What's New at Ulta and Sally Beauty

Blogger is having some issues, so yesterday's post and comments as well as some comments on earlier entries have disappeared. Supposedly they'll be restored (per Blogger's status page), so I'm not worrying about that for now and instead am forging ahead with a new entry now that the system is letting me in again.

With the approach of summer, new nail polish displays continue to show up at stores around here, and of course I have to document them. Today I have what's popped up at my Ulta and Sally stores recently.

I first saw Orly Pin-Up at Ulta, but it was mostly sold out by the time I spotted it. I was happy to see an untouched one at Sally Beauty a week or so later. There are four polishes in this collection (left to right): Va Va Voom, Here Comes Trouble, Coquette Cutie, Bubbly Bombshell. If I were doing a pin-up collection, I'd focus on reds, since "pin-up" makes me think of movie star posters from the 40s and 50s, and I associate those with classic sexy red nails. However, I'm not going to complain about two new glitters no matter what they called the collection.



Island Escape is China Glaze's summer offering, with six brights in it: 108 Degrees (pink shimmer), Blue Iguana (shimmer), Cha Cha Cha (green shimmer), Señorita Bonita (warm purple shimmer), Papaya Punch (yellow-leaning orange creme), and Electric Pineapple (greenish yellow creme). Like the Orly, I've seen this at both Ulta and Sally, but the displays had different photos in them. Here's how it looked at my Ulta:



And here it is at Sally:



FingerPaints is only at Sally, of course. (I go back and forth on whether the brand name should be Finger Paints with a space or FingerPaints without. On Sally's website and displays, it's no space, but the bottles have the words on two lines, no hyphen, which means it would have a space if rewrapped onto one line. This is the kind of thing I use valuable mental energy pondering when I could be thinking about how to achieve my larger life goals or something equally weighty.) Peace, Love & Color is their summer collection. It's got six colors as well: Outta Sight Orange (shimmer), Peaceful Purple (glitter), Give Pink a Chance (creme), Psychedelic Sunshine (yellow micro glitter), All You Need Is Color (blue green glitter), and Groovy Green (shimmer).



I'd hoped to find the Peace, Love & Color display since I knew from reading other nail blogs that it was coming, but I was surprised to see another new FingerPaints display on the same visit. This one touted "13 Hot New Shades!", yet it had 18 slots filled with what appeared to be 12 colors. I don't know if the marketing department wasn't talking to the production folks or whate. The ones in the display I saw were: Bronze Sculpture (brown shimmer), Hue Are You? (taupe creme), Warm He-Art-Ed (warm taupe shimmer), Purple Palette (glitter), Art You Wondering? (glitter), Tiffany Imposter (light turquoise blue creme), Red-Brandt (deep red shimmer), Go Van Gogh (dusty green creme), Don't Make a Scene (very light tan creme), Where Art Renoir? (silver glitter in black base), Prints & Princess (orange shimmer), and Avante Garde Green (deep green shimmer). I think these will probably be new core colors, since some of the old ones were on clearance a while back, but who knows—the sales associates didn't.



I didn't see a 13th color the first time I encountered this display, but the next time I came across one, in a different Sally store, I picked up every bottle to look at the names and lo and behold, found one called It Baroque. I guess I missed it the first time because it's a taupe creme that looks very much like Hue Are You. They're so close that I wonder if they're actually the same color, just some bottles got mislabeled. The Sally website doesn't have a photo of It Baroque, so I'm not sure what's up with this color. Here are the two bottles, It Baroque on the left and Hue Are You on the right:



You may have noticed that two of the hot new shades resemble two from the summer collection; Purple Palette and Peaceful Purple look like twins to me, as do Art You Wondering and All You Need is Color. Here are the bottles; the pairs look close to me that I don't feel a need to buy them all to do comparisons.



Moving back to Ulta, that's the only place so far that I've seen the new limited edition designs of Sally Hansen Salon Effects strips. There's black and white checkerboard (Check, please!), pink leopard which was sold out before I got there (Don't get catty!), navy and white horizontal stripes (Ay, Ay, Captain!), tan and ivory vertical stripes (Wicked Bamboo) (the only one that doesn't get an exclamation point in its name!), and black and white patterned zig zags (Show your stripes!)



