Just a quick FYI - my good friend Holly has started up a new community blog on bravenet. Check it out by clicking HERE. There will be tutorials to help you learn how to customize your blog, there are links to other blogs for you to check out and a lot more useful information there for the users of the bravenet community. Please be sure to stop by and check it out, and spread the word so others can benefit from this new blog too!

(As a side note, I'm going to set the date for this post so that it will remain up top for a while to try to maximize exposure of the new community blog. Scroll down to see my new posts.)

Well it's occurred to me that if I want to give myself any time at all to complete the challenges and get my posts up... I'll have to do things a bit differently. I will actually be doing the previous week's challenges, instead. That way I will have time to figure out how I want to interpret the challenge, then actually work it out into a photo. And in the event the new challenge is not posted on schedule (which seems to be the case today) then it really won't matter.

Anyway... Enough rambling.

No Tuesday Tunes this week. Go send the lovely lady in charge some love. Click me. Much love to you Andrea & lots of hugs. You already know that I've been there too, so I know what you are going through.

No FOTD this week. It’s only 7 AM but it’s already just entirely too hot and humid to bother. A little Carmex lip balm is all for today!

This week’s topic is one I’ve just been dying to post about. SCENTED NAIL POLISH.

Yes, you read that right. Scented nail polish.

Scented nail polish was all the rage in the mid to late ’90’s. I was among the first in my group of friends to try it and man oh man did I love it. More-so than most, I think. It was a short-lived fad, indeed. And one that I miss sorely.

I had several bottles from a couple different brands. There were fragrances available like Lavender, Honeydew, Bubblegum, Cherry… practically any fragrance you could think of was available in a scented nail polish from one brand or another. Now, this didn’t mean you could open a bottle and take a whiff… oh no. If you did that it still smelled like plain old nail polish. So they started putting scratch and sniff stickers on the bottles. You’d paint your nails and once the polish was dry… they would smell divine. It was like perfume for your finger nails… or your toe nails, of course.

My favorite brand by far was Townley Cosmetics. I can’t recall the exact product name for the line… Celestial something or other. I still have one bottle, but the lettering has all worn off but I remember the Celestial part of it. Theirs was indeed the best. While other brands made your nails smell pretty for a couple days at most… Townley’s made your nails smell great for a week or more. My favorite was Sandalwood. The color was a gorgeous shimmery shade of baby blue, with turquoise sparkles. And it smelled heavenly.

I still have the Sandalwood bottle. I bought it when I was 14 - so it’s 11 years old at this point. I should explain… as this was my very favorite nail polish in the whole world the color was gone long, long ago. I added clear nail polish to it when it was empty enough that I couldn’t get any more out of the bottle; but there was still that little bit always left on the bottom of the bottle. I hoped to extend it’s life as long as possible. So over the years I’ve added random shades of blue to the bottle here and there. And while the color is no longer anywhere near what I purchased, there are very amazingly remains of the original turquoise sparkles in it. And there’s still enough of the original formula that for about 24 hours after painting my nails with my muddled-up grey-ish blue shade that’s evolved over 11 years it smells exactly as it did when I first bought it.

I’ve searched the net a bit, and the only scented nail polishes I can find now are super cheap (re: not worth it, quality-wise) things geared toward little girls with Hello Kitty on them and such, with scents like Cotton Candy and Pixie Stix candy. Nothing I am interested in. I even wrote to Townley to ask if there were any plans to bring back the discontinued scented nail polish and was so disappointed when they said no. It’s a product that I, for one, would be tickled to have return even if only briefly so I could stock up. Though I know I’d only be disappointed, because nothing would ever compare to those original nail polishes and nothing could ever come close to being as fabulous as that baby blue Sandalwood polish. But, it’s still something I’d love to see back on the shelves.

That and the also short-lived late 90’s fad of Crackle Nail Polish… a topic we will discuss next week!