mattes:

I so need to find the rest of the matte collection! I love that the trend of giving matte polishes matte bottles has kept up in the present day – it’s so cute!

• Matte Red
• Matte Gold

The aluminums:

Now, these look verrrrrry interesting. They seem to be very opaque with lots of tiny silver shimmer. Again, I’ll be on the lookout for the rest of these. The ones I found are mostly different shades of purple.

**edit** ok, I was going through and shaking all the bottles and adding thinner where needed, and I discovered that the aluminums aren’t glittery after all – once they’re all shaken up, they’re more of a metallic shimmer. The glitter seems to have…clumped up with age? They’re not quite as cool anymore!!!

• Violet Aluminum
• Plum Aluminum
• Lime Aluminum
• Purple Aluminum
• Bronze Aluminum

The glitters!:

• Shooting Stars: silver glitter and blue bar glitter – AWESOME
• Red Comet: OMG this one is so bright and gorgeous! Notice the unusual label on it…
• Bronze Beam: surprisingly pretty for a brown, lots of glitter
• Night Affair: I feel like a polish with this name should be blue, not red
• Purple Comet
• Twinkle Twinkle: I have heard that this is somewhat close to Essie Starry Starry Night, which I will toooootally never own, so yay!!! I’m excited about this one, it’s so pretty!

The random colors:

• City Slick: I adore all gray polishes.
• Indigo Chic: looks like Twinkle Tinkle without the glitter
• Blue Chill
• Mod Mauve: boring, but this kind of mauve is right up my alley
• Ruby Desire
• Khaki Fringe: very unusual color!
• Purple Rage

More randoms:

• Santa Fe
• Fuchsia Comet: pretty pink glitter!
• Orange Water: this will be horrible, but it’s cool! Nice concept but probably not the best idea really.
• Taupe Tulle: this came in a two pack with Fuchsia Comet, which I really wanted

Overall, I’m very very, verrrrrry pleased with all of these! Now I just have to figure out where the heck to PUT them!

Now I need to go get out my polish thinner and limber up my fingers to add all of these to my polish spreadsheet. Oh god, and type out labels, and swatch them on my nail wheels, and FIND A PLACE TO PUT THEM…

*Credit for the title goes to the boyfriend – he was nice enough to hold a basket and wait patiently while I looked through every single polish in the store, and he also pretty much managed to keep his appalled-ness in check. AND THEN he took me to a second Dollar Tree!

Today’s Plunder, Part One

From Ross:

Nothing much interesting at Ross last night, but I did pick up this Elf Jewel Tones set.

• Dark Navy
• Royal Purple
• an irritatingly unnamed polish: Well it looks stupid anyway, grrrr! Maybe the sticker fell off.

From Sallys:

• Fingerpaints Decked WIth Dazzle
• Orly Iron Butterfly
• Orly Solid Gold
• Orly Glam Rock

I was going to only get Decked With Dazzle, but when I plopped my stuff down on the counter to check out, I noticed the display of the new Orly matte metals next to the register, and my hand just swooped out and grabbed them all at once! I hadn’t realized this collection was out yet, it looks verrrrrry interesting to me.

Zoya:

• Irene
• Veruschka: gorgeous, I can’t wait to try this one
• Kate: Pretty!
• Suvi
• Sunny: odd color…sort of a shimmery orangy pink
• Midori: My only Green Friday dupe
• Roxy: THIS IS SO PRETTY

Zoyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaa! This is my Green Friday order. I was sooo wiped out from all the other online shopping I’d been doing for the past couple of days that I pretty much just picked three random polishes to get my free greens. The other two greens are backordered.

Bleh!

It is crazy and ridiculous even to me, that I can stand in front of my ~200 polish collection and think “I have nothing to wear!” but it’s true. I’m bored with everything I have. I haven’t even worn most of them still but…yeah, I have nothing to wear.

I’ve got my Zoya free green polishes coming in…tomorrow, I think? so maybe that’ll give me something exciting to use for a few days. And I *still* need to hunt around for the Wizard of Oz collection…it seemed to be selling out when I looked last week though, I wonder if I’ll have problems finding it. And I’ve been wanting to make an order at Dollar Nail Art, because OMG, what a concept! AND, I’ve been thinking about Nfu.Ohs also lately…hmmm…I wonder where one can buy them, I don’t really think I’ve ever heard. Oh, and I need to make a new Diamond order…sigh. The fun part is the shopping, I think!!!!

Just now I finally broke down and applied a polish I’ve already previously featured on this blog, China Glaze 2Nite.

Does everyone have this problem of streakiness and seperation with holos? I only have two holos, but MAN they are horrible to apply. This is one coat, and I think it will take three to finish.

It is…lumpy! It’s almost like oily…stuff…is seperating from the polish on my nail, and God forbid that I try to go back over a wet nail with the brush to fix a smudge or lump – then it even rubs off the dry bottom layer!  It is so weird and terrible, this seems like the type of polish that should glide on extremely thinly, but it is NOT. Is this just a trait of holos, or what?

bumblebee manicure

Ehhhh, I’m gonna go ahead and call this one a fail. I need more practice at making my stripes staight and even. I used Barielle Lemondrops & black Stripe Rite polish. I did sort of a half moon first, then stripes down the rest of the nail.

OPI – Russian Navy Suede

Russian Navy Suede…oh how I love it. It’s matte…but with truckloads of silver shimmer.

As pretty as I think it is, and as much as I like the idea of matte, I do like my nails to be shiny, so I added some Seche, and then it just POPPED. It turned a little darker with the glossy topcoat.

