Latest Crop of Drugstore Displays

When I shared the Sally Beauty and Ulta displays last week, I promised to cover the drugstores this week, so here we go. (For the purposes of this post, drugstore includes not just CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens, but also Meijer and Target. It would include K Mart except the one near me rarely has special displays so I rarely go there on my polish hunting rounds.)

In the "old colors in new containers" department, we've got several entrants. Milani, which should be due for a new collection anytime now, has the Color Fiesta display, which is filled with core colors (Milani does do this sort of thing regularly, but they don't rename the colors to try and fool me into thinking they're new, so I'm okay with it). This one has Breezy (blue), Good Morning Sunshine, Wild Violet, Electric Pink, and Juicy Glo (orange). I saw this at Meijer first, but I think it was also at CVS (though I could be confusing it with another re-promote Milani display).



Sinful has their usual neon re-promote for summer thing going on, here at Walgreens:



I think this Nailtiques display is more interesting than the colors in it. Though I didn't realize CVS carried Nailtiques until I saw this, so I guess that's something.



The most appealing of the re-promotes was this bucket from Wet 'n' Wild, with seven bottles of polish from the FastDry line, plus a nail art kit with stencils and a white polish, an emery board, and toe separators. I've only seen this at CVS.





In the category of "some of these may be new but I can't tell because they didn't have names last year" we have Mood Struck from Blue Cross. I've seen free standing displays of these at Rite Aid. There are definitely some colors in here that are the same as the ones that Meijer sold last year, but there's at least one that didn't look familiar, a deep blue shimmer. Frustratingly, these have neither names nor unique UPCs, so I don't know what I'll call the colors I review.



Meijer has Mood Struck again, too, but this time it's on a regular shelf (with the color stickers on the side of the caps rather than the tops), and the colors have names. If you've bought mood polish at Claire's, you'll recognize some of them; left to right, we have Bold/Laid Back, Cautious/Adventurous, Fabulous/Funky, Crazy/Mellow, Calm/Wild, Lonely/Loved, Peaceful/Confident, Flirty/Shy, and Happy/Earthy. (None of these is the deep blue shimmer I saw at Rite Aid.)



Meijer has another new addition to their regular nail polish wall: CND. I was excited to see this since up until now I haven't had anywhere around here to buy it. The selection is somewhat limited—there are only three effects, for example—but maybe this means they'll also be getting some of the special edition polishes, like they get some of the seasonal OPIs.



Staying at Meijer, it's the only place so far that I've seen Wet 'n' Wild's Inked collection, which is nine crayon bright cremes in the Craze line: Street Art (pink), Scratchiti (orange), Sribble (purple), Vandalize (black), Writings on the Wall (red), Art Crime (yellow), Mad-Styles (white), Tagger (blue), and Undercover Graffiti (green).



Meijer also had Wet 'n' Wild's FastDry display, Mermaid's Cove, but it was already picked over by the time I got to it, so I was happy to catch it at CVS just after it had been put out. There are eight colors here: Waves of Enchantment (golden rose shimmer), Stream of Wonder (turquoise shimmer), Sea Witch (purple shimmer), Sea of Dreams (red violet shimmer), Ocean Grotto (lime green shimmer), Magic Trident (yellow orange shimmer), Diving for Pearls (teal shimmer), and Atlantis (rose pink glitter).



CVS also had Wet 'n' Wild Megalast Bloom display, which I shared when it was out at Meijer a couple months ago, but here it is again because this is a better shot of it since it wasn't tucked away on a bottom shelf like it was at my Meijer and also to alert those of you who wanted these but don't have a Meijer to check CVS if you have those.



Sally Hansen has some new things out now, too. She's getting in on the crack action; so far I've only seen her Crackle Overcoat at Walgreens. There are eight of these: Snow Blast, Fractured Foil, Antiqued Gold, Distressed Denim, Vintage Violet, Fuchsia Shock, Cherry Smash, Ink Splatter.



