TKB Trading pigment givaway

This is my first Giveaway EVER!  :-)

So, I moved all my pigments in baggies into jars today (well, at least until I ran out of jars, LOL).

The baggie I had of TKB Trading's Zirconium Cluster yeilded FOUR jars - this is way more pigment than I will ever use for doing my nails, and that is all I use these pigments for.  So, you guys get the benefit of all the extra!

This pigment is a white powder that is super-shimmery.  It has sort of a multi-colored shimmer to it.  I like mixing it into clear gel and then applying it over a dark color to add shimmer.  I'm sure you could also mix it into regular polish for all the frankeners out there.  :-)

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post.  Next Wednesday, February 29th, I will use a random picker to choose 3 people to receive one of these jars of pigment.  The winners will be posted, and then will have 3 days to send me their address via email (there is a link to contact me in the sidebar on the right).

Here is a picture of the three jars.  Each winner will receive one jar  (click on the images to enlarge them)

Here is what the zirconium cluster looks like when mixed into clear and applied over a black base.  

Here are a few other pictures.  The zirconium cluster is the one on the far left of the photos.  You can see it fits right in with the Sparks! Collection, even though it is not part of it.  It's about the same particle size though

Good luck everyone!  :)

Favorite SOG mani's to date

I thought since I just created one of my favorite SOG mani's so far, that maybe I would do a post on a few of my favorites.  These aren't necessarily in order of my faves, but rather I am working in reverse chronological order, LOL.  I guess since that is how my charting always is, that's the only way my brain really works anymore.

This is a very pic-heavy post.  But I assume none of you mind a little "polish porn".  :-)


Aragon Holo
This is the latest favorite, and my current manicure that I just did.  This is OPI Gelcolor's Here Today, Aragon Tomorrow (given to me by a friend) mixed with coarse grade spectraflair.  I'm in love.  I had a great Christmas mani (below) but I wish I had thought of this combination earlier!  :-p

This color wasn't really one of my favorites straight out of the bottle.  It's such a dark color it really looks almost black.  I really didn't need another nearly black polish.  When I mixed a few drops though with a rice-grain sized amount of spectraflair - WOAH!  Amazing forest green linear holo!  The pictures really don't capture the linear-ness of it well unfortunately.  My big camera's batteries are recharging.  Maybe I can add some better pictures tomorrow in the sun.

I am using an old contact lens case to mix in, as was suggested by a member over at The Purse Forum.  It works really well in fact, and then I can store what I have left over from the mix (in case I need to do any repairs), and it's protected from the light as my case I'm using is opaque heavy plastic.

Blingy Red Funky French

My previous manicure was the one I did for this Christmas - my beautiful holiday mani!  No mixing involved here.  I used two coats of Gelish Waterfield as the base color, then did two coats of Red Carpet Manicure Glitz & Glamorous on the tips (a dupe for Gelish Queen of Hearts).  I use a small old eyeshadow brush dipped in alcohol to clean up my smile lines.  Very easy.  

A couple days before Christmas I added the little reindeer decal to my ring finger (sorry for the crappy cell phone pic on that one).  

It was a great mani that I kept on the full two weeks (i'm usually bored with it and change it up after about 10 days).  Even then I was reluctant to take it off and change it, but i was anxious to try out a newish color in my untried stash, and the new lamp I got for Christmas!  :)  

Color Morphing Mania

A few mani's ago I did a color-shifting mani.  I used a chameleon pigment from Sik Custom Paint that shifted teal, blue and purple. It was incredibly hard to capture the color-change, but it was another I left on until I broke too many nails after just coming back from vacation that there was no real fixing it.  

Here I mixed the pigment powder with Gelish Structure gel and applied it over a base of Gelez Pitch Black (a black creme).  Color morphing pigments show their many true colors best when over a black base.  Lots of pics of this one, since it was so hard to really capture the color shift and get all the colors.  

Flame Swirl Funky French

Another great one that I got a lot of compliments on - my flame-swirl mani.  I used Gelish Ambiance here as the base.  Then I put small dots of Orly Gel FX Rage and Artistic Colour Gloss Eccentric on the tips, and used a dotting tool to swirl the two colors upward together.  Very easy to do, even if you think you can't keep your hand steady enough to do a traditional french and keep the smile line clean.  

