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Hello lovely Refined and Polished readers!

My name is Becca and I am so absolutely stoked to be here! Mrs. RefinedandPolished is definitely one of my favorite polish buddies that I’ve made along my journey and I know that I can call her a true friend. Anywho, I run a little blog called Franken Femme where I specialize in showing people how to create their own polish and find their own polish supplies. I even do indie reviews every once in awhile!

Now, let’s get into the lacquer shall we? I’m going to preface by asking this, have you ever had a mani where pretty much everything ever went wrong? That would be the problem child that I have for you today. I decided to show you Butter London Giddy Kipper from the upcoming Fall 2013 Colour Clash Collection. Butter describes this polish as an opaque, indigo shimmer and that is pretty spot on. This blurple has an almost dusty like quality with fine silver shimmer running through it. I just got this in some nail mail this week and figured this would be a great time to show it off while also incorporating some franken flair in there. Enter stage left my franken Crushed Velvet. This polish is a matte turquoise shimmer. Now when I created this, I wasn’t crazy with the way it turned out but I figured I’d give it another go.

Now here’s where things went berserk, I painted Giddy Kipper on my pointer, pinky, and thumb and had a helluva time with the formula. It dragged, it didn’t self level, and it was somewhat goopy. This wasn’t the Butter London I was used to so I figured it must be my error. I then painted my middle and ring finger as accent nails with Crushed Velvet. This also dragged like a beast and was a general lumpy mess. I gritted my teeth, powered through, and applied one more coat of both the BL and the franken. It was a little bit better. Next, I followed it up by taping V’s off on each finger using striping tape and then painted each finger with the opposite color of what was already painted (being sure to peel off the tape while the polish was still wet.) I followed it up with one coat of Sally Hansen Insta-dry. Finally, I placed square studs from the Born Pretty store on each finger, top coated it again, and threw in the towel. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t exhausted. But here is the final product!

Overall, you’d never know that I was about ready to rip phone books with my bare hands out of frustration. I can say that the top coat helped to smooth out the look of the multiple application issues. However, I do love the color combo; it kind of reminds me of a sassy beach ball! Not only that, but I do love the finish of Crushed Velvet when top coated… not enough to ever use it again though…ugh.

Well, that’s all for today my loves! Thank you so much for taking the time to check out my post for today and thank you to the awesome Refined and Polished for letting me be a part of her blog! I would love to see all of you over at Franken Femme soon! But until I do, remember to keep it classy and creative!