the_oracle

It's time for poor financial decisions with Impy! I'll be your host, Impy, as we walk through how I caved for the HT advent calendar and the sale. To be fair, I had set aside funds for both of these things, so it wasn't a surprise beyond being surprised they were doing a calendar to begin with.

It's now since sold out, but I want to ramble on about it and the various nail spaces are being predictably grrr, argh about it and I'm not really into that right now.

We'll begin with my biggest gripe (beyond the price, we shall not speak of that), which is that they didn't offer the option of spoilers before it dropped. HT has gotten much better this year at offering full 'spoilers' for their new releases prior to their official drop, but the one time I think it was totally required, they were still in their playing coy about what you were getting. Look, I get it, people want to be surprised, but at the same time, I want to be an informed customer (a phrase they used repeatedly) and it's really fucking hard to do that when you don't share what's in the box until after it's for sale and the site is on the verge of crashing AND there's a race to check out because everyone and their hamster knew this wasn't going to make it through the weekend (I'm not sure it made it through the day?). THIS is what people who complain about FOMO marketing mean, HT.

It did not help that their spoiler page was half broken, with the zoom function not working. But like, save that shit to Pinterest and we're golden. (The zoom does work now, but it absolutely did not for launch.)

( Spoilers, Damn. )
Overall, I'm pretty happy with snagging this. I realize it's stupidly expensive for what it is, but I love the packaging, like or love nearly all the polishes, and the non-polish stuff will actually be useful, plus the minis will encourage me to actually USE the damn stuff. I hope. I'm trying to be better about that. I also don't remember the last non-cheap candy advent calendar I bought myself, so there's that. I figure once every twenty years I can splurge?

I'll have to try to remember to edit this if more dupes are found. You know, for science.

I did also partake in the sale, though I did rein myself in a little since the sale pricing on the stuff I was most interested in wasn't as good as the sale they do in the spring. I picked up a few polishes I didn't want to roll the dice on being discontinued first. I specifically caved and bought Beach Please because there's no world in which this survives the next culling unless it's because they decide they really, really want to keep a sandy beach color in stock. I'm not sure anything else in my order was an obvious "this is not long for this world" polish though. Oh, I grabbed Rainbow Snow as a backup since I've been meaning to do that for awhile and I also grabbed Camera Shy since that one is being discontinued. Everything else was just stuff I'd wanted when it first came out but didn't want to wait anymore to get. I did forget to pick up a few others (Cardinal Sins for one), but figure since the sale is ongoing and there were three Rewards changes in there (now it's two since they updated today), it gave me time for them to be in the Rewards switch and thus freebies. This week's Rewards has some I would've redeemed over the weekend if they'd been available, but I'm not sure I'd want to place an order specifically to redeem them.

Essentially, I scooped up most of the Renaissance collection, parts of the Pixel collection (rolling the dice on those being rewards), and Stop Buggin' because green flakies? Yes, please. Lest you think this is insane (it is), please consider that Impy of a year ago would've just bought these collections as they came out. This year's Impy waited to get them ON SALE.

Now I've got to curl up in a ball and convince myself that Peri-Social is only on such a deep discount because they just have a lot of her and not because they're going to discontinue her.