Playing with polish: layers and layers of green

I put this picture up on Twitter already, so I'll start with that. It's not focused perfectly but at least you can get the idea.

This started with Chick Moss, which is just a nice medium green creme. (I don't think Chick is available any more - I wrote about that here a while back, and I don't have any more info than I did then, really. There are a couple of colors left at Llarowe, now marked down to 99 cents, though!)

For once I did plan to do this mani more or less this way from the beginning. I wing it a lot but the only things I hadn't decided from the beginning on this one was how many fingers to do as accent nails, and how many coats to do - I was pretty sure what polishes I was using, at least. I used BL Nail Foundation for a base, and then two coats of Moss, and then a couple of coats of RBL Meow Meow, which is a beautiful green microglitter. I am not sure how many coats the accent nails got - at least one - but the nails which don't have the Virago polish have three coats of Meow Meow.

Here's just those fingers, with the bottle so you can see what that looks like:

Then I put the Virago polish, which is a prototype that I just got in the mail a few days ago, on one finger at a time until I was satisfied. I thought this might just be one finger but it ended up being four - my ring finger and pinky on both hands. I don't exactly know why, except that I really liked it and I liked being symmetrical with which fingers I did. And the Virago glitter is so wacky that I felt like putting it on every finger would be way too much. And I'm still happy with what I did, it feels like just enough. The accent nails have two coats each, and then I ended up with two coats of topcoat (HK Girl) on top of that, too. I put one on that night and added another one yesterday morning.

I guess maybe the wackiness is why this was a prototype and didn't get any further in the production process, but on the other hand there are wackier glitters out there, so who knows. And it's quite gorgeous. I don't have the bottle in front of me and it's hard to separate out what's Meow Meow and what's Prototype 003, but this polish has at least four types of glitter in it, because I see four different shapes of holo flash. There are a lot of diamond-shaped pieces, plus some stars, some bars, and a lot of small pieces. (Unless I imagined the bars, because looking at my nails now I'm not sure I see any. But I think I did see them before!)

So far so good on the wear. With that many coats you'd expect it to either (a) wear like iron or (b) peel right off from its own weight, but luckily so far we are leaning towards the former. I've had it on for 48 hours and it's just beginning to show the tiniest bit of wear.

The Llarowe link for the remaining Chick polish is above. For the record, here's Rescue Beauty and here's Virago. I also bought another Virago green, Mistletoe Kisses. It was my first order from Virago and I am very happy with everything. In fact, I ordered back during the holidays, and there was a note up that said nothing would ship until the 5th, so I wasn't expecting anything until this week - but I got my order on the 2nd so obviously somebody decided to come back to work earlier after all. (For the record, I was fine with getting it this week, but hey, early is great!) As I write this, I see that there are a couple more prototypes - already sold out, too - similar to the one I have, but in other colors. So I guess she was testing out a future line, maybe, or one that didn't quite work out. (Considering how much I like it, I'm hoping we'll see something similar eventually.)

(Also, take a look at the RBL + R29 line if you haven't already, because it's gorgeous.) (Note that I had the wrong link here originally, but it's now corrected.)


(FYI: no disclaimers needed here. Everything was paid for and nothing is a sponsored link.)