Fun is ... Clairns 230, Fantasy Fire and a gold/green morphing franken

For nearly two years now I have been stalking ebay looking at bottles of Clarins 230 thinking these various thoughts:

"Yes, I should get it now before all the bottles are gone"

"No *slaps face* don't be stupid and pay that for a bottle of polish:

"Oh look, this one is only $60, quick I should get it now"

"No, I can totally franken this using red/green colour morphing powder"

"Hang on, how will I know if I have my franken recipe is just right if I don't have the real thing to compare it too"

"Just get Fantasy Fire and be satisfied with that"

"But the collector in me really needs to own a bottle of 230"

"Imagine if I found a box full of 230's in some garage sale, I could make a squillion dollars"

And so on and so forth.

So a few weeks ago,  I did the deed.  I paid a horrid amount of money for a single bottle of nail polish.  And do I regret it? Nope, not one little bit.  I feel a small amount of relief as I gently stroke my bottle *my precious*.

What do you do when you get your bottle of Clarins 230, you slap it on and compare it to the other polishes you bought (yes you Fantasy Fire) and made (yes you purple franken with red/green pigment) and see what they all look like.

First I tried just Clarins 230 on it's own.  This was three coats, which all looked very smooth and even in real life, although in these photos the index finger looks like it got a thicker coat.  So pretty and squishy and the red/green sparkle really is to die for.

Next, I compared Clarins 230 with my franken and with Fantasy Fire.  

Verdict: franken is much more opaque, Fantasy Fire is a much brighter purple and neither of them quite had the same strength to the green sparkle that Clarins 230 had.

Next, I tried them all over a purple polish, and my favourite go to purple polish is Ulta3 Orchid.  This one really showed that the sparkle in the Franken and Fantasy Fire wasn't as strong.

This set of comparison photos is just of Clarins 230 and Fantasy Fire over Ulta3 Orchid.  Are you sick of this yet??

Finally, because I was disappointed that my franken didn't have as much green sparkle as Clarins 230, I added a good few heaped straw measure fulls into the bottle.  BAM, lots more green sparkle, and lots more red sparkle!  DOH I added too much, now I have to split it into two bottle and dilute it.  Actually, if I just left it as one coat of my franken instead of two, it's pretty damn close.

Well, that was fun.  I totally enjoyed my play with the magical unicorn pee and it's friends.

Franken - My moon and stars

I got some new solvent stable glitters the other day and decided it was time to make up some new custom polishes.  Here is the first polish I made up, which I have called 'My moon and stars'.

It has small and medium sized turquoise hexes as well as turquoise holo moons and silver stars.

The base is a dark blue jelly which is made with suspension base, a few drops of Blue 1 tint concentrate, two drops of Ferric Ferrocyanide tint concentrate and one tiny drop of black tint concentrate.

This is two coats on its own, and while it might look like the edges of the stars are sticking up, they are actually smooth beneath the glossy top coat of Ulta3 non-chip x2 and Seche Vite.

I have a whole range of other franken polishes / custom polishes in mind, I just need the time to make them and wear them.

Our Aussie supplier for suspension base (or untinted lacquer base as they call it) has recently set up a section on their website with all their franken supplies listed. The suspension base they sell is really fantastic, it suspends glitter really well, dries glossy and is big 3 free.  I'm a huge fan of it and have personally used more than a litre of the stuff for just my own mixing.  I also highly recommend their tint concentrates.  I purchased some of every colour and they make the most amazing jelly colours.

http://beautyworld.com.au/franken_polish_supplies

They do ship overseas, but only items that are not classed as dangerous good such as glitter and the like, so please don't ask them about shipping suspension base overseas.

A quick franken so I can...

... get back to watching the TV.

That sounds terrible, but it's the truth.  On Easter Monday my husband and I started watching the first series of Game of Thrones.  We have two episodes left and I'm going to go watch them now!

So quickly, here is a franken that I made using all the different sized and shaped silver and silver holographic glitters I own.  Plus a little bit of black glitter. Two coats, with two good coats of top coat to smooth it out.

Ok, off to watch some heads getting chopped, siblings having it off with each other and other weird and gruesome happenings in this show!  How many others out there watch Game of Thrones?

Oh, and last call for any Aussies that want in on the group Layla order for holo, mirrors or anything else.  Here is a video of the mirror effects (all in Italian :P).  They also have a newish flakie and glitter collection, with a purple flakie that looks very Nfu Oh 51 esque.

Nail art challenge random draw winners - and a franken

I'm starting with nails today, but if you want to skip down straight away to see the random winners, then I understand.

Ok, are you back with me now?  Here is a franken / custom polish called Fiber Optic which I created for Shatter Me Claire's franken comp. If you haven't checked it out already, you should, cause there are some fantastic frankens over there, all with their ingredients listed out.  Plus you can vote for your favourite franken to win some Glitter Gal polishes.