A comparison shot. Ahhhhhhhhhh.

Look at the shimmer!!!

And a closeup, sans topcoat.

Out-gray-geous Konad

This is of course a base of Barielle Out-Gray-Geous, konaded with plate konaded with plate 64 and Barielle U-Concrete-Me.

This is not good. I was trying for something subtle with the two different gray finishes, but I don’t like the plate, I think. It just looks…sloppy.

Randomness pt 2

So I found a theme! It is the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen. Every other WP theme I’ve tried has been modifiable, but only through editing the PHP and CSS files. And I can do that…but I’m uncomfortable making large changes to someone else’s code, it would take forever unless I built it from scratch myself and knew where everything was and how it was specified…and yeah actually, that would still take forever!

But then I found Atahualpa. Crazy name, but OMIGOODNESS. There are options to edit the theme directly from the WP admin panel. Like, a LOT of options. In fact it’s so thorough that so far, I haven’t found anything that I want to change and can’t. I have not once had to edit a php or CSS file (and I don’t think I would anyway, I suspect making random changes under the hood could really screw this up). It is amazing and awesome. LOOK AT THIS!!!!!

OK, so in nail news, I went to Rite Aid today to pick up a few things. Since when did Rite Aid start selling Sinful Colors? I thought that was a Walgreen’s brand.

I guess I was in a sort of neutral  color mood, huh?

• Wet n Wild Craze in Shield and Goldmine
• Sally Hansen Opulent Cloud
• Wet n Wild Flirt Gumdrop

And also I saw these and couldn’t resist because I can’t figure out how they could possibly work, or even really what they’re supposed to do. And fromt he small amount of testing I’ve done with them so far…my suspicion was right, they’re crap.

Oh, and I am so all over the Zoya Green Friday promotion this week. If Zoya continues to give me free stuff, I might go broke, though.

randomness

So I’ m off all week and planning to make the move onto self-hosted wordpress finally. I bought a domain months ago in preparation, but I’ve been holding off because it will really be a ton of work. I consider myself fairly internet/computer savvy, but I just don’t really understand feedburner (one of the reasons I want to move to self-hosted) all that well at all.

Plus I’ll have to mess around with themes too…I have extreeeeeemely specific ideas for that, and I haven’t been able to find a theme that meets my standards as of yet. I want a 3-column theme that is widget ready and can make use of a customer header graphic. It needs to be simple, preferably will allow me to change the colors, and also not stupid. The sidebar widget lists have to be spaced correctly, too – a lot of themes that meet my requirements otherwise  have irritating spacing on the widget lists, and I just cannot deal with that. I’m considering making a theme from scratch, but…I’m not sure I want to sink that amount of my vacation-time into it – last time I made a theme it took foreverrrrr. I really love my current theme a whole lot – the ONE thing it lacks is the ability to add a header image.

Speaking of that, I’m working on designing my new header image…this is what I have so far.

Still needs a bunch of work just for that image, then I’ll need to incorporate it into an actual banner.

Also, I’ve found out that the Wizard Of Ooh Ahz collection is available for order now, and I’ve been waiting and waiting for it! And even though the swatches I’ve seen recently of it aren’t really what I was expecting, I am still going to buy it. But, transdesign doesn’t seem to have either the set or the individual Dorothy Who? polish available for order, and that’s bugging me.

OK, back to my banner-making!

Barielle – Suntini

Suntini was a random polish I picked out when I made my big Barielle order a while back, and I really didn’t expect to like it this much! It’s a seriously bright orangy red, and I really love it. Actually I’ve loved all the Barielle reds I got. Sadly, my camera is incapable of taking pictures of red polish.

Oh, and this particular polish wasn’t one of the crazy horribly thick Barielles, by the way.

Zoya Hot Lips

OK first of all, this is not a makeup blog, and I don’t really want to make posts about non-polish related stuff, but I figure this is…sort of polish-adjacent because these glosses came from Zoya, and plus there don’t seem to be all that many Hot Lips swatches floating around on the net, so I figure I’ll contribute.

In the free Hot Lips promotion recently, I got Visa, Luck, and Shimmer.

So, Shimmer is less sheer than I had thought it would be. It’s a tad bit lighter than my natural lips, and pretty sparkly. The glitter in this isn’t gritty or annoying, but it’s definitely there. Shimmer smells like raspberries.

Luck is my favorite – it’s just slightly darker than my lips, and also very glittery. This one was the oddball of the bunch – it smells different (like bubblegum!) and it had a different applicator shape.

Visa I don’t really like. It’s surprisingly dark, and so I found it really difficult to apply evenly. Dark. DARK. A very nice color, but just not for me, maybe I”ll give it away. I tried to get gloss that was sort of out of my comfort zone since I tend to only wear makeup that exactly matches my face, but this one’s just too dark for me. A normal person would probably love it though. No shimmer in this one, and it also smells like raspberries.

So, the applicators. Luck was weirdly the only one with a “normal” rounded lip gloss top, the other two were just straight squeeze tubes – not really convenient for applying gloss directly to your lips, since I consider gloss more of a “shove it in your pocket and maybe apply a few times throughout the day without a mirror” kind of thing than an “apply with a makeup brush and a mirror” thing.

I like the shape of the tubes – they’re short and fat rather than inconveniently long and thin – good for the aforementioned shoving in pockets! Overall, these are very nice glosses. Not too sticky, huge range of colors, non-gritty glitter, the lip-lasting time was about what you’d expect for a gloss – reapply often and you’re fine.