I love nail polish. I love buying nail polish. I probably love buying nail polish a bit too much. However, two years and 300 plus bottles of lacquer later, I’m growing tired of shelling out my money for a tiny bottle of glittery, toxic paint that I will use perhaps twice. I’m not talking here, of course, about the cremes and holos and glitters that I use every day in various types of nail art, more the niche polishes that have one very specific purpose and season in which to shine (I’m thinking here of the glitter I own that looks like a blended Christmas tree – it never looks like anything but a blended Christmas tree. Pretty, but useless outside of the holiday season.)
So when I recently became enamoured with a shimmery, nude flakie polish from Digital Nails called The Dude Abides, I decided to forgo the PayPal transaction and see if I could create my own version using polishes already in my collection. And you know what? I could. And so I did! The Dude Abides (named after The Big Lebowski, a movie I actually LOATHE) is a nude crelly shot through with chromatic rainbow flakies. The PolishAholic has a great swatch of it here.
To get a similar look, I sandwiched one layer of Polish Me Silly’s Party Hearty, a multichrome flakie topper, between two coats of KB Shimmer’s pale nude holo, In Bare Form. In Bare Form is actually quite opaque and covered up a bit more of the flakies than I liked, and so I brushed on one final, light coat of Party Hearty, which added beautiful shimmer and great overall depth. My DIY version of The Dude Abides is a bit glitzier than the original, on account of the extra layer of vibrant, colour-shifting flakies, but I think it’s a better-than-serviceable imposter.
So the next time you’re eyeing up that beautiful, but impractical, polish, take a moment to root through your lacquer collection first to see how close you might be to cobbling together the exact same look from polishes you already own. Your bank account (and inevitable lack of storage; no one has enough storage) will thank you for it!
Finger Candy 
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Have a great day! C x
Thanks very much! 🙂
Yeah I think it is time for a low/no buy…I am probably at the limits of my storage (or would be if I’d take the time to move things around in my Melmers, which do have some room, and deal with the overflow around the polish room). I just buy the same things over and over again any way (coughpurpleholocough)…
Yeah, I’m starting to see a number of colour duplications in my collection, particularly among the holos. And as much as I’d also like all the purple holos, I really don’t need eight of them, each one a tiny smidge different than the one beside it, but just barely. And I’m really starting to get resentful of the super niche glitter polishes I splashed out on at the very beginning of this nail art odyssey – they’re so pretty, but, like, nearly totally useless.