Mermaiding It

Wanted to stamp with the mermaid scales for a while...

This is Maybelline Urban Utopia topped with Color Club Beyond the Mistletoe then stamped with DRK plate using Maybelline Denim Dash. 

DRK went out of business in 2016, sadly, and the thing about them was that they had 1) great plates and 2) a lot of Brazilian brands of nail polish that, frankly, kicked butt.

I grabbed a few polishes and a plate before their final days.

Meanwhile, this is a fun combo.

This is after two days of wear before stamping, then two days with stamping. Love the combo.

I am using CND Vinylux as a top coat. Little rough around the edges, but a mani extender will smooth it out for the weekend.

Thanks for reading my little nail polish journal!

Franken: The Resurrection

Since my second attempt at franken-polish was a large schooling session, I wanted to try the polish out for a few days to meditate upon it.

• Upside: the color. The pale teal, the flash of purple.
• Downside: glittah! The dense particles that make the metallic nature of that polish coated every last piece of glitter, hence the bumpiness when applied. Adding more clear would only dilute the metallic nature.

Truly a nail polish conundrum.

But Polish resurrection:

I kept the polish on as a base and added about 4-6 coats of New York Color Silver Starry Glitter 105A.

This glitter application meant that the bumps were gone and the blue/teal base made it watery blue, which blended nicely with the silver small glitter of the NYC glitter. Then the blue and pink larger glitter looked like fish swimming around in an aquarium, figuratively speaking.


Fun save, and gave that frankin a few more miles that it would not have gotten.


So, frankens can be saved, even trashable ones deserve a break.















Sad update: the polish survived a day of packing and organizing for a Thanksgiving trip, but this evening a massive chip came off, so now I am wearing E.L.F. Light Red, I think I will toss on some Cover Girl small holo glitter for the holiday.

 I will save this lovely franken/glitter combo for spring time, it's a great combo, and worthy of being worn again!
 (Maybe my problem is that I love all my polishes too much? Hmmmm)

Red, Red duochrome, FrankenDead, and a Quote

This is the E.L.F. "Dark Red" I found at Ross. It was a sad goopy mess, but I added a little Poshe restore and it was really nice.

This photo is of two coats, so it seems "meh, whatever", but when I added a third coat, it was quite dark and lovely. Very nice. I loved the application. And wow, after nursing along other polishes into a state of dryness, this was so nice.

A few days later I added a light coat of Maybelline 125, a sheer cheap polish that's all over the Dollar Tree where I am at right now, it's a sheer white shimmer with a red/gold duochrome. It totally changed the dark polish into this frosty burgundy. Wow. Gorgeous!

My application was better on the red, the white was a mess. I haven't figured out how to really tidy up the edges, so I am relying on application, such as it is.

Last, my next franken-polish! Such a hopeful thing! I really loved my first franken, the pale grayed out periwinkle! It was beginners luck!

I found a Wet n Wild "Crystalique" polish at the Dollar Tree. It was a silver metallic called "Wizard". Very nice, I figured, no brainer. Well, I should have put a little sample together, because the first thing I did was pour into the bottle some L.A.Color purple and green glitter. I was so excited at seeing that, that I forgot to test. Doh! It got drowned. The pigment in the metallic polish is fine and dense. So, lesson one.

But, not to just toss the whole thing out, I added some "Travel to Neptune" pigment from TBK Trading, it's a purple/green duochrome. This was lesson 2: find a good way to add the powder, because I lost nearly as much as I finally got into the bottle. I am thinking about a little funnel, or decanting a bit, my paper funnel I made got a bit of polish and cause a clog.

This didn't go too badly, I could see some duochrome, but I wanted more color, so I decanted a bit of NY Color "West Village" into the bottle. Normally that's a navy, but the base color has a maritime green tint to the blue. (It's gorgeous, I did my nails in it, but was in a rush to go to the barn and schmootzed my thumbnail)

I also decanted some and added some clear to get the pigment and glitter to show. No dice.

I ended up with a very peacocky/tealy metallic with chunks. Epic fail!!!!!!!

I am wearing it.

Slow to dry, well, not any worse than the Revlon Bronze Ablaze, but hearty! It's taken a lickin'. No tipwear, chips or shrinkage.

Of course it is WnW and the top coat is Wnw, too.

 

All in all I am very happy with the color. The other side of that happiness? I really hate the texture. I will probably try to wear it a few times and then add some clear.

Lesson learned: allways do a sample batch. You can't go through polish THAT fast, and while Deborah Lippmann in her blog says that it's fashion forward to have a new look and texture in polish, I am kind of wondering if that's just marketing malarky to sell her polish.

BUT, I've gone a step further! Ha. I think I live up to this quote:

...put away your OLD ideas of how polish should look.

                         -Deborah Lippmann

 

What can I say?

I am trying!

;D