The Orgasm Mani

........Meaning the mani I used my NARS Orgasm blush as a pigment for this.  What were you thinking?  Get your minds out of the gutter!  :-p

For this mani I scraped a little of the blush onto a blob of Gelish Structure and mixed it in.  I applied 2 coats as the base and then did the tips in Gelez Pitch Black.  Again, I cleaned up my smile lines with the eyeshadow brush and alcohol.  

Up in the Blue Holo

Another great favorite: Gelish Up in the Blue mixed with Spectraflair.  This was before I got the coarse grade, so this one is made with the mid-grade.  It's still very holo, just not quite as sparkly as the coarse grade.  It's still plenty sparkly though!  

After about a week or so I was dying to try to see if you could water marble with SOG.  Well, you can.  Messy, yeah a little.  Actually not as bad in my opinion though as doing it with regular polish, as you can just use a towel to wipe off any excess and peel off your tape before you cure.  Clean up from the cup..... not so easy.  Thankfully I used a plastic cup.  Defnitely don't use anything you'd want to keep.  :-p

The water marble was done with Artistic Colour Gloss Wham, Fly and Deblu.  I did it over of course a completed SOG mani, since the mani was about a week old.  I would recommend that - If you don't like the way it came out, then it's easy to wipe it off and try again!  :-)

Breast Cancer Awareness

I loved my breast cancer manis.  I've done two of them.  First of all, I love french manicures, and I wholeheartedly support breast cancer research and anyone who has been affected by breast cancer themselves or in a family member, friend, etc.  

Both times I have done it on myself it's been as a french manicure.  I use Gelish Ambiance for my base and Gelish Sheek White for my tips.  I used Gelish Passion to paint on the Pink ribbons.  

For the other mani below, which I did on my mom back in October for breast cancer month, I used Gelish Less Talk and the Pink Ribbons were water decals.  

The Ruby Slipper Mani
One of my all time favorite combos is what I call the Ruby Slipper mani.  It's a dark color (like a dark purple like Entity One's Midnight Runway (a dupe for the Original Gelish Bella's Vampire), black or a dark blue) with Gelish Good Gossip layered over it.  Good Gossip is a very versatile color.  It looks amazing on it's own, but since I am weird about reds on my own hands and like dark colors, this combo is perfect for me.  :-)

And when I say the "original Bella's Vampire", let me explain..... It seems to me that gelish has changed the color somewhat.  Bella's Vampire was one of the first colors I ordered when I started SOG a year ago.  It was very much purple, not a dark red as the name (to me) would imply.  However, I recently picked up a new one in a mini version from Sally's and it is decidedly a dark red.  Not even close to the very dark purple that was my original one.  No biggie to me, as the Entity One color was a dupe for it.  And the newer version I have is what I always expected the color to be!  Win win for me!

Here you can see that the Entity one (on left) and the Orignal Bella's Vampire (on right) I had were dupes, and both very, very purple!  I'm trying to get a good shot of the new bottle I have's color, and will update this post when I get one.

At any rate, this is 2 coats of Entity One Midnight Runway with a coat of Gelish Good Gossip over it.  Forgive the odd-looking middle fingernail.  This was in my early stages of SOG, and the very first time I ever tried to sculpt a tip on a broken-way-too-short-to-make-me-happy middle fingernail!  Not a bad try for a first attempt, but I have much improved over the past year when I have to do this!  :-)  I had used a clear gel here, so it makes the color look a bit sheer and patchy on the tip of that middle finger.

I get TONS of compliments on this combination whenever I wear it!  Try it!  You will too!

Bella's Holo
One of my very first favorites was another combination creation of mine.  I desperately wanted a medium-purple holo.  So I made one.  This was 6 drops of Gelish Sheek White mixed with 4 drops of my original bottle of Bella's Vampire (further proving it was truly purple) and then I added Supernail Silver Rush holographic glitter powder I got from Sally's.  This was long before I discovered spectraflair.  The Silver Rush doesn't make a linear holo, but it was a very pretty mani.  Sorry, the first pic is a cell phone pic, but was more representative of the color.  The other two the flash made the purple appear much brighter than it was in reality.

Well, that's it.  I hope you enjoyed this latest picture heavy post.  :)  See you all soon!

Color Morphing Powders and Spectraflair

A while back I purchased some color-morphing powders from an Australian blog that I follow - More Nail Polish  It's a great blog, and anyone interested in holographic nail polishes and frankening polishes should go visit there!  Another great one for pigments, glitters and more is Polish and Pigments.  While I don't do much with regular nail polish, although I own plenty of it, Pretty much all of the frankening and mixing can be done with gel polish as well.

