Before I forget, Polish or Perish now has a sale blog for the bunch of us to sell our polishes... mostly in order to raise funds to buy new polishes. kittytokaren posted the first sale today!
Somebody on Nail Board alerted me to possible Absolutely Alice and Mad as a Hatter dupes the other day. Luckily, Ricky's NYC does online ordering now so I could take a looksee at these possible dupes.
Mattese (or Mattese Elite) is/was (?) a store-based brand, found in Ricky's NYC, a chain of not-cheap beauty supply shops in New York. Currently, their polishes seem to be manufactured by Forsythe and are often dead-on Color Club dupes. So I was surprised to hear about the existence of OPI dupes. I didn't think they'd be dead-on and I was right. I'm leaving for Boston tomorrow (not to mention having my second year talk in the morning) so I didn't have time to swatch these. I will do a comparison when I get back though...
Mattese Elite Legendary Alice vs. OPI Absolutely Alice
Here are a series of photos where it'd be really helpful to click to see the full sizes (if you are really bent on finding AiW dupes). The Mattese seems to use a slightly brighter blue and is missing what I think of as the defining gold glitter that makes Absolutely Alice so great. Instead of the gold glitter in AA, it has highlights of silver glitter instead. Which kind of makes Legendary Alice a more run-of-the-mill blue glitter.
Mattese Nutty Hat Guy vs. OPI Mad as a Hatter
It's like Forsythe didn't have gold glitter on hand to put into these polishes. Nutty Hat Guy (ha) consists silver glitter, light purple (or pink) glitter, red glitter and green glitter. The predominant color that seems to come out is a bright, slightly pinkish silver. Mad as a Hatter contains so many more different colored glitters: silver, gold, dark purple, green, orange and blue. It gives MaaH a darker and more complex look and the predominant color appears to be more pewter in appearance than silver. It does appear that the Mattese Elite versions of this polishes are not as a complex and and a (noticeable) touch brighter than the OPI polishes.
In my opinion, I would never call these dupes. They're close enough for people who aren't obsessed but for those who are... they're close but no cigar. I think they probably look more similar on the nail, from afar though.
And finally, my travel mani kit: getting ready for my conference!
1/8fl oz of Nail Life Gripper, a bit less than 1/8fl oz of Orly Prince Charming and 1/8fl oz of Nubar Diamont. I will most likely pick up new polishes in Boston (and New York) so I'm not worried about bringing something else to change into once my poster is over.
In the meanwhile, I didn't get my paper into my readers before the end of the weekend and am still busily writing. I really, really, really want to get the first draft to them before tomorrow morning -- and I need my sleep tonight. But right now, I have some hope: I have a good first paragraph. (That doesn't sound too good but I generally don't write first paragraphs until at least halfway through the paper, when I've figured out what the paper is about. Also, introductory paragraphs are usually pretty hard if you're trying to be a halfway entertaining writer.) And once I have a good first paragraph, it's like it provides momentum for the rest of the paper. I have about 65% of it done and I completely stalled over the weekend. Now, I feel like with my good first paragraph... there is no reason why I can't finish it tonight!
