Frankening Tips

I suggest you start simple. Don't go out and buy lots of polishes just for the sake of mixing until you're comfortable with (and let's face it, better at) frankening. Start by using polishes that you have in your stash but don't particularly like. That way if you end up wasting it on a dud franken, you won't cry. Lol.

Hopefully you've not been throwing away your empty bottles from topcoats and basecoats. These are what I use to franken in. Polish addicts burn through this stuff faster than toilet paper! Once my bottle is empty, I squirt (I use a handy-dandy plastic pipette I stole from work) some acetone into the bottle and shake it up a bit to clean the brush. I leave them stored like this until I'm ready to fill them and franken. Don't have empty bottles lying around just yet? Drop by Walgreens and pick up some Wet N Wild clear polish. It's 99 cents and you can save the clear to later add back in as a filler for your frankens.

Start by just mixing two colors together. Think ahead as to what you would like to do, make it shimmer? make it glitter-bomb? etc. Add some of your first color, I usually just fill the bottle 1/4 full. Then pick your second polish, shimmer, glitter, etc. Add that polish in about 1/4 as well. Now you have a half full bottle of nail polish, got that simple math lesson?! Lol. Then shake it like a polaroid picture (thanks to Laura I have that song stuff in my head each time I franken!). Then swatch your franken. Do you like it? Does it need more shimmer, more color, or is it just right? Then add small amounts of whatever is needed with furious shaking in between. You have yourself a basic franken! Congrats to your success!

I suggest you get comfortable creating simple frankens like this before moving on to buying polish with the intents of frankening.

Oh you're comfortable now? Great, then why not hit up some garage sales or your mom/sister/aunt's polish stash. Yes they may be terribly dated and frosty, but they will also be cheap and plentiful. And mix away the frostiness :)

Ready to move past that? Ok, well hit up the Walgreens for other Wet N Wild's (colored polishes) at 99 cents a piece. Try Wal-Mart for Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear line (usually $3) or Pure Ice collection (usually $2). Pure Ice has some great shimmer polishes that are in a virtually clear base. Great way to start simple and add to a colored polish.

At this point you can go wild, you know your mix-abilities enough to go buy specific polishes and predict their franken outcome. Maybe even dupe-ify a special lemming you've got?

Good luck!

(Oh and best Frankenstein movie ever made!)