Franken Polishes

Aug 21, 2013 20:39

A few weeks ago I ran across a vid on youtube about making frankens, or DIY nail polishes, and it looked really interesting and simple. And I already had almost everything I needed to make a franken. So I decided to give it a try.

First off a little background (I'm not an expert, but this is what I've gathered in a couple weeks of Googling):

'Franken' refers to any nail polish color mixed at home. It's a reference to Frankenstein's Monster. It can be a simple as pouring two standard commercial nail colors in a bottle and shaking them up. Or you can get kind of fancy and mix pigments and/or glitter in clear base for a completely original color.

For my first project, I decided to spend a few dollars for the sake of convenience and bought some small empty bottles and some copper bbs. (I could have cleaned out an old polish bottle and used that, but that's kind of messy.) I also bought some suspension base for $5, which I've read is necessary for adding glitter. I already had a bottle of clear coat, a pink eye-shadow (from a free sample make-up bag), and a pot of black nail glitter (also a free sample).

In total, I spent about $15 for supplies, and have enough stuff to do at least 5 more bottles of polish and could have done the same thing for even less if I put in just a little effort. (If I did just pink, no glitter, I could have skipped the suspension base and not bought anything extra.) As craft projects go, that's really cheap.

What I did:
1) I scraped some pink eye shadow out of its palette and on to a piece of paper with the nail file part of a nail clipper. It came out very powdery, which is what you need to mix in nail polish, no extra grinding was needed. Folded the paper and used the crease to funnel the powder into my empty bottle.

2) Scooped a little black glitter on to the paper and into the bottle.

3) Poured clear coat over the glitter & pigment until the bottle was about 2/3 full.

4) Filled the bottle most of the rest of the way with suspension base--leaving a little room at the top to shake or add extra color if necessary.

5) Dropped in a few bbs.

6) Screwed on the cap and shook it up.

I need a new camera and the lighting in my house isn't great. It's actually sparkly in person, but here's how it turned out, sorta:


It took all of about 5 minutes to do. I put down a piece of newspaper in case of drips, but didn't actually end up spilling anything. So there was zero clean up since all I did was pour and shake. And I ended up with a fairly nice and completely usable nail polish, colored with things I probably would have thrown away otherwise. Which is really very cool.

Now I'm thinking about other nail polishes I can make. I've got several other eye shadows in my medicine cabinet, that third or fourth, too-dramatic, color left over in eye shadow trios and quads and some other odd samples that could be great nail polish colors. And there are those bottles of polish that aren't quite the right color or ones where I have that little bit left in the bottom that is hard to get to--maybe a little color mixing will do the trick...

diy, nail polish

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