Thursday, May 13, 2010

Gold foil - part fail

First up - Sheri,  are you out there?  You won second prize in my giveaway and you haven't contacted me.  You also didn't leave an email address.  I'll wait one more day then redraw!!

I did another set of foils the other day.  I was sooo happy with my initial application, they looked awesome.  Thanks for the tips readers after my last attempt!!  This time, I used my hair dryer to ensure the glue was totally dry before applying the foils.  This worked perfectly and the foils transferred and lifted off with pretty much zero gaps.  Cool.

But then I did the top coat.  I knew not to use a quick dry top, so I put my seche vite away and grabbed another one.  As I applied it I could see it changing the foil immediately.  I did four fingers on my left hand with this top coat, and then stopped.  All the holo effect was disappearing!  I changed top coats for the left thumb and the whole right hand and it made a very clear difference.

Here is the right hand.  This shows a good smooth finish and you can see some of the holo effect.

Here is the right hand on another angle, see the nice smooth holo finish.


And here is my FAIL left hand.  See how the gold foil lost all its holo effect.


And another.  Although the nail had a high sheen from the top coat, the foil actually looked matte.


So I learnt my lesson about which top coat to use. 
I think it's just trial and error to find a brand that works well for you.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Artform 3D Gold holographic 514

Artform 3D polish in Gold is another beautiful polish in this fabulous collection of holographic polishes.  This one required three coats to be totally opaque, but it was worth the effort.

When this first arrived in the post I was a bit disappointed, because in the bottle this just looked like another silver holo.  I couldn't really see the gold.  But after applying it, I realised what a fantastic cool toned platinum gold this is.  Here is an indoor pic, where you can see that it is definitely gold rather than silver.


I had hoped to swatch some comparison swatches with other gold holos, but with winter descending on us in the southern hemisphere awfully quickly, I just don't get enough daylight to swatch before or after work.  Thus, my swatching has to wait until the weekend.  I wonder what people would think if I took polishes to work and swatched at lunch?