Playing with Old Dusty Polishes

I'm sure you're tired of me commenting how I'm getting more into layering recently...and trying to combine a cool layering combination with some interesting stamping. So not too long ago, I spent a bit of time (who am I kidding...a lot of time!) in one of my local dusties riffling through the bins looking for polishes that I thought could be interesting for layering. This is the result of a few of my finds.



I'm not a terribly creative or visual person; I can't look at polishes and think, well this will look cool with that on top...my brain just doesn't see those unique layering possibilities...so I spent a couple of hours...yes, hours...at the store, picking up the polishes, shaking them up, tilting them, looking at them in different angles and lighting...I'm sure the sales ladies thought I was a little kooky! Good thing it was a place that I frequent often and they know me well as 'that polish lady'...nothing annoys me more then when I'm hurried along in my polish shopping when looking at polishes...typically the smaller beauty shop supply places that watch over me when I'm in the store like I'm a shoplifter...I hate that!

Anyway, these were a few of my purchases....blah in a bottle I tell you!




And my experimenting when I got home. Um, I guess I bought quite a few bottles, eh? Lol!





All I can say is thank goodness these look so blah in the bottle...which I'm sure is why these older polishes are so plentiful in my area...because I'm sure if everyone could visualize their gorgeousness when layered, everyone would have snatched them up already! I'm not sure how well you can see this, but if you look in the very far left hand corner, you'll see my swatch of a cool, glitter polish I found with diamond shaped glitter in it...it was terribly goopy and thick when I bought it, but came back nicely with some thinner. I've yet to use it on a mani though.

After I finished playing with them and decided which polishes to use, I started my mani using one coat of Wet n Wild Black Creme.



Did the layering using the selected dusty polishes.



Bottle pix of the polishes I used for this mani. A couple of these had more colour than the rest of the blah in a bottle ones, but they were too sheer for my liking without doing a lot of coats, which is why I picked them up for layering. These are the five bottles I used for my mani; the first one is on the middle finger (Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear Lemon Lime), the second on the thumb (Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear Hot Magenta), the third on the pinky (Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Nylon, Balance Fr., colour #4363-12; has a 12 on the top of the lid), fourth on index (Sally Hansen Hard as Nails New Lengths Ceramics, Sheer Glisten, colour no. 6212-01 and has a 01 on top of lid) and the last one was on the ring finger (Rimmell 60 Seconds, Pulsating)**.



Then stamped using Black Konad special polishes with QA 17.


I'm not sure if you can see this well, but the stamping polish kinda shrunk and cracked after I stamped on the middle finger, which you can see in the above pix right at the tip. But I just touched it up with a bit of polish and you can't even tell in the pix below.



So simple and cool....I can't wait to try out more of these dusty finds including seeing how they look over colours other than black!

Thanks for looking!

**Post was edited to include names of polishes on nails (Feb 24 2012).