Gold leaf nail art over Mckfresh Angel

Mckfresh Nail Attire is one of my favourite Aussie indie brands, made by a pretty damn cool chick. The Sunnydale collection was one of my favourites last year, and Angel in particular was one of most unique. It's a blackened purple base, with tiny silver specks and big blue iridescent bars, which are super thin and don't have any of the won't-lay-flat, looks-like-hair crappiness of many bar glitters. You can check out the swatch of Angel alone in my original post on the Buffy collection, but today I wanted to show you an experiment with gold leaf from Born Pretty.

I don't actually own a gold leaf topper yet, so I tried to make do with some shredded gold foil from Born Pretty. I used larger pieces in a mani for Artsy Wednesday a while ago, and it turns out that using smaller pieces is both better AND worse. Better, because you can pulverise the crap out of the foil. Worse, because it's super fiddly to apply. I used a cotton bud, much like the way I do glitter gradients, but since the foil is dry, I painted a slow-drying top coat over the original manicure first, to give it something to stick to.

Overall? I like the effect, but it seems like it would be so much faster just to cave and get a gold leaf top coat! I'm also considering dropping some of the foil into polish and seeing how stable it is - I've seen some nasty concoctions made from not-real-gold foil corroding in organic solvents though. We'll see!