Polish attempt

Craft buddy Spooky Little Girl and I made nail polish a while back. It was fun, messy, and mostly a failure.

I thought I could just dump glitter into nail polish to get amazing, custom colors. It doesn’t work that way. The colors look great in the bottle, but they make fingernails look like gunk spackled on dirt. The glitter makes polish thick and unusable. After a few days, the colored glitters that were added to clear varnish turned silver. The clear polish took on the color of the glitter, but the glitter lost its color.

Making and naming them was fun

From left to right, the polish I made:

Pumpkin juice – multi-sized orange glitter in clear polish. an homage to that hideous pumpkin juice I made
Pumpkin guts – steel gray polish with orange micro glitter, and orange hex glitter
Orc – steel gray polish with flecks of olive, orange, and black glitter
Absinthe – clear polish with “tinkerbell” green, emerald, and grass green glitter
Green Apple – green polish with all the abovementioned green glitters
Nameless purple polish – the only one that looks good. violet polish with orange micro glitter

A blurry close up of my nails. Lumpy, with little evidence of glitter. But the bottle color looks great.

 
This is Orc. In my head, it was the best one. In execution, it makes me sad.

If you etsy search “indie nail polish” you can find some beautiful, creative colors. I totally thought I could easily make that. So did some of the etsy sellers – there’s some dreck for sale. Some are sincerely amazing.