PWI: Sally Hansen Grape Going! Plus, JERBS

For those who are following along at home, here's the interview scorecard:

• 1 (R) – A good school, a decent interview.  I wasn't smitten, and I doubt they were.  I didn't make a fool of myself but I don't expect followup.
• 2 (F) – A fantastic research fit, but a social fit that really concerned me.  OTOH, they made me an offer, and they offered me the moon and the stars.  If they want me that badly, I'm willing to try to make it work.
• 3 (G) – A fantastic research fit.  A fantastic social fit.  A fantastic place.  I would sell... something important to work there.  They loved me, too; they told me so.  But they've interviewed some truly amazing people, and it's all down to the shouting, now.  It's an engineering department.  There will be shouting.  (But please, please, please?)
• 4 (U) – Smaller school, less of a research fit, but I would fill some painfully obvious holes they have, and socially it was awesome.  People were direct, honest, forthright, and kind.  I enjoyed the heck out of my visit and I would work there if they offered.  Also, the closest to Super Woman and Dr. D of anyplace I interviewed.

I expected to hear from #3 today, but didn't.  I actually managed to work myself into a state where I was womity just from nerves.  Finally I said screw it and fell back to my usual reaction to adversity: sulking and nausea.

And, oh, food.  Coq au vin (traditional style, so it took 4 hours), cauliflower puree, skinned drumsticks in batches in the freezer, and oven-roasted Brussels sprouts in brown sugar and bacon glaze.  (Um... I have leftovers... help?)  I actually managed to fight down the urge to call an impromptu dinner party and make everyone individual Cornish game hens, but it was a near thing.

And, as happens when the going gets confusing and adult, I have been painting the crap out of my nails.  It is consequence free.

Today's offering is Sally Hansen Grape Going!:

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Reddish purple!  [hand tilt]  Bluish purple!  ...am I more excited than this warrants?

A blue-purple duochrome,* which is pretty awesome.  That said, it has some problems.  One is sheerness, as this is like 4-5 coats, meaning way more chances to screw up.

The second, and far worse, is how subtle the color shift actually is.  I needed this super-direct setting-sun light to get a real purple – the mildly uninteresting mid-tone blue on the right is more the default look.

Anyway!  Tomorrow I will hear something maybe or maybe not!  Please, um, just please cross your fingers, or pray, or whatever your superstition is and all, or nothing.  Just... please.

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* Two different colors in different lights / at different angles.  The word is also used for polishes that shift among >2 colors, which makes Grammar Hulk aaaangry because it should obviously be multichrome.  You wouldn't like me when I'm... using the red pen

Nail mechanics

Interested in the mechanics and some chemistry of nail-painting?  Possibly not!  Feel free to move on.  BUT if you are interested, here are some deets of how it all works!  Actually, all the deets.  Good grief.  Deets are long

Polarity!  Broadly, liquids come in polar (molecules have a magnetic positive and negative), and non-polar (they don't).  Water is polar; acetone and other nail polish solvents are non-polar.  Nail polish floats on water like oil.  This will matter.

Three peel-off base coats, a regular base coat, and two fast-dry top coats.  In
general, for any given painting of my nails, I will use one from each category.
(PS: augh augh now I'm noticing the numbers don't line up augh)

So the nitty gritty!

First step, for me, is always a peel-off base coat.  They don't last anywhere near as long, and the failure mode is looking down and discovering a whole nail is missing – "Now where did I leave that?" But I'd (much) rather paint my nails a new color than fuss with nail polish remover.  Also, glitter tends to mechanically block the action of remover, so glitters are a damned nightmare to remove otherwise.

The players.  I start with:

1: Nail Pattern Boldness' Glitter A-peel.  This is the only one that is regular, non-polar nail polish chemicals.  I used to use this a lot, but the solvents in nail polish eat your nails, and I'd prefer to avoid that – I only get chipping, peeling nails when I'm putting non-polar solvents on them regularly.  Including this.  So I moved on to...

2: Homemade PVA base coat.  PVA (polyvinyl acetate) is Elmer's glue (or tacky glue, outside the US), which peels off nails exactly the same as it peels off skin.  Lab Muffin is generally credited for working this out, although others have too.  It is water-soluble and polar!  So this is a bottle of Elmer's wood glue mixed with water.  It doesn't eat my nails, and it works.  Also, no fumes.

