Playing with Polish

Boy, oh boy, did I ever haul some polishes over the holiday break! Sally's had a sale. Ulta had a sale. Found a few on clearance at Walmart and Target. It's nonsense. The great thing about polish is that it never ever really goes bad. If you buy some polish thinner, you shouldn't ever need to throw out any of your lacquers. 

Here's some additional info on the immortality of nail polish, confirmed by OPI Director of R&D. Also, please don't use nail polish remove to thin out your polish. It can destroy your nail polish (I know, I know! I used to do it, too.) You can get some thinner from Sally's for around $3.

So, there's my justification for buying new nail polish when I clearly have plenty. But, I've been making good use of my latest finds and I haven't left the house without a manicure since New Years. I also own several fauxnad plates including the coveted Hot Topic fauxnad set, so I've been playing around with nail stamping, too.

Each manicure has a base of Total Rx Stuck On You and a top coat of Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Top Coat (Winner of a 2012 Temptalia Editor's Choice Award)

Manicure 1: Piggy Polish in Polar Sea Ice stamped paint splashes from the Hot Topic Kit in Sally Hansen Presto Pewter and Icing Grapetini

Polar Sea Ice is a cool shimmery blue. It went on perfectly opaque in two coats. Presto Pewter was perfect for stamping. Grapetini was OK but as you can see there are places where it didn't transfer well. Lovely color on it's not super opaque. If your using polish that is not specifically formulated for nail stamping, the more opaque a polish the better. Foils and metallic polishes fwork extremely well. 

Not the best fauxnadicure by any stretch of the imagination, but it's an alright start. I wanted it to look messy anyway. I mean, it's paint splashes! Not a lot of tidy lines here.

Manicure 2:

This one was super easy. Piggy Polish in 6 Impossible Things topped with Salon Perfect Black Crackle.

It's a bit messy because I hadn't cleaned up the cuticles yet. The trick to crackle polishes is to not paint in a straight line. The direction you paint is the direction in which it will crackle. Applying polish regularly in long straight strokes will lead to parallel crackles. I usually paint the right side of my nail like normal and then paint short horizontal stroke across the nail. I mix it up to make every nail different. The thinner your coat the smaller the cracks will be.

6 Impossible Things is a lovely shimmery white polish. Unfortunately, I have such issues with white polish and 6 Impossible Things was no different. White polishes generally apply very streaky and I need three coats to get them decently opaque. I probably ought to just buy a Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in white. I imagine that would go on nicely in one or two coats. At least I hope it would.

The Black Crackle, however, did not disappoint. It's everything you could want out of a black creme crackle. Very opaque in one coat, which I find a necessity since you can't really do two coats of a crackle.

The new polishes in this post:
The Piggy Polishes were purchased at Ulta on clearance for $0.99 (Polar Sea Ice) and $1.99 (6 Impossible Things) last week. The Black Crackle was found at Walmart for $2.98 and the Presto Pewter at Target for $2.82 on clearance.