Silver Eggs Saturday - Revlon Popular, Silver bullions

You might have seen Fish Egg Friday going around blogs, and I thought I would join in. I have used a different name for the themed entry, because it's Saturday in Australia already, and I wanted to keep the alliteration. :)

[Revlon Popular
Ring finger: Silver bullions over Revlon Popular]

You probably have heard about the whole Ciate's cease and desist letter which sparked Fish Egg Friday. I think it's interesting to know that this beaded nail art was originally created by Dashing Diva in 2011. I wonder what will happen if other companies went around trademarking 'Half-moon manicure' and 'Crescent manicure', and demanded that no one else used these names. What a terrible PR job by Ciate so far!

All that silliness aside, let me go through my strange, haphazard process while deciding on this look!

[Revlon Popular]

I actually started the day preparing a swatch of Revlon's Popular. Popular used to be called Starry Pink, because Revlon loves renaming their nail polishes and confusing the lot of us. :O  Revlon's Popular is a very pale pastel pink base with silvery-gray hex glitter and finer glitter.

The glitter is almost matte, rather than full out shiny, and the nail polish applies smoothly, with a nice, even distribution of glitter. The glitter lies perfectly flat, which is great of course.

[Revlon Popular]

I used three coats of Popular, but do note that my nails are rather long, so you could possibly get away with full opacity at two coats on shorter nails. I do like how glitters look against creme polish. The pink is a little lighter than what I'm used to having on my nails, but I like how the big glitter gives it that extra glitz.

[Revlon Popular]

What I also like about this polish is that some of the silver hexagonal glitter have a dark gray edge. I have no idea why, or if it's intentional, but I think that makes the glitter stand out more.

I then saw Fish Egg Friday going around the blogs, and I thought it would be interesting to have an accent nail in silver beads, to match the silver glitter in Popular.

[Revlon Popular
Ring finger: Silver bullions over Revlon Popular]

I don't think silver bullions look very much like caviar or fish roe, but it does look a bit like armour, which pleases and amuses me. The bullions are shinier in person than in the pictures, because my camera is picking up more of the topcoat than the bullions.

[Revlon Popular
Ring finger: Silver bullions over Revlon Popular]

The completely beaded nail look is easier to achieve then I originally thought. All I did was put on a coat of clear polish, pour the silver microbeads/bullions over the wet polish, and repeated the process where necessary. Most of it stuck on the first try. It would probably look better if I had a silver base instead of a pink one, but it didn't turn out too badly, I think.

I have gone over the silver bullions with topcoat, because I want to see how long this mani will last. Without a top coat, the bullions were shinier and looked a lot more striking, but I doubt they would have lasted more than a few minutes. I have done some cleaning around my place with this mani on, and it seems to have come out unscathed so far.

You can easily buy the hole-less beads or bullions online at nail accessories stores, on Ebay, at craft stores, etc. I got mine ages ago at some dollar store, and these bullions are more for manicure accents. The bottles I have are pretty small, but they seem to go a long way!