I excitedly picked up Bo'dier Baby from Don Deeva several months ago with the possibility that it was a close match for my beloved Mystic Glacier, and though it's a gorgeous color in the bottle, it's ultimately far too sheer to use on its own. It occurred to me that a great way to get a thicker layer of the color was to bead it into another polish using a blobbicure technique, and Llarowe's Building Sandcastles seemed like a great match.
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| indoor, bright CF lighting |
Building Sandcastles is a beautifully wearable white crelly with both Clarins 230 type shimmer and aurora shimmer of the same red-to-green shift. The pigments and the moderately sheer finish warm this right up from a stark white and make it nicely flattering with my skin tone.
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| outdoor, shady daylight |
The blobbicure technique involves dripping small tidbits of polish into a contrasting base color layer, ideally having the drops smush up next to each other and creating abstract/oblong shapes in the drips rather than just simple circles. I'm not a blobbicure pro, so some of these nails worked out better than the others (major disappointment with my efforts to create a large blob as an accent focus on my ring fingers...which caused bubbling that was only visible on the macro shots but not at all IRL).
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| outdoor, bright direct sunlight |
For this look, I painted one thin layer of Building Sandcastles, then did complete cleanup. Allowing that first coat to set nicely "corralled" the rest of the polish so that even thick coats didn't flood my cuticles. The 2nd layer of Sandcastles was quite thick and applied one nail at a time so I could drop in the bits of Bo'dier Baby. Both polishes have a lovely fire to bronze to green flash, and the jelly finish meant that my mani looked utterly glass shiny smooth after topcoating.
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| outdoor, angled bright sunlight |
The blend of aurora + UP shimmers shows up as a sparkling collection of reflective lights in several different colors along the spectrum of shifting all at once, rather than as a smooth glide from red over to green. It's ultimately a really pretty look, and I'm glad I ended up convincing myself that this effect couldn't really be achieved by using a topper over a white crelly.
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| indoor, bright CF lighting |
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars for Building Sandcastles, truly a lovely neutral with a great formula. This wore great on me considering it's a jelly and was applied thickly, but of course the white color wouldn't show edgewear obviously.
Where to buy: Building Sandcastles and a few other of the UP + aurora jellies are s
till in stock at Color4Nails. Bo'dier Baby was a one-and-done at Don Deeva, so look in destashes if you'd like to use this blue in layering experiments.
~Michelle
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