Does a tiger say roar?

My nails decided to stop cooperating and continued to break for the past few weeks.  They weren't photograph-worthy until this weekend.  In the meantime I've been experimenting with all my new glitters from youmix and TKB.  FYI the sample size of TKB shaplies is plenty.  I ended up ordering 1oz of some of the sizes and ended up with way too much glitter.

The manicure below has china glaze seduce me as a base, topped with two coats of my magenta glitter franken.  I stamped a franken over that, put on a coat of seche and called it a day.  Typically I'm not one for animal prints, but I thought I'd give it a go.

Glitter appreciation shot.

 It's so glittery.  The purple magic glitter looks awesome when the light hits it.

Who said "puke green" couldn't be beautiful

Green is by far my favorite color, especially vintage shades.  Everyone who knows me describes "puke green" as "Liz green".  I should probably be insulted by this, but unfortunately it's true.  I'd prefer to think of "Liz green" as a 70's retro shade rather than vomit.  China glaze's trendsetter is pretty much my ideal color.  This floral design from BM plate (224) has been posted many times before, but it's too pretty to not to show pictures of.  China glaze VIII was used for stamping.  I LOVE this color combo.  It achieved the retro look I was going for.

I'm happy with this manicure and especially pleased that I've found a shade of green that matches me in trendsetter ;)

Basic mani

 I hate having naked nails, but I don't always have time to do something complicated. So, these are the times I turn to a basic mani.  This isn't anything exciting, but it still looks pretty and clean.

Base: china glaze seduce me
Top layer: china glaze luxe and lush 

Suspension update

Like many others, I had a moment (or two) of panic when I learned TKB was no longer selling glitter suspension base.  It sounds like it will eventually be brought back, but for now I'd like to have an alternative.  There doesn't seem to be any great solution on the web.  From head to foot has an awesome discussion on her experimentation with alternative suspension base options.  Aerosil sounded like a great solution so I purchased a small amount from ebay.  It turns out that there are many varieties of Aerosil and they don't all work for this purpose.  I purchased Aerosil 200 and it did NOT work in polish.  The powder clumped up in the luster base and wouldn't completely mix in.  Xanthan gum has mixed results, but I figured it was worth a try.  Also, There is this video floating around where xanthan gum is successfully used for glitter suspension. 

This is the xanthan gum I used.  Most blogs have suggested using the clear form, but I'm not sure which this is.

I used a spoon made from a straw and added 3 scoops to the bottle.  Luster base was also added.  This bottle has 2 sizes of glitter.  There is a micro pink glitter and small pink hex glitter.  The xanthan gum did cloud the base a little, but it wasn't anything too dramatic.  I wanted to see how long the glitter would stay suspended without me shaking the bottle. 

  

The photo on the left is after 24 hours.  The photo on the right is after 5.5 days.  

Seems too good to be true, right?  Right.  The suspension was successful, but the xanthan gum did add a slightly rough texture to the polish.  The photos below are without and with top coat.

 No top coat

(notice the rough texture)

One layer of seche vite

(better)

Two layers of seche vite

(not too bad)

In conclusion, xanthan gum suspends glitter surprisingly well.  It did leave a slightly rough texture and wouldn't work well to make polish to sell, but it seems to be a good temporary solution until glamour base returns.  2 coats of seche worked to cover up the roughness and looked fine for every day use.

Here is another suspension with xanthan gum.  This polish contains 3 different sizes of glitter including a micro, small and large hex.  This was left untouched for 4 days.

Silver holo franken love

I'm loving all the glitter options from you mix cosmetics.  I felt it was necessary to make an awesome franken with silver and black glitter. Below is a photo of the glitter used.  All of them are from YMC except luminosity (left) and the black micro which are from TKB.  The remainder of the glitter used included silver holo square, black holo hex, black shredded, black hex, 2 sizes of gunmetal hex, small silver hex and 2 sizes of silver holo hex.

It's so pretty in the sun.

The base is one coat of a silver steel franken followed by 2 coats of the glitter polish.  There was a bit of shrinkage near the tips of the nails following application of seche vite.  For some reason it always looks worse in photos than in person.

*On a side note, I've been experimenting with the use of xanthan gum in glitter suspension. It seems like people have had mixed results with it.  The polish was only made last night, but so far it has remained suspended. *fingers crossed*  I will post photos after the weekend with an update.

Sinful red

 I figured the rainbow nails were a little too intense for work. So, I kept the pointer finger the same and worked around that.  The base color is sinful colors Ruby ruby.  Each nail contains a small red hex and a larger red hex closer to the base. I applied the glitter with a dotting tool while the second coat of red polish was still wet.  As mentioned yesterday, the pointer finger has the small and large hex glitter along with dots in various shades of orange.  A dotting tool was used for this.

That's all for now :)

Rainbow nails

Rebecca is hosting a contest that combines a few of her favorite things.  I chose to incorporate gradients and dots in mine.

This is a little more busy than what I usually do, but I it's always good to try new things.

1. Pointer: sinful colors Ruby Ruby with multiple orange dots and two sizes of red hex glitter
2. Middle finger: OPI rising star and take the stage stripes with gold hex and bar glitter
3. Fourth finger: Sheets from dry water marble (previous post)
4. Pinky: Too many shades of blue and purple to count applied with a dotting tool (notice the dots of Cult nails clairvoyant)

Time for the macro shots...

The blue polish instantly stained my cuticles.

Glitter!