I received this set of glitter from Born Pretty Store. It contains 12 different colors of loose, hex glitter in individual pots and retails for $6.45 USD.
(left to right, top to bottom) Pink, red, emerald green, and a lighter tealish blue:
Iridescentish white, a sort of dirty silver-looking color, gold, and a rosey lavender color:
Burnt orange, silver, a royal blue, almost indigo color, and chartreusey lime green:
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| Screen cap from Born Pretty Store's website. |
Polish All the Nails does some awesome glitter placement looks that I love, so I immediately knew I wanted to do a rainbow one of my own!
I originally wanted to do every nail in rainbow glitter placement, but it would have taken a century, so I laid down a white base, then applied dots of different colors, and put the corresponding glitter color on each. Rather than leaving the background white, this allowed color to show under the glitter where there were any missing spots.
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| Click this picture and blow it up bigger for a closer look. Come on! Do it! You know you want to! You won't regret it, these are awesome!! ;) |
As for the gradients, I just used each color from the glitter placement nail. From the middle nail to the pinkie, left to right, the colors I used are:
Revlon Metallic (silver, which by the way, doesn't gradient very well at all!), Sinful Colors GoGo Girl (red, and I sponged it half a dozen times, but it refused to actually turn red not matter how much I kept adding, it was eternally hot pink -.-), and Zoya Arizona (orange) [middle nail].
Pure ICE (Pure ICE ((@officialpureice)) liked and commented on a picture I posted of this mani on Instagram, too, which is freaking awesome!!! Sorry, fangirl moment! ^.^) Wild Thing (lime green), Revlon Emerald City (dark green), and a nameless L.A. Colors teal [ring finger].
China Glaze Ride the Waves (blue, and a jelly, which surprisingly gradients quite well!), Sally Hansen Lacey Lilac (light purple), and Revlon Guava (pink) [pinkie].
The thumb was just some leftovers. I decided to do one color each from the other three gradients on it and used Arizona, Wild Thing, and Lacey Lilac (which you can barely see, sorry, you can see a slight glimpse of it in the first "with thumb" picture below, but I can really only see it where it starts to fade into the green because I know it's there).
I know, I know... I kept throwing a fit about Julep's Freedom Polymer topcoat... Well, it is finally almost empty, so I figure I might as well use it up.
No matter how much I hate it, I just can't see dumping a polish. Besides the fact that Juleps are like $5,000 a bottle... Which is also a bunch of bs... but that's another rant for another day. :) Being that it is so expensive, I couldn't bring myself to dumping it, even though I'm down to about 1/4 of a bottle.
I have found if I apply it as thin as possible, it doesn't shrink quite as bad. But it still sucks. Seriously. Worst topcoat I have ever used!
I love the rock-hard, super shiny finish it gives, but I will never be purchasing another bottle of it again. To tell you the truth, I would rather use an NYC or Wet'n'Wild $1 topcoat than this crap. In fact, I would rather go topcoatless than use it, sometimes!
I did cleanup before topcoat, and made sure I had a huge gap at the cuticle to allow for the topcoat. I painted the topcoat all over the entire nail, all the way up to the cuticle, nearly flooding them even, and so far across the sides that there was topcoat all over the sides of my fingers, and it shrunk so much that it pulled from the cuticle almost all the way to the polish line. Absolutely ridiculous.
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| I'm really liking this hand pose, too, btw. I always said I would never do pictures without holding a bottle used in the mani, because I just like that look. It fills in more space, but with the fingers sort of staggered, I really like this! What do you think? I think it almost looks nicer and more neat and clean in a way. Plus it can be more uniform. With bottles being all different shapes and sizes, it is difficult to be really uniform in how I place my fingers, if that makes sense. Julep bottles (and minis), for instance, are a pain. I don't like doing my fingers in a straight line, but it's hard not to with their bottles. Maybe I should have warned you ahead of time that I was feeling so... mouthy tonight! ^.^ |
I actually ran out of room for the pink and teal glitter width-wise. I did a vertical zigzag pattern with the other colors, and just added a horizontal zigzag on top with the teal and pink. That part didn't really turn out the way I was hoping because you can hardly tell there's a zigzag in the bottom layer of glitters because of it. Oh well, it still turned out so fun and colorful! ^.^
Not too shabby for my first ever full-nail glitter placement, huh? I just love how it turned out!
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| Make this one bigger too! :) |
I wish I would have thought to do something like this 2 months ago! These would have made perfect New Years nails!!
AND... OMG they are awesome! They're so neat that I even had to take a video of them shining and reflecting!! ^.^ They look kind of ridiculous and lame just sitting there, but I accidentally discovered that they'll reflect light (obviously they reflect light, but I mean all scattered and whatnot kind of like a disco ball), and fell in love!
I used my phone, so the quality is crap, but I was so surprised they actually even reflected like that!
I got distracted by loving these looks so much... now onto the review part! ^.^
So what did I think about these glitters?
Well, overall, I love the colors! There are 2 (the white and dirty silver) that I doubt I use much, and I wish there'd been one more yellow in color, and an orange that was less burnt orange, but I like them a lot!
These glitters did a fantastic job of laying flat! I have been wearing the silver nails for 2 days now. I spend the enter day yesterday deep cleaning and rearranging and haven't had a single casualty other than my cuticles getting super dried out!
I did have a couple of issues with glitter pieces sticking together. When I would pick up 1 glitter with my dotting tool, sometimes there would be another 1 or 2 stuck to it.
The pots leaked a little, too. When I took them out of the packages, there were about a dozen pieces of loose glitter outside of the pots. Plus a couple pots had 1 or 2 glitter bits of a different color in them. But that's no big deal, I just had to tighten up the lids more!
These glitters are super shiny, though, and topcoat doesn't take away from that. Each nail took around 75-100 glitters and in that, oh lets say 500 total because I am not counting them individually, I only came across maybe 2 partial glitters that got cut in half.
Even with doing all 5 nails in silver glitter (which took me about 3 hours, in case you're wondering), I didn't even put a dent in the glitter! There are a ton in each little container! I will probably never have to buy hex glitters again. Awesome! Less than $7 for a lifetime supply?! Totally worth it!!
You can get these glitters individually, but they are $1.99 a piece. The set of 12 makes them roughly .50 cents each! So I definitely recommend just spending $5 more and getting an additional 11 colors!
And while you're there picking up your glitters, make sure you enter my coupon code ANL91! You'll get a little discount! ;)
This product was provided to me for review from Born Pretty Store. All opinions are both entirely truthful and completely my own.I received no compensation.