Lacquer Convention: Glitter Top Coat Swatches

 Hello there everyone!  It's been about a week since I've felt like sitting down and putting anything together, but I've been looking around and trying to help solve the nail lacquer base shortage problem for myself and other frankeners.  There's still work to be done, but I received my last order from TKB Trading on Friday and I could finish stocking up for my Etsy shop.  It isn't open today, but I'm going to open it this Wednesday, March 21st.  This won't change again!  I apologize again for not opening last week when I intended to.  A few people took me up on email orders in the last week, but they're now closed.  Thanks to everyone who's been kind and supportive since last Monday!  I appreciate it all!

Today, I wanted to show you some of my glitter top coats, which will be available in the store on Wednesday.  I'll be doing swatches on my own nails for the shop, but for now I have nail wheels.  Each shade has been applied in one coat over black, white and mint green with no top coat.

This is Cocktail Hour, a mix of black, white, burgundy and holographic gold hexagons in a clear base.

This is Cute & Fun To Be With, a mix of multi-sized green, gold, pink, purple, periwinkle blue and holographic silver glitters.

 

This is Pub Night, a mix of pale green and gunmetal hexagons swimming in a sea of smaller navy, silver and pale green glitter.

The last one for today is Sour Patch Kids, a mix of red, orange, yellow and green hexagons with smaller white glitter.  It's named after the sour gummy candy that happens to be my BFF's favorite type of candy.  I mixed this color for her =)

Tomorrow, I'll have swatches of three more glitter top coats, Showgirl, Not On The Lips, and Sparkle Berry Cobbler.  Also, I'll have a real post again with some nail art.  My husband has been getting sucked into the new My Little Pony cartoon (His friends are all huge bronies and he's the last one to be infected) and I'm thinking some MLP nail art is in order tonight!

Thanks for reading!

Franken Friday: Black Based Shimmers

Hello everyone!  Today I've got another couple frankens to show you and this time I have swatches!

After I put together my base colors yesterday, I decided to get to some of the ingredients that I bought to have fun with.  TKB Trading recently started carrying loose flakies, so I ordered samples of them all to give them a test.  I tried them on their own in a suspension base and used them as a top coat over black, but I wasn't too impressed with the colors.  They're not as bright as what you find in premixed polishes, like the Finger Paints Special Effects collection for example and I probably wouldn't reach for it over them.  I decided to do some other experiments with them.

I wanted to experiment with black based shimmery colors, so I tinted my flaky base and added my pigments. This is the almost finished, unnamed product.

It comes off with a little bit of a rubbery finish.  On my index and ring fingers, I added top coat to compare.  my middle and pinky fingers have no top coat.  I want to try to shine it up a little when I get my last shipment.

In the bottle, you can see a lot of flakies, but they don't all get translated to the nail very well.  I think that I need to add more because of the vibrancy issue.

The color is something that I really liked in this one.  The pigment has a color shifting quality to it, blue to purple, that really shows through the black base.

It kind of makes me want to mix it into a top coat and give that a little try as well, but that's on the agenda for another day.

Overall, an interesting experiment and a better use for those flakies than a top coat.

This is the second color I mixed with some of the flakies and it turned out to be a bit of a waste for them, but a really pretty color nonetheless.  

You can see the flakies in the bottle, but they get completely lost on the nail.  If I mix this up again in the future, I won't bother with them.

The black I used is turning out to be a little green based so it took the gold pigment and made it look greenish, which I have no problem with.  

The finish is a little more shiny in general in this bottle, though I did the same top coat and no top coat nail combination to compare.  My camera couldn't seem to pick up a good shot to show you the difference.

So happy Friday everyone!  Enjoy your weekend and thanks for reading!

Nail Art: Hello Kupo!

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I wanted to do a Hello Kitty manicure because for as much as I love her, I've never done one.  I got sidetracked though by my husband playing Final Fantasy XIII-2 (Which he bought for me  only to end up obsessed with, of course!)  I really wanted to do some nail art for that as well, so when I sat down to do this, I decided that Hello Kitty and Mog the Moogle looked awesomely similar.

My hand is still not as steady as normal, so I hope you can forgive the kitty on my ring finger.  When I text my BFF a picture, she said it wasn't bad, HK just looked like she's melting...  In any case, voila, some freehand art again!  

I really wanted to use my bottle of Mermaid's Tears by OPI because it was so nice and creamy when I swatched it.  

Also, I wanted to show you where I stand with my frankens!  If you follow my page on the FB machine, you'll have seen most of these next pictures.  They're bottle shots of the polishes that I blended today.  Not all of them, only four, but over the next couple days I'm going to show you more!  I got a big package this morning with half of the bases that I ordered and a huge selection of pigments.  The problem is that I am still missing the other bases and can't actually finish most of my recipe tests and then go on to bottling.  It'll probably take another week and a half to get everything...

But I am completely covered in glitter, thanks to this hobby of mine!

This is my new and improved version of Expendable Crewman.  I'm still on the fence about keeping their Star Trek names because I'm worried that they don't appeal to as many people as I would like.  Perhaps I can bribe some of you with a bottle naming contest?  We'll have to discuss this option when I get the rest of my supplies and finalize the colors!

A new version of I'm A Doctor, Not A Nail Polish!

Then we have the base color for Tiberius.  This is pre-glitter.  I'm playing with different sizes and colors in it at this point, but I seriously love the color in this pigment and I'm considering offering this shade without big chunky glitter.  We'll see!

Finally, I have what I'm calling "Pop Tart" thanks to one of my friends on the FB machine.  It's a white jelly with a bunch of rainbow glitter.  I have five bottles of this mixed and can probably mix two more before I run out of ingredients, and after that I may not offer it except in limited quantities, at least until I can get a bigger stock or find alternative glitters that aren't as pricey.  It runs me a bit more to produce than the other colors.  

If you're still with me, thanks for reading!