3: OPI Glitter Off.  Also PVA, and brand new to the market.  OPI is best known for their formulas, because they are amazing, so when I found out that this existed got some immediately.  This is my new best friend.  All the advantages of #2, plus it lasts about 2x as long as my homemade stuff, dries a bit faster, and really only needs one coat.

Next is a regular base coat!  This is important!  Polar base coats (PVA) don't block the sort of pigments found in non-polar solvents (all nail polish), so after either #2 or #3 I need a regular base coat to do that.  If those pigments aren't blocked, they (occasionally) soak into your nails and take up permanent residence.  Eeeww.

In case you thought the "interview nails" was entirely a problem
in my head, I've been asked about this nonsense.  I failed to use a
non-polar base coat one time.  That polish is already hall-of-shamed. :-(

4: Orly Rubberized Bonder.  This is a very popular base coat for holding polish without chipping, and it prevents the horribleness of figure 2 there.  Always use base coat, kids.  If you don't want to go peel-off, this is actually the first step.

Next is some kind of attractive polish!

You cannot tell me this is not wizardry.

Finally, a coat of fast-dry top coat.  Fast-dry top coat is the difference between bothering to paint my nails, and not.  About a minute, maybe two after application, your nails are bomb-proof and you can go about your life.  I love you chemistry!

5: Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat.  Probably the fastest-drying, and very thick, so one coat can even out glitter roughness and so on.  Magical clear nail armor.  I heart this very much.  It chips quickly, but not as quickly as the peel-off peels off, so for me it's excellent.

6: Sally Hansen Dries Instantly Top Coat.  (SH Insta-Dry, red bottle, is also good.)  Dries reasonably fast, a bit thinner than Seche Vite, but less chippy.  I use this for interview nails, which are not peel-off.

And that's it!  Glue, a regular base coat, fast-dry top coat, plus something pretty, and you're good to go.  It sounds like a lot of coats, but since the world dries faster these days, it doesn't correspond to taking forever (much less time than typing up this monstrosity!).  All you really need is base coat and color, if you're feeling minimalist.

PWI twofer: Wet'n'Wild Sophisticated Lady and Sally Hansen Ice Queen

I bought this at the same time as Wet'n'Wild Champagne Toast, from the same display and, apparently, in the same mood.  Behold!

Wet'n'Wild Sophisticated Lady:

pink nail polish is pink

I don't really get the name.  It's pink.  What's sophisticated about pink?  I mean it's too pale to be bubblegum pink, but?  ...whatever.  It's pretty, it's subtle, it's fine.  I feel like if I mixed this and Champagne Toast  I'd have a more opaque Nomad's Dream.  Nice to have around.

Then, because I make the same mistakes over and over, I layered on the partially-contrasting Sally Hansen Ice Queen:

Bugz!  Little teal bugs on my hand!  Ugh.

Big pink glitter, big teal glitter, teeny iridescent multicolored sparkles.

This does a good job of showing why I don't really like multicolored glitter.  Up close, it looks fine, but from any distance the teal glitter just looks like I got scunge on my hands and should wash them.  Also, getting the big hex glitters out was a giant pain; getting this many glits took three-ish coats and a mountain of dabbing.

So I'll either get rid of this or use it for the teeny sparkles.  Meh.

PWI twofer: Sally Hansen Celeb City and Sinful Colors Queen of Beauty

Sometimes it's worth posting base color + topper separately; often it's not. This is that second kind.

Base coat (which is nice on its own, I mean, I wore it), is Sally Hansen Celeb City:

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Left is daylight, right is indoor, cuticles are covered in silver. Not easy to
photograph! It's no Push'n'Shove,* but it's a perfectly nice metallic.

Pretty color, nice and even in two coats. It's shiny but maayyybe the glitters are too coarse to call it a foil? Nah, foil. (I think I'm going to do a post on all these made-up domain specific words.)

Later, topped with Sinful Colors Queen of Beauty:

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Do I need to say which is which? No, I do not. Because the
indoor photos are always the ones where I'm in last-stage jaundice.

My camera haaaates this. It took a while to get two even borderline decent photos, I mean, for heaven's sake. Go look at KittyPNB's swatches if you care, she has an actual camera. :-P

But basically, it looks like little disco balls. Just straight-up silver glitter. This is 4 [!] coats. I doubt it would be opaque without Celeb City undies, but it was pretty at every stage.

