Pretty and Polished Swing

Today I have a special polish to show you, it is from an indie brand called Pretty and Polished which you can find on Etsy. The brand is owned by Chelsea and she has designed some amazingly gorgeous nail colours which are very unique compared to the mass market brands such as OPI etc. I have been waiting for her shop to reopen for ages and two weeks ago she opened again. I was very excited and stayed up late (Pretty and Polished is based in the US) to place an order so I didn't miss out. I ordered 8 of her mini sized lacquers and they arrived a few days ago. They are absolute stunners, I am so pleased with them. So far, I've only used one which I am showing today, it is called Swing.

Description from Pretty and Polished:

It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing!

This is one Du-Wop of a polish! A red jelly base is home to different sizes of black, white, and silver glitter.

I think it is lovely. It is so different from other colours out there and I love the squishy jelly base. One of my colleagues said it reminded her of a trifle - she thought it looked like raspberry jelly with fruit in it. I've seen quite a lot of nail blogs creating what they call a jelly sandwich where they've used a jelly type polish and sandwiched some glitter between the layers. Swing is like an instant jelly sandwich manicure in a bottle.

The application wasn't as good as I'd have liked. It is quite a runny polish compared to most glitter polishes and the glitter slipped off the brush a lot. I found that putting the bottle upside down for a few minutes beforehand helped to get the glitter to the top so it was easier to get it out with the brush. It is best to do a coat and then scoop the glitter with the brush and dab it on with the second/third coats. I am wearing three coats here and there was no nail line visible.

A bottle of Swing costs $4.75 and contains 7ml of product. They can be purchased on the Pretty and Polished Etsy store here. Currently, Chelsea has no stock available but she says that she is hoping to restock on Sunday.

Jennifer xx

Another Franken

Hi! I have another franken polish that I made a couple of weeks ago. This one is mostly purple but has some gold and lilac hexagonal glitter thrown in and teeny specks of pale purple glitter which flash blue in certain lighting. The purple glitter bled and tinted the clear base but it still worked okay. These pictures make it look a lot more blue than it is, just due to the camera. In real life, it doesn't show much blue at all, only when the light hits it in certain ways.

The base colour I used under this was Deborah Lippmann Call Me Irresponsible which is a purplely jelly.

I love the purple shade, it reminds me of Cadbury chocolate wrappers - if only I'd been able to take accurate photos of it (the bottle shot is better than the nails though). Those of you who don't get Cadburys chocolate where you are, it is in my opinion, the best chocolate.

Source

Speaking of Cadbury, I'm off on a canal holiday next month for a week with my boyfriend's family and we will be going past Cadbury World. I hope we get the chance to stop to visit.

What does this franken remind you of? Again, I'm looking for a name for it if any of you have a good one. I might just call it Chocolate Wrappers but I'm open to better suggestions.

Jennifer xx

Guest Post for Liloo @ Le petit jardin de liloo

17 Wild Curls Mascara - read about it here.

Liloo, from Le petit jardin de liloo recently requested for some guest bloggers to review some mascaras for her. I reviewed two from 17 Cosmetics. You can read my guest review about them here.

Jennifer xx

My first franken! Tropical Waters

Those of you who are not aware what a franken is, well it is taking different polishes and mixing them together to create your own concoction or making your own colour by adding pigments or glitter to clear polish. It comes from Frankenstein who in the novel gathered different parts to create his monster.

I've seen some gorgeous frankens, some people have even started up their own indie polish brand to sell their creations. I've wanted to try it for a while and finally decided to buy some glitter, bottles, shaking balls and clear polish to try it for myself. I have learnt a lot from doing it and have done a lot of research. My first franken whilst it wasn't a complete fail, (I love how it came out on my nails) I found that the dyes in the glitter bled into the clear polish, tinting the clear base which was unwanted. For the future, I need to find some glitters which are suitable to be mixed with solvents. I also learnt about glitter sinking to the bottom due to it needing a base to keep it suspended, clear polish just doesn't cut it. I can't find suspension bases online in the UK so for my second franken, I used a fine glitter polish and added to it. More on that in my next franken post.

Anyway, this is what I came up with:

I really need to get a macro lens to help with these close ups...

As yet it is un-named. My boyfriend said it reminds him of swimming pool tiles when you look into the swimming pool. I thought it was a really good description. I wont tell you exactly what glitters I used because I don't know which ones caused the colour bleeding and I don't want my readers to potentially waste their money.

The base colour I used under this was Color Club Lumin-icecent which is from the Foiled collection.

So what do you think of my first franken? Does anyone have any name suggestions so I can stick a little label on it to finish it off?

Thanks to The Polish Anon's comment below, I'm now going to call this polish 'Tropical Waters'. 

Jennifer xx