Liquid latex

I've always wanted to try ombre manicures, so I figured for that I'd need liquid latex to keep from making a gigantic mess. I saw a video that talked about buying it on Amazon - the link for that is down at the bottom. It seemed like a much better deal than just buying a small bottle of it, since the small half-ounce bottles cost as much as (or more than) the whole big jar, most places I've seen.

I had some trouble trying to decant it into a usable form, though. This is how it came - although I had already opened it and made a big mess with it by the time I took this picture, which is why the label has smears on it. (Basically, my ability to make a mess of things is pretty infinite.)

This is ammonia-free latex. Even in this bright color it does work as advertised - that is, it peels right off once it's dried. (Due to the aforesaid mess, I can attest that it peels off right off of a variety of items including my fingers and the table.) Here's a link to the same brand in pink - if you've ordered from Amazon a lot like I have, you probably already know to check the different colors for differences in prices and the shipping costs. This comes in a large variety of colors, some of which were eligible for Prime and some weren't. Amazon also sells another brand that comes in even larger containers, but I figured I'd probably never even use up a 4 oz. jar, much less 16.

I had a plastic squeeze bottle like you use for haircolor - I bought several of them from Sally's when I did that big order a while back. But I couldn't figure out how to get it into the bottle at first. I didn't have a funnel or anything like that (or a syringe, which is Kelly's solution in the video below), but my improvised solution worked - I took a piece of heavy paper torn out of my September Vogue and made a cone-shape, put it down into the squeeze bottle, and poured through that. It worked fine, although of course some sticks to the paper. That seems like a minor issue, though. Then, since that bottle has a pointed tip (although it's not visible in the picture below) getting it from there into the small bottle was easy-peasy.

The small bottle was an old Chick polish bottle that I cleaned out, so it has the advantage of having the cute chick graphic, but other than that any polish bottle should do. I just left the rest of the latex in the squeeze bottle and discarded the original messy jar.

(I haven't tried the ombre thing yet, but at least I'm one step closer!)


Here are the videos I had watched a while back: