In Which The Nail Art Industry Brings Liquid Latex Out Of The Bedroom

Heya gorgeous! Hope your weekend is crammed with all the stuff you wanna do :) 

So I've decided that I'm going to spend January doing stamping. I have a lot of plates and I feel like I just don't use them enough :/ I plan on rectifying that this month, and using a lot of plates that I haven't used before, especially the plates that I specifically bought the sets for and then never used (I'm looking at you, paisley from Bundle Monster...)

So I'm looking to do new stamping techniques. Last week was double-stamping. This week, it's a part of the cleanup process, which I totally forgot to take pictures of...

Recently, a new cleanup method has come about called Liquid Palisade. It's basically purple liquid latex in a purple liquid eyeliner tube, according to some who tried it. It also retails for $22/bottle. 

Think about how long a tube of liquid eyeliner lasts. Now, imagine having to smear that all over your fingers instead of a thin line on your eyelid. It's not going to last for very long, and at $22 that feels like theft to this stingy mom. So, I went looking for a solution, and I found one, very easily. Liquid Latex. I went to a couple of smut shops in search of a small jar or tube, but found that it wasn't very popular and were pulled off of the shelves, and was encouraged to go online. I went to my favorite place, smile.amazon.com (where 5% of every purchase I make goes to St. Judes AND I get free shipping), and I found a sizeable tub of latex for more than half the price of the name brand. I chose white as my color, and two days later it was at my door.

So when I was deciding what to do for my mani, I decided it was time to bust out the latex. So I would need a messy and hard-to-clean mani... Gradient. Sponged gradient. Perfect. And then I closed my eyes, opened up a page in my new Pueen plates, and picked a design. It was fate. And as fate would have it, my nails are pretty awesome. 

So I get the gradient done using Sinful Colors' Enchanted and Zoya's Charisma and then decide to take a lesson from last week and add some glitter.  I'm not sure if you remember, it was a very long time ago, but I was having issues with the purple bleeding and nearly annihilating my stamp. In an attempt to prevent this, I decided to put a clear coat of something in between the stamp and my gradient. I still want to get to know Starrily's Eclipse a bit better, so I added a layer as a barrier between the purple gradient and the white Sinful Colors polish I was going to stamp with (Snow Me White), and it worked! I topcoated this with Parrot Polish's Glow Purple (still can't capture that elusive glow-in-the-dark effect on camera...) and there was no bleeding, yaaaay!!!

So that is the roller coaster of events that lead up to this mani. I do want to give some tips in the event that you decide to grab some liquid latex to try out for yourself, just real quick.

• Put the latex into a smaller container with a brush for easier use. I poured some into a clean and empty nail polish bottle. Don't forget to lay down newspaper when you pour, and the little tiny funnels you sometimes get with glitter at walmart are completely ineffective. 
• Only do one hand at a time. So, I wanted to play with it and got carried away and did both hands to start and MAN that was a messy mistake. One thing I did not know about liquid latex is that when it's dried, it has the consistency of really old waterballoons that sat in your garage or attic for a couple of summers too long. You know what I'm talking about... sticky and mushy and just really weird. When your fingers that are covered in latex touch each other, the latex kinda tries to meld together, making it hard for them to come apart. It causes lifting, and you'll have to redo the latex. When you have all 10 digits stuck together, this makes it really hard to try to do anything, especially nails. So keep it to one hand at a time, K?
• Buy ammonia-free. I did, and it still has a slight hint of cat pee smell to it when it's wet. It's odorless when it's dry, but if this is what the ammonia-free one smells like, I shudder to think what the kinds with ammonia smell like.
• Pull it away from the nail. In some videos, I've seen people just grab a corner and pull off and all of the polish came away. This was not the case for me. When I pulled it away, the polish kinda slid right off, like when you were a kid, you put polish on a balloon and... oh. Duh... Anyways. I'm wondering if the Liquid Palisade has anything special in it to prevent this, or if I shouldn't have waited until everything was dry. More experimentation is in my future, I predict! Anyways, I used a pair of tweezers and kinda cut it away from my cuticle and then pulled outwards, loosening the latex and making sure it took the polish with it, and THEN I was able to pull it away. It came in one piece, too, which was oddly, yet really satisfying.
• Waste not, want not! Just kidding, apply this sh*t liberally. Get it all over your finger, and then some. Make it thick. It'll come off easier. Avoid any hair that might be on your knuckles, though. Hair and liquid latex do NOT mix. Get it as close to the cuticle as you dare, and as far down and away as you think you might get any polish. If you're watermarbling, probably go like half an inch further, just in case.
• If you are allergic to latex, DO NOT USE THIS. I'm just being facetious here. If you're allergic to latex, you probably already know to avoid this stuff. I mean, it has the word "latex" right in the title... if you don't know if you're allergic or not, grab the nearest epipen or some benedryl,  and do a test patch on a hairless part of your hand. Always better to be safe than sorry!

I personally found this to be a better experience than taping my finger, and will definitely be continuing with this method. Keep an eye out in the tags for it in future posts! I'm really sorry about how wordy and long this post got. I generally do try to keep posts short-ish and sweet-er, but I got carried away. It happens to the best of us, right? 

Will you be giving this cleanup method a go, trying Liquid Palisade, or do you have your own tried-and-true method? Lemme know down in the comments, and please remember to subscribe for more fun with me!