So Close...And Yet So Far

I'm trying to work through a few of my untrieds at the minute.  Bless, her, Michelle of Things I Love At the Moment was saying she has 13 untried polishes she's trying to get through.  To which all I could say was: I wish!!!  I've been spending far too much and swatching far too little. 


Well, having tempted my mother with a polish from my Models Own Beetlejuice collection, I thought I'd use one of the others, so I went for Aqua Violet.  If you haven't tried it this is a gorgeous greeny blue/purple duochrome, inspired by (obviously) beetles. 

I think my problems with this mani started when I put polish on over a basecoat that had been dry for a few hours.  I'm currently doing an experiment with 2 different basecoats, one on each hand, to see which one strengthens my nails the best, so I know which one to buy more of (more on this in a separate post some time).  I'd had a busy day so I'd only had chance to apply the basecoats earlier in the day.  So I'm guessing this is the reason why I had bubbling as the polish dried. Not a good look.

Here you can just see the flakies

So I decided to cover up the bubbling with a flaky.  Me in my genius decided to use a flaky (yum, Cadburys Flakes...) that matched the colour of the polish, so I chose Finger Paints Motley.  Bad idea.  Never choose a flaky that is the same colour as your polish!!!  Because Motley also has a duochrome effect of greeny blue and purple, you just can't see it on top of the Models Own Aqua Violet.  It just disappears!!!  All it does it make it look like it rained on your mani.  Which would be good if this is what you wanted!  But it wasn't.  Mistake #2!


My third mistake came when I decided to apply Seche Vite when the colour was nearly dry.  Major shrinkage!!!  From asking around I think that Seche Vite is really bad for shrinkage if the undercoats are pretty dry.  Which is a shame as I love my Seche Vite.  However, to confirm this in a true scientific way, at some point I will do a controlled experiment to confirm this.


Anyway, by last night I was fed up with the tip wear look but couldn't be bothered to take it off and do another mani, so I decided to try to cover it up.  So I got out another untried - China Glaze Some Like it Haute.  If you haven't seen this it is a gorgeous gorgeous glitter top coat - it has tiny aqua bar glitter mixed in with small purple glitter - a perfect match to the Aqua Violet.  This is such a pretty glitter that if you love glitters you absolutely have to have it.  

The tiny bar glitter

On my accent nail I decided to have a go at stamping again, and actually this turned out pretty well.  I think I'll be doing more stamping.  Once I'd cleaned off all the polish my darling daughter had got all over the scraper, the plates and the stamper.

My stamping - and here you can see the raindrop effect

But again I made the fatal (well, in nail polish speak) mistake of putting another coat of Seche Vite over the top (I'd not had the convos about shrinkage at this point!).  Just look at the shrinkage in the photos - it's soooo bad.

Shrinkage!

With a little more care and a few tweaks, this could have been an amazing mani.  But sadly it was mostly a fail - *goes off and weeps into her acetone*.  But I have learnt a few things with this mani which means hopefully I'll improve and have some better pictures to show you another time.