As a side note... who comes up with these names? Some of them are nicely descriptive (Champagne Toast), some are just eh (like, Celeb City, once I see the polish I can make some connection),  some of them are straight-up meaningless (Cassie, Hot Wired), and some of them are just weird and misleading (Pull Over is an orange-ish yellow). It's like paint samples, which are also named by people tripping so hard they can taste colors.

# of clicks it took me to find this: 2.

So now we know what color surreality, quintessent..i...ality? .. and elegance are.

PWI: Sally Hansen Rouge Rush

This is another topper-over-previous thing. It's very convenient! Also, Mr. Fix-It gave me the plague a head cold, which doesn't change what I have to do to get a job, so forgive me if postings are kind of short and uninspired. Really uninspired.


Over UO Spiked Punch, here's Sally Hansen Rouge Rush:

Indirect daylight, not-daylight. In person it looks better at night.

These were disappointing to photograph. In person, especially at night, they have a sort of glimmering depth that I usually associate only with flakies. I mean, I'm really too casual a blogger to get a lightbox and a macro lens and suchlike nonsense, but I can see why people do.

The polish has several different shapes of glitter in very, very minor variations of color; I'm a little surprised by how much I like it. AFAICT, it's: pale pink glitter shreds; pale red glitter shreds; and smallish fuschia hex glitter.

It's... a lot more harmonious than it sounds?

PWI: Sally Hansen Tweedy

Quick post because we're leaving for Hawaii at... ugh... never mind it is so early. Sooo eaaarrrlyy.  Although I guess I can't bitch, because Hawaii?

So anyway!  I wasn't going to buy any of these Sally Hansen weirdnesses, because the swatches all looked terrible.  But then I guess everyone agreed with me, because they were marked down (eventually) to about two dollars.  I'm kind of weak, so I bought one, even though I kinda thought blog swatches of these looked like little bugs on your hands.

Sally Hansen Fuzzy Coat Tweedy:

Up close: bugz. Distance: better!

Once again, hooray for trying stuff! Macro shots: little bugs. But from any distance, it looks interestingly complex and kind of awesome.

It's white and black bar glitter. A slightly darker gray might make the white more visible.  Anyway, ok!

PWI: Essie Sparkle On Top

Like any good academic, I've decided "Project Wear-It" is too long and too comprehensible, so I'll probably go with PWI for a while. If it's hateful I'll go back!

J'avoue... when I said I might put glitter on Golden-I, I was thinking of a new acquisition, which is not a glitter but a flaky. I love flaky polishes, and my husband described one of the few I own as "looking science fiction-y". ^_^ So I'm generally on the prowl for not-too-expensive ones!

Over Golden-I, meet Essie Sparkle on Top:

It looks like crumpled tin foil. Or very, very, very badly applied gold polish. Sigh.

Unfortunately, it really didn't look great. From any distance it just looked uneven and lumpy. The iridescence didn't really show. So I did what any sensible blogger (or academic) would do, namely Googled for someone else's solution.

The swatches that appealed to me most were over pale colors, blue and pink primarily. Aha, sez I! I have a medium blue kicking around somewhere. So I tried it over the unnamed Physicians Formula blue, and magic happened:

Better!  Uh... I promise.

Okay, I freely admit that the pictures just don't look any better than the gold!  Flakies are super hard to take pictures of, y'all.  But in person I see lots of glinting greens and distracting sparks of red and orange. I'm much happier. Except for my photography...*

* Write on chalkboard 50 times: I do not need another hobby, I do not need another hobby, I do not need another hobby...

Project Wear-It: Sally Hansen Golden-I

I'm meeting with a visiting VIP today, meaning my nail polish has to be work-appropriate – which in my field just means "subtle" (I have a whole rant on that, but it can wait). I'd go without polish, except...

I recently switched back to PVA peel-off base coat. In the meantime, I had forgotten that water-based coats won't block stains. (Lab Muffin gives an excellent explanation, as always.) I was reminded after a day of chartreuse polish turned my fingernails three-pack-a-day yellow overnight! doh.

So, Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Golden-I, which is unprepossessing on me:

It's a tiny bit cooler and shinier than this shows. Indirect outdoor light.

It's a foil; application is okay, definitely not a one-coater. The color is a pale, pretty gold, somewhere more in the champagne family. This is two coats; it would really have needed three for full opacity, but very short nails have their charms!

Perfectly nice color. Too much for a job interview (sigh) but reasonable for one casual half-hour meeting. Maybe tonight I'll put glitter on it...