Dance Legend Glitter Base Nude + Black Cat Lacquer Where We're Going We Don't Need Roads

Glitter is of course a love-hate thing, what with the fabulous sparkles and the hellish removal.  So far, I find that my one brand of peel-off basecoat (Nail Pattern Boldness' Glitter-a-Peel) works well if you use 2 coats, but it's going to start popping off after a max of 48 hours.  Lots of bloggers favorably reviewed Dance Legend's Glitter Base (most reviews I saw were for the black version, with no glitter on top, just trying it solo) - this line of products is tinted opaque so you don't need undies for your glitters, letting you skip a step.  I snagged a bottle of the nude version on the cheap when Llarowe sold off everything, so let's give this a whirl.

Ok, to start with the formula: working over no base coat (apparently, if you use your regular base coat with this type of peel-off, it will PEEL OFF THE TOP LAYER OF YOUR NAIL when you  remove it so don't do that, kids), this went on a bit streaky and needed 2 coats.  It's not 100% smooth and even at 2 coats, which would be a huge problem if I was wearing it solo, but it's sufficiently opaque to be undies.  Per the ingredient list, this is a polyvinyl acetate emulsion, so this is a white glue-type peel-off.  And that means that if you don't have an orange stick handy immediately on application, you will get what you see above - kinda crappy looking cuticle lines, because acetone doesn't work for cleanup of this stuff.  Meh.

I layered 2 coats of Black Cat Lacquer's Where We're Going We Don't Need Roads on top - this is a way fun glitter mix packed with brightly colored holo stars and moons in a slightly red-tinted jelly base.  I'm not going to review it here since I'm not trying it by itself, but the formula was nice and the glitter was well-suspended, and i <3 stars and moons, so it was all good.  Orange is not my bag, but my work crew all thought this looked fun and autumnal.

yeah, not a real review, but this is a cute glitter

On the good side for DL's Glitter Base, this stuff wears great.  This is the mani experiment after 2 days, and there's nary a bit popping off:

no chips or lifting at all, that's cool.

On the weird side, any time I picked up something roughly, or brushed across a rough surface, the Glitter Base frayed like rubber.  Though there's no latex listed in the ingredients, this sure acted a whole lot more like latex than white glue.

those weird shreddy ends on my pinky are what we're talking about here.

Ok, so it didn't pop off on its own, but how does it come off when I actually want it to?

Definitely behaves like latex, stretching like a balloon skin while I'm trying to pull this business off my nail.  Starting the peel was kinda difficult on about half of my nails, and a lot of force was necessary for starting a couple.  

See how the remaining glitter polish in this macro looks crazed?  I think that's the problem.  GB doesn't come off on it's own, true, but once the layers of polish dry hard over the top of it, that actually hinders its easy removal, as though I had to crack the hard polish layers before I could get it all off.

As you can tell from my discard pile here, a few nails came off mostly in one piece, and at least as many came off in a bunch of smaller pieces.  Removal is ok, but not at all super easy.  Worst part:

dammit.

Yep, that stuff stuck so very well to my nails that I actually ended up with not one but two splits (one for each hand, yay), where I can only assume there were some weak points in my nails that were torn open by removing the peel-off.  Fortunately, I have a fix for this (next post, plz).

Rating:  very, very mixed.  I'm willing to give this another go, and I think there's definitely a use for it, but I certainly haven't found a holy grail peel-off base coat.

Where to buy:  honestly, not sure right now, other than directly from them.  While some stockists are carrying part of DL's extensive line-up, nobody stateside has really picked up this peel-off line (of which DL has plenty of color options).  

~Michelle