Green franken

Bubbly? Thick? Streaky? Yep. Do I care? Not really. I think the shade is kind of nice. This has about 6 different polishes in it and half of them are so old the label has worn off. If I could find a way to fix the bubbles and thickness issues, this might be an alright franken.



In the end it will probably end up in a priority mail box to Texas like the rest of my frankens, since I really don't want to keep any polishes that I can live without. My sister in law is slowly getting into polish (I like to think I have something to do with that) and I'm planning to send a few down to her. She told me that she has picked up a bunch of new polishes for me recently, so I'll be posting about those once I have them in hand. Hooray for polish mail, and hooray for Colleen!

Franken - #2

I've been going franken crazy lately. I am not a big fan of pinks and reds, yet every time I try to mix something it turns into a shade of pink or red. Sigh. It probably happens because the polishes I don't mind losing through mixing are pinks and reds, and no matter what else I throw in there the pink/red pushes its way to the forefront to mock me. Oh, franken #2. You had such potential. I had pictures in my mind of a magical blue-shimmering-something and I have no idea how I thought putting pink and purple into you would make this dream happen.


Two coats, no top coat. It's overcast today, so my outside pictures are a bust.

This started as a super old bottle of Sally Hansen Nail Prisms South Sea Pearl. I know people go batshit crazy for the Nail Prisms, but this stuff was gross. It was a yellow tinted frosty polish that had a blue shimmer if you looked at it at exactly the right angle. I've read other reviews where the same polish flashed blue/pink and was supposedly nice, but mine was horrible. I threw some CQ Cranberry and CQ Mystique into the bottle to see what would happen.


You can see a bit of blue in the bottle here.

This is what happened. It's a sheer pinky-purple that still has a bit of the blue shimmer that showed itself once every 600 years with South Sea Pearl. I like this much better than the way it was before I threw CQ stuff into it all willy-nilly, but I'm not about to marry it or anything. I think I have to have disgusting amounts of glitter in my frankens in order to like them. This must be the key. I had a hard time photographing the shimmer because the sun hates me today and decided it would laugh in my face the moment I braved the spider-infested deck door (yes, they're still there) to take some photos. You'll just have to trust me when I say that the shimmer is there, and it's pretty. For a pink.

CURSE YOU, SUN! I WILL BEST YOU YET! I see a light box in my future.

China Glaze - Snow (+ franken top coat)

Natural light.

Snow is white. It doesn't seem to lean towards yellow or blue tint or any sort of different type of white, it's just white. I found this polish to be quite thick and it was pretty streaky for the first two coats. These pictures show Snow with three coats and no top coat. This is my first white polish so I'm not sure if streakiness is normal for this color.


Failed attempt at a shot in the shade.

Overall I like Snow. If you're looking for a pure white polish, this might be the one for you.

I live in New England, and my favorite part of actual snow is the sparkle. I wanted to try adding a top coat I've been working on to see how it would look with a white base.


Natural light.


Full sun.

I had a bunch of super sparse glitter top coats and I was not a fan of how they applied, so I spent 100 years fishing out glitter and putting it all into one bottle of clear. These photos show one coat of this stuff, so you can see how much glitter is in here. Some of the smaller ones are semi-transparent (is there a name for these?), which looks really nice in real life but translated to photos as weird pastel pieces.


Closeup.

I'm not a fan of how this photographed in the closeup, but I LOVE it in real life. I will be trying this top coat over other colors later to see if it looks better in photos.

Franken Berry

The title of this post makes me laugh way more than it should, but I had to do it. When I swatched CQ Cranberry yesterday and saw how un-cranberry it really was, I decided to try my hand at making my own cranberry polish. This stuff is kind of a mess, but I think I like it (for the most part). The pictures show the polish in two coats with no top coat, though it could use one to even out the bumps from the glitter.


Natural light.

I put so many different polishes into this that I have no idea what they were anymore. Something happened when I mixed them all and now this stuff is THICK. It's hard to apply in thin coats because it's thick, sticky, and dries in like 15 seconds.


Natural light.

I really like the color. The hexagonal pink glitter looks a bit stupid in it, and I wish I hadn't added it. I was going a little glitter crazy at 2am and didn't think before I poured. The more I look at it, the more I like it, though most of it settles to the bottom of the bottle, so it would probably be easy to by-pass if needed.


Natural light.

If I could figure out how to thin and de-sticky this stuff I would totally use it again, as long as I could find a way to either keep the hexagonal glitter in the bottle or coax more of it out. I think that stuff works best in high volumes. When it's sparse on the nail like this it can look messy and stupid, in my opinion. The glitter problems are a definite disappointment.

I'd say this franken was a color success, and a formula mess (hardy har). What do you think?