Last weekend, a coworker
posted a magnetic polish video on facebook, asking in amazement, "what witchery is this?!" That of course led me to playing around with magnetic polish myself, since it was more than time to test drive one of a handful of Masura polishes I'd scored last year.
 |
| indoor, CF lighting |
Russian company Masura made a big splash in the polish aficionado community last year once magnetic polishes became cool again (yay!!) and we caught sight of the striking effects possible with the right polish and the right magnet.
 |
| outdoor, shady/overcast daylight |
Mint and Bazil is the name on the underside of my bottle, but most stores carrying this brand have it instead listed with the more conventionally spelled Basil. In either case, it's a luminous jade green "cat's eye" shimmer in a nearly black-green base. If you wanted to wear this color alone, it's plenty beautiful enough to skip the magnet, and opaque at one coat. The opacity is enough you can stamp with it, and this would be gorgeous to use with designs that have broad spaces to really let the magnetic effect shine.
 |
| window-filtered daylight |
But why on earth would you skip the magnet when you get this amazingly shifty 3-D effect with so little effort? IRL, this reflected these different tonal shades of green as the light moved across it, with very bright pearly mint above and below the dark S-curves I'd marked across each nail. Each of these photos has a different angle of my nails, so mentally put all that together to see the stunning cat-eye effect in action. Yes, it's just as good as the russian blogger videos promised.
 |
| bright direct sunlight |
I usually wear 2 coats of any magnetic polish, with the first being as thin as possible to frame out where I want it to go, then total cleanup, then one nail at a time applying and magnetizing the 2nd coat, and finally going back one nail at a time re-magnetizing after applying topcoat. I did the same here, but easily could have skipped step 1 and just gone with a medium thickness single coat to magnetize - it's that opaque and that reactive.
 |
| indoor, bright CF lighting |
Also, regular magnetic polish wearers know that typically the sharp lines you get immediately after magnetizing will fade a bit over the next several days. While this of course does soften out in the first hour or two while it progresses toward 100% completely dry, the pattern stayed utterly fixed after that. All of these photos are at least 24h after painting, and several of them are from 4 or more days later. Btw, did I mention this wore like iron?
 |
| outdoor, overcast daylight |
A green this pigmented and this opaque will typically stain the bejezus out of your cuticles, and Mint and Bazil is no exception. Paint carefully, or else plan on scrubbing cuticles up really well the next day.
Ever since I got it, I have been preferentially using Dance Legend's cat eye neodymium bar magnet for all my magnetic polishes. It creates a thin, sharp line by attracting the magnetic particles, and for Mint and Bazil, that results in a vampy blackened emerald with a bright flash of jade through the middle, as modeled on the bottle below:
 |
| indoor, CF lighting, magnet held to bottle side for just a few seconds |
After watching the cool S-curves on that video, but having only one hand to operate a magnet with, I instead tried out my Dance Legend magnetic pen. To my utter surprise, it worked by instead
repulsing the magnetic shimmer particles, creating a dark zone along the path I drew while pushing the shimmer into that cool 3-D cat's eye effect (check out my thumb below - my fave pic of just how flashy this effect really was). You can see the difference in the two effects with the bottle below, where the dark dot on the bottle side is where I drew a tiny circle with the pen tip. It was super easy to draw an S-curve back and forth across my nail while the polish dried, with the first pass quick to get the pattern sharp, then slow passes until I couldn't see any more changes, about 20 seconds total for each nail. I repeated the same technique after topcoating each one, and the pattern set very solidly.
 |
| same indoor, CF lighting, magnetic pen tip held to bottle side for just long enough to make a circle/dot |
Rating: a perfect 5 out of 5 stars for this beauty. Masura polishes absolutely live up to the hype: easy to work with, super reactive, and a perfect formula. Work has been an utter trainwreck of epic proportions this week, leaving me with no time or energy to do my nails, and that super thin line of edgewear you can see on my thumb above? That's after
a solid week of wear.
Where to buy: check out
Masura's list of international stockists.
~Michelle
Comments
Post a Comment