Ugh

Ugh, blogger is driving me crazy!!! Some blogs don’t allow me to use a name/url when I comment, so I have to comment using my manicuremania.wordpress.com address. GRRRRRRR

Here’s my actual current blog:

My Latest Obsession

Big Exciting Move!

Well, exciting to me, anyway.

I’m moving my blog off of WordPress.com and over to my own domain – mylatestobsession.com.

I am looking forward to having more control over my content using self-hosted WordPress, but the real reason for the move is that honestly…how long is this nailpolish mania going to last? Sure, right now I’m all about the nailpolish, but a couple of months ago I was making jewelry, and before that I was making mosaics, and before that…knitting, maybe? I don’t even remember.

Anyway, I figure that on the new domain, I’ll be able to post about all that stuff and not feel guilty because it’s a nail blog and doesn’t belong there.

There’s a new feed for the new site, and I think that current subscribers will need to resubscribe over there. I think. I still don’t entirely understand Feedburner, to be honest, but I HAVE a new feed over there, at least. So please click over to the new site and re-subscribe if you’d like to continue receiving updates!

I’m not entirely done tweaking things over there, appearance-wise, but I spent so much time struggling with WordPress to move my posts over last night that once I finally got it fixed I decided it is TIME TO MOVE so I never have to do that again.

Cover Girl – Cosmic Blue

I LOVE this color!!! It’s such a delicate blue. Shimmery, of course. Once again, all my old Nailslicks have become extremely thin, which is odd because I remember them being irritatingly thick 15ish (wow) years ago when I used to wear them regularly.

Essie – Big Bag Theory

Pretty pretty! Once again, my camera cannot take pictures of reds though. Strangely, the bottle picture is fine, but the nail picture has turned cherry red as always, I don’t get it! This polish is yet another that proves that I was entirely wrong in my dislike of Essie-this and every other Essie I’ve tried since deciding they sucked has just been lovely.

Lay It On Me [blue]

So first of all, this polish does not work. And that strikes me as an odd thing to say, because I’m not really sure what I’m expecting the polish to do. How could this possibly do anything special??? Well, it’s good that my hopes weren’t high, because…it doesn’t do anything special. Ah well, the bottle is really neat looking!

On the nail it turned into a well-mixed, opaque light blue with glitter-bumps. I can’t see it ever looking any different than that, because the brush doesn’t really reach far enough down into the bottle to get to the red layer.

I’m ashamed of these pictures – somehow they’re blurry, and I don’t particularly want to use this polish again to redo them, so this is it!

Maybelline – Night Affair

I am having some issues. First, I took pictures of the polish I wore today (one of my Dollar Tree Maybellines, Mod Mauve), then immediately redid my nails, and when I plugged my memory card into my PC…no Mod Mauve pictures. WTF? Maybe the card wasn’t seated properly in the camera. And THEN. None of my pictures will upload to WordPress tonight! My connection seems slow this evening, I guess I’ll just try again tomorrow.

This color is pretty blah. Very pretty in the bottle, but on the nail it’s very dark and the sparkles don’t show up very well. It actually is red, just a sort of brownish red. The glitter in this is both red and silver. 3 coats:

Orly – Glam Rock

This is the perfect matte, seriously.

I have really been looking forward to the Orly Metallic Matte collection, it seems like a great concept. And Glam Rock is kind of awesome, just as I hoped. I love shimmery mattes! I think it applied better than any other matte I’ve ever tried – normally they dry so fast and clump up and I end up with polish an inch thick to get it even! Not so with Glam Rock, though, and I called it even coverage after 2 coats.

Normally I can admire mattes for only a few minutes before I start itching to add glossy topcoat – but I really actually like this better in matte form. It retained a ton of its shimmer even when matte.

Here it is glossy:

Maybelline – Twinkle Twinkle

This is Twinkle Twinkle, and it’s kind of awesome. Silver glitter in a semi-jelly blue base, and the blue is light enough that the polish doesn’t look black in any light, yay! 3 coats:

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.