Mani Monday: Make Your Own Nail Polish

I don't know about you guys, but I never seem to have enough nail polish. Now in my defense running this feature means I need lots of colors, but still. I own a ton of different colors and still have trouble finding just the right one. What I do have though is a bunch of eyeshadows I never use. I came across a pin on Pinterest well over a year ago that said you can mix clear polish and eyeshadow together to make a new color, which sounded awesome to me so let's try it out!

To do today's manicure you will need:

• Clear nail polish. I'm using the clear ELF top coat I've been promising myself I'd replace for the last few months and STILL haven't. Seriously brain, how hard is it to remember to pick up clear polish when I'm at Ulta? 
• Eyeshadow, loose preferably or at least smashed up. I happen to have a ridiculous amount of loose gold eyeshadow so I'll be using that.
• Something to mix it with, I'm using my dotting tool.
• A small paint brush.
• A full sheet of paper, because this can get messy so you want something to contain it.

This actually doesn't take a ton of eyeshadow, so your first step is to pour out a small amount onto your paper. I put out maybe half a teaspoon and I only used half of it max. Since I have a ton of that particular eyeshadow it was no biggie but better to not waste more than you should.

It is actually easiest to mix up and paint one nail at a time, I found that this dried faster than polish normally does, so step two is to place about 3 drops of the clear polish onto your paper.

Now slowly start mixing in bits of the shadow into the polish, I used a piece of paper as a scoop a tiny pile next to the polish and I just slowly mixed it into the polish with my dotting tool. If it starts to thicken up stop adding the eyeshadow, you want it to stay loose or else it will no go on smoothly.

Now paint your freshly created polish onto your nail and marvel at your awesomenesss. Now repeat each of those steps for every nail you are doing this on. Once you are totally done use the clear top coat on your nails to not only protect them but to help smooth the homemade polish down.

Like I dipped my nails is actual gold, I love it!

Texturely this is quite different from regular nail polish, my gold made my nails look like I had gold leafed them, which I think looks awesome. The polish is also very opaque, so I only needed one coat per nail minus a few touch ups of spots I had missed on my first go around.

Seriously, that is a chunky mess, don't do it.

And as a side note, the pin that says if you dip a freshly painted nail into the loose eyeshadow does technically work but holy poop did it look awful. I ten out of ten would not recommend that method of eyeshadow nail polish application. The picture above is how it looked once it dried, seriously awful.