The ingredients for this look like a big long list, but they are all pretty easily available:

• 2x scoops of Adam & Eve glitter (TKB Trading)
• 1x scoop of Indu Rose Moondust (TKB Trading) - this is what gives it the blue/purple duochrome look.
• 1/2 scoop of purple glitter sample (TKB Trading)
• 1/2 scoop of mauve micro glitter (TKB Trading)
• 1/2 scoop of purple micro glitter (TKB Trading)
• 1/2 scoop of lavender micro glitter (TKB Trading)
• 1/2 scoop of iridescent micro glitter (TKB Trading)
• 2x scoops of purple flakes (You Mix Cosmetics)
• 2x scoops of blue to purple colour shifting glitter (You Mix Cosmetics)
• 1x scoops large silver hex glitter (You Mix Cosmetics)
• 2x scoops of Holo blue hex glitter (Bling Flake)
• 5 drops of Ferric ferrocyanide tint - or use a dark blue polish.
• 10 drops of red 7 tint - or a strong red polish
• Untinted lacquer base (suspension base).

Ok, now the random winners of the Nail Art Challenge.  First up - the Aussies.  There were only 29 in the draw cause the overall winner (Ev) was removed from the random drawer after emailing me this morning.

Congratulations Bec! Please email me within 24 hours, or I'm going to randomly select another Aussie winner. 

Now the international ladies..... drum roll please...

Congratulations Jelena!  Please email me within 24 hours, or I'm going to randomly select another international winner.

Once again thank you to all the ladies (and gentlemen) that made the effort to enter, and of course thank you also to the amazing Lynnderella for making the amazing polishes which made the whole nail art challenge so huge for me!

Flakies to franken with

Back around Christmas time, I received a very small sample of some raw flakies from Kaila at TKB Trading.  She wanted to know what I thought of them and whether they should get them in stock.

Cause the sample size was very small, I just mixed a little of each colour provided into a mini 5ml bottle with suspension base.  I then applied it over black. I only took comparison photos against other flakie polishes, as I wanted to show Kaila the difference, and stupid me didn't take a photo of the fully mani!

My bottle mainly comprised of gold and green. I only had a tiny amount of the red and blue flakies, so they don't show up much in this polish, but the red flakes look more pink and purple in my photos. The blue ones are clearly blue, but there aren't many in my bottle.

I was so excited to try these out mainly because until now, I have not been able to locate any raw flakie that you can add to polish and it didn't lose it's colour.  I know MK over at Polish and Pigments has done a huge amount of research on this too.

Anyway, I told Kaila that they should definitly still stock these, even though they are not as bright.  Mainly because there still isn't anything else available as a flake.  I will be getting some more because  they will certainly make an interesting addition to my frankening supplies.

I think these same flakies are also now available from You Mix Cosmetics and Frankenpolish Shop.  I have no experience yet with either of these companies, although I have recently ordered from You Mix Cosmetics so will know in the future.  

TKB Trading now have these in stock and my experiences with them has always been excellent.

Pimped up frankens

I have a couple more frankens for you today.  These are two that I made up about a year ago, but I rarely wore because they were settled at the bottom of the bottle and I couldn't be stuffed shaking them like crazy to fix them up.  

But now that I got some suspension base, I poured off the clear that was settled at the top and replaced it with some suspension base.  Whoo Hoo, they look super awesome in the bottle now.

This first polish is made with TKB Copper reflecks, 1/4 a bottle of black and the remainder suspension base.

I ended up being a rich and sparkly chocolatey brown.

The TKB Reflecks are very fine but have a glass fleck appearance.

This next polish is a bit of a mash together of a few things, and because I did it a year ago I don't actually remember what went into it.  I know there is lots of green glitter, a little gold glitter and some silver holo glitter.  I originally put some green pigment in too, because the clear polish that I poured off was very green.

Because I poured out the green base, I added some new green tint, which was Ferric Ferrocyanide and Yellow 10 tint, plus filling the bottle with suspension base.

I originally called this polish "lights on the tree" because the holo sparkles looks like Christmas lights on the bright green tree.

Just in case you hadn't checked, TKB is now shipping suspension bases internationally!!  I think the price that they are shipping it for is really quite good.  I was expecting it to be a lot more expensive than that.  

Here are the basic prices for 480ml of suspension, which includes shipping:

• Canada: $39 =  $1.22 / 15ml bottle or 40 cents / 5ml bottle.
• Rest of the world: $69 (but they say ONLY IF your country allows the import of nail polish?!?! they say they will have a list of countries soon) = $2.15 / 15ml bottle or 72 cents / 5ml bottle.

