China Glaze White on White with Fault Line and Nubar 2010

My back to work manicure has been a debate I’ve been silently musing over my entire week off – I always enjoy having a flashy manicure to show off in the office, but I also can’t go too overboard as I spend a lot of time with executive management (for my sins I’m sure) and need to be “professional”.

This wasn’t what I actually intended – my vision was to do a french manicure using crackle polish on my tips, using a base coat of purple on my pointer, middle and pinky finger with white crackle tips, then inverting that for my thumb and ring finger.  I’ve seen crackle tips somewhere and thought they looked pretty cool.  My major oversight was that both my thumb nails recently broke in major style – one ripped below the nail line and that hasn’t been much fun.  They don’t go with french manicure to say the least!  If you’ve ever spoken to me about crackle polish, you will also know I’m not onboard with the trend at all and until today I didn’t even own any.  It’s too untidy for me, especially where it pulls back from the edges.  But I decided I needed to try and although I still have no inclination to wear it as a full manicure, I concede it’s quite a cool layering polish for a feature nail.

So what I have here is two coats of China Glaze Grape Pop, then one coat of Coconut Kiss on all my nails except my ring finger.  I used Grape Pop as a base because Coconut Kiss is quite sheer and I didn’t want any VNL.  Then on my ring finger is three coats of China Glaze White on White, two coats of Nubar 2010 to give it some sparkle and a thick coat of China Glaze Crackle in Fault Line.

Here you can see that Coconut Kiss and Fault Line don’t have quite the same finish – Coconut Kiss is slightly lighter and more blue based with a finer shimmer.  However unless you look closely, it’s not too noticeable and it certainly doesn’t bother me.  The nails with the crackle also needed two coats of top coat (Diamont) to even out the finish.

I tweaked the settings on the photo here to show Nubar 2010 under the crackle.  It didn’t show up well in the photo but the sparkle of the flakes really brighten up the nail and give it more depth I find.  It also breaks up the starkness of the white.

What are your thoughts on crackle polish?  Have you been on board since day 1 with OPI Black Shatter or are you like me only just trying the trend out now?