Ulta also had an Essence display with files and Studio Nails Nail Fashion Sticker sets in six designs: black and brown leopard, taupe with white swirls, pink/red/purple camouflage, black/grey zebra, pink with black lace, and a silver/black that looks like a broken mirror. These have 14 strips in them and are a lot cheaper than the Sally Hansen strips at $2.49 a pack.



My Ulta does stock some Zoya, but they usually get the collections after I've given up on seeing them at retail and just ordered online instead. Case in point: Mod Mattes, which showed up at Ulta last week. I got my Phoebe (turquoise) and Mitzi (lime) weeks ago (I skipped the pink, Lolly, because I do have some self-control).



Right next to the Mod Mattes display was one for Ooh-La-La and La-Di-Da, which was a lot more behind the times; this was new for summer of 2009. The Ooh-La-La colors weren't there, though, just the La-Di-Da ones (pink, red, orange, and yellow cremes). I suppose rather than whining that they're putting out two year old displays, I should be hopeful that this means Ulta is releasing stuff from the warehouse that time forgot. Maybe I'll be able to pick up things I missed when my nail polish obsession was dormant for a few years there.



There were some new Piggy Polish displays at Ulta, too. Perhaps unfairly, I think of this brand as the Sinful of salon brands, since I never know if the colors in their endcap displays are new or repromotes or what, and the displays don't say. I'm guessingthat this first one, Go out and play!, is the summer collection, since there's sand and a bare midriff in the photo. Five colors here: Six Impossible Things (pale green), Lion Eyes (orange), I and Love and Blue, Embrace Adventure (teal), and Blink (pink). The blue is a shimmer; the rest appear to be cremes, though I could have missed some subtle shimmer in there.



This next Piggy Polish one looks summery to me, too, but it says "Be ... Springier" on it, so maybe I'm off by a season. Three colors in this one: Pink-ing of You (red-leaning pink shimmer), Smootch (purple shimmer), and Damsel in this Dress (which is an orange shimmer, I know, because I own it; what's in this display slot is some random pink creme, which I didn't notice until too late).



Just to the right of Be ... Springier, you can see a third Piggy Polish display, with a warm white shimmer, a blue creme, and clear. I don't have a picture of that one; I'm not sure why. Maybe I was too distracted by what I spied on a nearby shelf: the 2nd and 3rd OPI Serena Williams sets, Spark de Triomphe with White Shatter and Rally Pretty Pink with Red Shatter. If my Ulta ever got the first set, it was gone before I saw it (a kind friend got me one on her side of the country), but I caught these when there were still some left.



Finally, also in the new from OPI category, Ulta put out the Pirates of the Carribbean collection with Silver Shatter this past weekend (rather than on Friday, when I still could have bought some during the Buy 2 Get 1 Free sale on OPI). When I got there Monday, this is what the Silver Shatter display looked like:



Based on what happened with Black Shatter, I'm confident they'll restock the silver at some point, so I'm not going to worry about it. They did still have a good number of the rest of the colors left, both full size and mini.





I like Disney, and I like the Pirates movies, and of course I like nail polish, so I should have been beside myself with delight from the moment this collection was announced. Except I wasn't, because like a lot of other people, I saw the promo pictures from OPI and said "huh? that doesn't look like pirates to me." The Jack Sparrow I know doesn't do pastels. When I watched a trailer for the new movie the palette didn't make any more sense to me, either. It took me a while to give up on the pirates collection in my head and actually look at the colors in the one I could buy. When I did, I saw some things I liked. The Skull & Glossbones (grey), Mermaid's Tears (sea green), and Stranger Tides (sage) are the most interesting to me. Steady as She Rose (light dusty pink), Sparrow Me the Drama (pink), and Planks a Lot (purple) are safer shades that will probably sell well.

There have been new displays at the drugstores, too, so I'll post about those next week sometime (I hope to spot a couple more this weekend; I've heard rumors that they're out there).