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

Transdesign Haul!

Don't you just hate how much OPI and China Glaze nail polishes cost in the UK? £10.50 for a bottle of OPI is just extortionate! While they are fantastic quality and my favourite brand of nail polish, I do begrudge having to pay that price when they are so much cheaper in the USA. I used to buy my polish from ASOS singly or QVC in kits to get a bit of a discount and there are a few cheaper UK based e-tailers that sell them a bit cheaper. Then while online, I read about Transdesign and the fantastic prices of the big brand nail polishes they stock. They are a US based e-tailer and sell OPI for $5.75 and China Glaze for $2.99, a BIG difference! I was very dubious before as I didn't know how much the shipping would be and didn't was to incur import tax to set it over the edge, making it not really worth ordering. Then I read that they did flat rate shipping for $20 which you can get up to 9 bottles of polish in (any brand) and I decided to take the plunge. I didn't think that was too bad for shipping really when we can pay £4.95 here sometimes for standard shipping and the warehouse might only be up the road.

Despatch was very quick and my parcel arrived about a week later! Very good service there I think. I mainly chose OPI but picked out a couple of Color Club polishes to try.

Read on for my haul!