For the other new Sally Hansens, the latest limited edition Complete Salon Manicure shades, I had to go to Target, and I didn't get there soon enough because two of the colors were already gone (I'm sure they'll show up somewhere else later so I'm not driving around from Target to Target like a crazy person). Left to right: First Kiss, Coral Fever, Malt, Runway Red-y, Barracuda, Delphinium, Paparazzi, Model Behavior, Summer Plum, Without a Stitch. (Comparing this list to the previously announced Tracy Reese and Prabal Gurang collections, there are some missing, so I'm not sure what the deal is.)



I heard about Revlon Just Tinted on the MUA nail board before I saw the display at Rite Aid; these polishes are evidently matte sheers, which sounds strange to me so I will probably have to get at least one to try. Four colors here: Desire, Mystical, Victorian, and Dawn.



Rite Aid also had some LA Colors sets that I'd not seen before, though I suspect the colors might be some of the same ones that Dollar Tree has been stocking—regardless, they look pretty all lined up rainbow fashion, and at $5.99 for the set of 7 they're a little cheaper than they would be at Dollar Tree.



Taking a detour from the drugstores to finish out this entry, you might remember in my previous display post that I realized one of the Piggy Polish displays had the wrong color in it. Well, I had to fix that the next time I was in that Ulta. (I didn't say I wasn't a crazy person, just that I wasn't going to drive around from Target to Target like one.) Here's the corrected Be Springier display with Damsel in This Dress in its proper place on the right, replacing the pink Around Sundown that had been put there in error.



While I was at it, I also snapped a shot of the Piggy Polish display I missed before, Beach You to It. This has It's All About Blue, a clear that probably has a name but it doesn't matter because it's clear, and Ethereal Thing.



Whew. I hope that's it for a while; my decision-making muscles are getting overworked in the face of all this temptation.

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Slow Display Week

Just a few new to me displays this week. My Ulta has started carrying Barielle, and the first ones I saw of were in this Style in Argyle display, which I believe is their Fall 2010 collection. I like that they feature a gradient mani in the artwork, and good for them for having a vision and sticking to it rather than just throwing a bunch of unrelated colors and finishes together and calling it a collection. I just wish the vision had involved colors that are more appealing to my eye. I didn't buy any of these but wonder if any of them are close to the browner of the Chanel Khakis. I may have to go back with my nail wheel swatches and compare.



Left to right: Aura Angora, Tight Knit, Unraveled Rust, Wool You Marry Me?, Cashmere or Loose Me, Cowl of the Wild.

Also at Ulta, I saw the L'Oreal Midnight Muse collection. This one is annoying because they only have one bottle of each of the polishes. One. Seriously? That's a bit too limited an approach to limited editions if you ask me. There are four polishes: Luminescence, a deep plum shimmer, Dark Sky, a deep plum creme, Le Sangre, a red creme, and Femme Noir, a deep red shimmer. The cremes look really dupe-able to me; I'm undecided about the shimmers, but will probably get them if I see them on sale somewhere.



Moving on to Meijer, mine is now carrying Nailtiques. The display says "proven protein treatments now with color". By color they seem to mean the ones between white and dark red. Purple, no. Green and blue and yellow? Fuggedaboutit. I didn't write down the shade names because I was too bored.



Finally, not a display but two very odd Sally Hansen bottles I found sitting on a endcap shelf at Meijer. They just say "nail color", no line name at all. One bottle is shaped like the Maximum Growth bottles, the other one is colored like the Opal line but is a different shape.



When I turned them around, this is what I saw:



I don't know what these are. They had price tags on them, but no UPCs, so I wonder if they came out of a broken up party pack. I left them in the store because the colors weren't singing to me, but later wondered if I should have gotten them just because I don't have any bottles like that—except then I realized that trying to collect even just one of every bottle type Sally Hansen has made over the years might require me to get another Helmer, and that's not a good idea.

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