For those of you who aren't familiar with the brand, these polishes have a strong candied rose perfume scent. I think it's adorable and it lingers long after a mani has set and dried (as long as you haven't layered it over anything that makes it smell like bugspray which is what happened to another time I used an Anna Sui polish). Two days after this recent mani application, my SO was still commenting on the scent. I don't think he was commenting favorably on it but I favored it so on it stayed. :)
Anna Sui 02
It's like candy. Sweet-smelling candy. With glitter! Unlike a lot of my chunky glitters, these big chunks are actually circular (as opposed to hexagonal). There are also square and small hex glitters, all suspended in a dark pink jelly. Three coats are pictured above and because it's a jelly, you can see all the glitter from even the first coat -- which I'm led to believe is the point. And if it isn't the point, it should be made the point. I love jelly glitters with depth!
Close-up of Anna Sui 02
Glitter is good stuff. I didn't like glitters as a teenager; didn't even like it that much a couple of years ago. But now, it's like, "Give me glitter... or give me death... by glitter." What makes this great is that I gesture a lot when I'm talking and even more when I have sparkly nail polish on -- that or it seems like more because it's more attention-catching. Since I work with a bunch of language people, they're always aware of what gestures I'm using to accompany my talk. The new grad student in my lab always comments on it. Actually, the first time I sat down socially with him, I was wearing a holo nail polish (I think it was ChG Kaleidoscope Him Out) and he interrupted me and asked if I was capable of talking without gesturing. My answer: "Nope." I mean, seriously -- I'm incapable. It helps me keep track of my thoughts (so-called "cognitive offloading"), it captures my audience's attention... and I don't feel fully expressive without using gesture: my gestures don't necessarily have set meaning unto themselves but they complement what I'm saying with words.
There's a whole psychological literature having to do with gesture: how we gesture, why we do it, how it might help us process information. Super nifty stuff! If anyone's interested, I recommend Susan Goldin-Meadow's book Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think. (You can read a preview of it here through Google Books.) University of Chicago's Goldin-Meadow -- great name, eh? -- is a fantastic writer: her writing is so clear and engaging, whether it's in a book meant for a wider market or in research papers meant for her colleagues. She uses solid examples from real life but she's also talented at making complex research accessible without dumbing it down . Really, one of my favorite academic writers. And her research is so cool. Squee!
(If only gesture research wasn't such a pain in the ass: I mean, I complain about doing audio transcripts of conversations. Video transcripts of gesture research is where the real pain is. My lab was all into gesture research the year before I matriculated and my advisor, who is pretty laissez-faire, was happy to go along with the zeitgeist. Now she's like, "You're interested in gesture? Let me recommend... NOT gesture." It's just too time consuming and no one wants to spend eternity in grad school. If and when I get tenure in... 12+ years, I'll do some gesture stuff. For now, spoken language is fun enough.)