Sure it's not cheap, but at least it is available.  They are also selling in other various sizes so you can mix bases and tints.  It's been a real long time waiting girls (nearly a year) but now almost everyone can get some base.

Custom polish - Cavalry Orange

I've posted about my husband playing and coaching baseball before, specifically for the Canberra Cavalry in the Australian Baseball League.  I've done Cavalry nails before, and I'll tell you now, there are going to be several more Cavalry baseball manis over the summer, because I plan to have a different orange baseball mani for every home series.

Orange is the teams colour, which in general terms is rather bright and not really a fashion colour to me.  But in terms of a team supporter colour, it's excellent.  I wore this orange mani to the games last weekend.

Last season I only had one orange polish, Ulta3 Crazy!  This year I have added to that with Picture Polish Citrus and Nics Sticks by OPI Orange you fast, but because I got my new tints I just had to make my own orange holo.

I'm afraid I have a lot of trouble capturing the holo in red and orange polishes.  My camera doesn't get it. I always think I have taken some great shots, then I upload them to my PC and discover you can hardly see the rainbow.

I made this one using Red 6,Yellow 10 and Yellow 5 lacquer tints, suspension base and spectraflair.  

To answer some questions in yesterday's comments, I got the tints from an Australian Beauty supply company who only ships domestically to Australia.  I don't feel comfortable posting their business name up or contact details here, as they are a bulk supply business that doesn't currently deal with small public orders.  However any Aussie girls can email me to find out the details.

Custom polish - Fairway green

I have another custom polish for you today.  Again I don't want to call this a franken, because it's not actually made from the parts of any other polishes, it's made from all new ingredients.  

As you can see, this is a strongly pigmented rich green holo.  I wore this for a couple of days last week and it really was rather spectacular.  Because it's not your everyday colour I got so many comments on it!  I also played a round of golf on friday at our corporate golf day and my boss even asked if I specifically put on this green polish because I was playing golf.  Because of that, I've called this one "Fairway Green"

I made this polish using the new polish tints I got with the suspension base.  It was only when I was making this polish that I actually realised how awesome these tints are.  You see I got seven tint bottles:

• Black
• White
• Red 6 (orange red)
• Red 7 (crimson red)
• Red 34 (magenta)
• Blue 1 (light green based blue)
• Ferric Ferrocyanide (dark blue)
• Yellow 10 (canary yellow)
• Yellow 5 (golden yellow)

So what's so good about them?, well you just need to take a look at the bottom of a bottle of polish. Take this bottle of China Glaze LOL for example.

The important colour information is listed at the bottom.  The color in LOL is made using a combination of Ferric Ferrocyanide and Red 34.  I just need to keep tweaking the quantities of each one until I get the polish colour to match!!

The Fairway Green polish above was made using Ferric Ferrocyanide, Yellow 10, spectraflair 1500-35 and suspension base. 

I can't express how much fun I have playing mad scientist with all this stuff.

Custom polishes for my friends wedding

Last weekend my husband and I had the pleasure of attending the wedding of a girlfriend of mine from work.  The wedding was really lovely, and the dinner afterward was just delicious.  It was at a nearby winery and renown country smokehouse called The Poacher's Pantry.  I'd heard great things about it, and it totally lived up to my expectations.

Prior to the wedding, I created two polishes specifically for my friend.  After working out the recipe in a mini bottle, I made her two full size bottles, one of each colour.  I put them into cleaned out Nfu Oh bottles (from some Nfu Oh polishes I scored for $2).

This first one is what she has named 'Fiona's Wedding'.  She wore a classic french polish on her fingers for the wedding, but I noticed that she wore this one on her toes!

In the sun it's a magical metallic holographic gold.  Below in the shade, it is a lovely neutral cool toned gold.

I'm so in love with the polish.  It's a 100% me colour too, in fact I made myself a full sized bottle of this after I made hers.  I made it using TKB forged gold pigment, TKB gold sparks, 1500-35 spectraflair and suspension base.

Next up is the second polish, which my friend named 'Fiona's Honeymoon'.  Maybe she is wearing this one right now?  I wanted to create another metallic holo, and I wanted it to be pink.  I'd remembered seeing her wear a Sally Hansen pink chrome polish once, so I thought she might like this.

Again I mixed a mini bottle first, then made up the full sized one once I had worked out the recipe.

I made this one with TKB metallic white pigment (which I never would have bought, but it came in their sample pack where they choose the colours).  I love the metallic white pigment cause it turns whatever colour polish you are making into a metallic finish, and it also tones down the colour.  So it's great if you are going for a pastel shade.  I also used some of my magenta liquid tint,1500-35 Spectaflair and suspension base.

I don't want to call these polishes Frankens, because they were not created from other polishes.  They were created from scratch with all raw materials.  I think I will just call them custom polishes when I haven't added another polish to it.