I never mix up whole bottles of anything.  I merely mix small batches to do manicures and what I need on a square of tin foil.  If it doesn't come out to be what I wanted, I've not wasted much.  The downside is if you have to redo a single nail or just fix a small chip, it's a pain in the arse.  

Anyway, back to the stuff I bought!  :)  

I ordered some coarse grade (35 micron) spectraflair from her, as well as 3 color-morphing pigments.  She has MUCH better pictures than anything I captured on her blog.  She also just over the past couple days did swatches of some color shifting powders from TKB Trading, which I ordered a couple weeks ago but haven't swatched yet.  I'm even more excited to get working with them now that I've seen them on her blog!  

The manicure I just did and am sporting now is Spectraflair.  I mixed a small amount of the Spectraflair with Orly Gel FX Ruby on a piece of tin foil.  I find that most of the time my mixtures that I'm applying with a separate brush apply a little bit thinner than if I'm using the brush from the bottle, so this is 4 coats.  The pictures really do not do it justice.  It's a beautiful dark red with that amazing multi-colored holo shimmer you get from Spectraflair.  I'm absolutely loving this color...... way more than I liked Orly Ruby by itself, and I actually did like that color!  LOL.  It's actually a darker, deeper red than it appears in this picture.  I had a hard time really capturing the color, but you can see the sparkle!

The color morphing powders are equally amazing.  There are 3 - Blue to teal green shift, Green to gold shift, and red to green shift.  The red-green has the most distinct, obvious color shift IMO.  I love it!  For these swatches, I did 2 coats of Gelez Pitch Black as a base.  I mixed each of the color morphing powders with a little clear, and applied 2 coats of that mix over the black base.  

In order to try to show the color shift even better, I made a little video.  It doesn't do them justice though!  

My previous manicure I had on was also a color-shifting pigment that I got on Evil-Bay.  It was from Sik Custom Paint, and it was a green-blue-purple shift.  I had a REALLY hard time capturing the color shift in that one, as it was really dependent on the lighting.  In some light it was very teal green, in others very purple.  In the sun the green was the most obvious, while indoors it was the purple, and in dim lighting it was the blue.  Very pretty color.  Again, it was done over black for a base.

Spectraflair Franken Manicures

Spectraflair is a holographic pigment.  It's actually intended for automotive paint and industrial uses.  That being said, here's my disclaimer:


It is recommended that you use a mask when dealing with Spectraflair.  If I were making large quantities of anything and had dust flying, I would.  I don't feel it's necessary to franken a tiny amount of gel polish.  I have several other "car paint pigments" and I've not had any fingers turn green and fall off, I've not had any reactions, etc.  However, if you are concerned or not comfortable using this, DON'T.  I am not recommending anyone try this or use any other product that isn't intended for use in nails or cosmetics, this is just my personal experience and what I do.  


Spectraflair is a very, very, VERY fine powder that has a holographic effect.  It actually comes in a few different particle sizes, from 20-35 microns.  What I have currently is the 20 micron size, but I'm trying to get some of the 35 micron size, as it is supposed to be a bit more blingy.  


The Spectraflair isn't a super-bright, obvious holo.  Indoors or not well-lit areas it just looks shimmery.  Outside or in well lit indoor areas however, it creates a very nice holo effect.   The holo effect is more predominant when used over a black base or other very dark color.  


I've mixed Spectraflair into Structure gel and also into a few colors of gel polish.  It seems to work fine either way.  With the structure (or you could use TIO), you can mix a tiny amount to make a more sheer topcoat, or you can mix a slightly larger amount in to get an opaque silver color.  Either way, the amount you need is REALLY tiny!  


For this Manicure I mixed up the Spectraflair with Gelish's Up in the Blue

Here is a close up of one of the nails:

 Here are some other samples I've done:

From left to right: Spectraflair mixed into Structure to make opaque, Spectraflair mixed with black and painted over a black base coat, Spectraflair mixed into Gelish Up in the Blue (I used a bit too much spectraflair here, but it came out great when I did the manicure), Spectraflair mixed with Gelish Exhale

Here is a the video on mixing spectraflair with Structure, but again you can use any color you want to mix with.  Or, you can apply any color polish, then use clear mixed with spectraflair as a topcoat over it.  :)