In my Chanel Les Khakis post a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned nail polish frankening as a means of getting the look of Khaki Brun and Khaki Vert at a fraction of the Chanel prices. But what exactly is this frankening business when it's at home?
Well, you'll be glad to know that it involves fewer bolts and volts in the beauty world than it did in Dr. Frankenstein's basement. At its most basic, a frankenpolish is a combination of two or more different nail varnishes, mixed by you to create a personalised custom colour.
Frankenpolishes are obviously a good way for make-and-do types to come up with their own unique shades or to ape very expensive, discontinued, or hard to get cult colours, but they're also good for tweaking a polish that you reckon needs to be just a smidge darker/brighter/lighter/more glittery to be absolutely perfect.
Get the hang of the frankening basics and you'll be custom mixing like Butter London's nail supremo Nonie Creme in no time!
You will need:
- To work in a well ventilated area, and also cover your workspace - unleashing creative genius can get messy when there's nail varnish involved!
- Tooth picks/orangewood sticks
- A piece of hard white plastic/art palette
- The polishes/glitters (dry glitter should be very, very fine or cosmetic grade for best results)/make-up pigments/dyes you're going to use to create your frankenpolish
- An empty nail varnish bottle, if starting from scratch. You can order specialist empties online, but the easiest - and cheapest! - thing to do is simply clean out an old bottle of clear nail varnish or top/base coat for the job. Pour out any remaining polish, bung in some nail polish remover, and give the bottle a good shake to ensure that all remnants are dissolved and removed. Don't forget to clean the brush, too, and allow both to dry 100% completely before using.
- Ball bearings to help mix the final product for an even, predictable finish - especially important if you're working with pigments. Again, these can be got online (or in a crafts supply store) but to keep costs down try recycling the ball bearings from old unloved bottles of nail varnish instead.
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Before you lep straight in and start decanting varnishes into your empty bottle, it's a good idea to first work out the ratio required to achieve your desired shade or finish. To do this, work drop by drop to add a little of each colour to either a piece of white plastic or, if you're very fancy, a small art palette, mix them together using a tooth pick or orangewood stick, and test the combo on a piece of white paper.
Eventually you may be able to skip this step as your confidence in your frankening abilities increases and you can work by eye, but this method makes it dead easy to judge how much of each colour you'll need to add to the mix and minimises the chances of making a total dud.
When adding loose glitter or pigments, just use a piece of folded paper and feed them down the crease into the bottle. Simples! Bear in mind that glitter on its own can't do much to change the colour of your franken, so using a blue glitter won't necessarily equate to a glittery blue nail polish. Well, it might if you use enough of it, obviously, but then the mix will be too thick to apply to nails. It's better to get the colour base right first so that you're only using glitter for the bling factor it brings.
SOME MEASURING TIPS
- To capture the colour of a loose make-up pigment in a nail polish: add it to clear nail polish a little at a time, and shake well after each addition to distribute evenly.
- To create a sheer jelly: try adding food colouring to clear nail polish.
- To create a Khaki Brun-alike colour: try a 1:3 ratio of Barry M Mint Green to Barry M Mushroom.
- To create a Khaki Vert-alike colour: try a 3:1 ratio of Barry M Mint Green to Barry M Mushroom and just a few drops of white.
Now, I tend to stick with colours from within the one brand when it comes to frankening, partly because I think they're more inclined to mix easily than if you're taking them from across a number of brands, and partly because I'm not sure how well different brand formulations might react with one another. Admittedly, I have yet to hear of a franken blowing up, but it'd be just my luck ... !
Do you franken? Would you be arsed to give it a go?
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Resources
- Manglaze for FrankenJuggs, $1.38 each + $6.24 P&P for up to 4 bottles. These speciality empty bottles have awesome labels and are wide-mouthed for easy pouring.
- Transdesign and 8ty8beauty also sell empty bottles; you could include a couple in your next order.
- Coastal Scents for pigments and cosmetic grade glitters. Lots of helpful consumer reviews of individual products, too.
- I'm blue in the face recommending eBay but it can be a great resource for beauty bits, especially less mainstream stuff.
