Crowstoes Indian Summer (with ILNP Birefringence and some gold leaf!)

Crowstoes Indian Ocean with ILNP Birefringence and Gold Leaf

I love Duochromes! When I first saw Crowstoes Indian Summer on Ida's blog Ida Nails It, I just HAD to have it! Ida called it the motherofallpolish and I have to agree! It's magenta/red/purple duochrome and totally fantastic. I just used two coats without undies of any sort for this mani - I prefer the squishy, jelly sort of look. Ida did a comparison of Indian Summer *commando* and over black - check that out at the link above!

Application, as I'd expect from Crowstoes, was flawless. Lauri has been making polishes for a while now, and they are always superb. She has a fantastic eye for colour too.

Crowstoes Indian Ocean

In some artificial light, Indian Ocean looks like a red shimmer - but sadly I couldn't get a decent picture because when it was reddest the room was rather dark and my photos came out all fuzzy. Boo!

This macro I took in daylight really show the depth and complexity in Indian Ocean, you can see the magenta shift around the edges of my nails:

Crowstoes Indian Ocean

After a couple of days I decided I'd add a gradient with another super Indie duochrome, I Love Nail Polish (ILNP) Birefringence. Birefringence is a blue to purple duochrome, with an underlying shimmer very similar to Indian Ocean, so I thought I could combine the two in a gradient to make a super-duochrome...........

Crowstoes Indian Ocean with ILNP Birefringence

It's just a simple sponge gradient; I always use a slightly dampened sponge. I think this idea worked; I was well pleased with it anyway! Here's a shot in bright, direct sunlight to show the colour shifting pigments glowing RED!

Crowstoes Indian Ocean with ILNP Birefringence

My final addition to the mani was some real gold leaf. I don't own a gold leaf topper, but I do have a gold leaf..... it's very easy just to pull bits off and press them onto your nails. And the advantage of doing it like this is that you can get just as much or little gold onto your nails as you want, and pieces the size you want them, where you want them. Maybe I'm just a control freak but I had great fun adding the gold and I love how it turned out. Sort of *regal* with the gold and purples!

I topped this off with a layer of non-quick drying topcoat then Seche Vite to get a good gloss. I was a bit vary of adding SV onto what was effectively a four day old mani, I think it might have caused shrinkage.

Crowstoes Indian Ocean with ILNP Birefringence and Gold Leaf

I purchased Crowstoes Indian Ocean from Rainbow Connection UK - the polishes seem quite pricey but when you factor in the difference in shipping costs it works out about the same as buying indies direct from the US. And it's quicker and less risky with the mail. Internationally, the best place to get Crowstoes is Llarowe. ILNP Birefringence came to me via a friend but you can buy direct from the ILNP Etsy Shop. My gold leaf came from Waitrose but I guess you can find it in most supermarkets in the baking aisle!

CrowsToes Bone Daddy over Sinful Colors Cinderella

CrowsToes Bone Daddy over Sinful Colors Cinderella

My nails today are something of an experiment - but I like how it turned out.

I got a real surprise when I was walking through Boots the other day; they had a display of Sinful Colors polishes! Sinful is a brand I see talked about a lot by US girls, but they're seldom seen here in the UK. They're a cheaper brand, and although I often see colours I like the look of in other people's swatches, it's never seemed worth it get anyone to send me any, when the cost of the postage will be more than the price of the polish. But here they are, and I was excited to try. They were £1.99 each or 3 for the price of 2, so a real bargain. I'll share the other colours soon :D


Here is Sinful Colors Cinderella on its own. It's a pretty light blue, quite sheer and with a really pretty reddish shimmer, almost like tiny flakies, running through it. It's quite a thick polish, and the brush is on the small side, but application was easy and very little clean up required. These pictures are three coats with Seche Vite.

Sinful Colors Cinderella

I love finding a 'cheap' polish that doesn't look cheap at all!

The classic layering combination with Cinderella seems to be Deborah Lipmann's Glitter in the Air, or it's dupe, Revlon Whimsical. Although I have both those glitters, and I like how they look over pale blues, I wanted to do something a bit more original. So instead I chose CrowsToes Bone Daddy. This is a complex mix of white glitter of all shapes and sizes in a light grey jelly base, together with iridescent glitters that flash blue at certain angles. I've worn Bone Daddy both alone and over various grey bases, but I was interested to see how it worked at toning down another colour.

There are lots of glitters in Bone Daddy, so just a single coat was enough to get the effect I wanted.

CrowsToes Bone Daddy over Sinful Colors Cinderella

The tiny brighter blue glitters and the red glitters are not part of Bone Daddy. Once I'd applied Bone Daddy, I liked how the red shimmer of Cinderella still showed through, and I thought it was calling out for an accent in red! I have a decant of Alta Costura Vernis Chaos that I was given by a very sweet polish friend, and I thought that would be just perfect to add a little highlight to this mani. Chaos is a mix of microglitter, short bar glitter and hexes in various neon colours - some of them are transparent. I only wanted to use the blue and red microglitter and bars, and a couple of carefully selected hexes, so I fished these out of the bottle carefully and dabbed them on my nails just where I wanted them. I used just one red and one blue hex, but took the smaller glitters as they came. I do seem to have picked up a few green microglitters too.  It's not difficult to pick out individual glitters from a polish like this, just load up the brush then wipe the polish off in the neck of the brush and poke the brush back in where the glitters you want are. Apart from picking out the red hex and the blue hex, all I was doing really was avoiding getting the colours I didn't want on my nails on the brush, so the whole thing didn't take very long.

I used a coat of Gelous to smooth the glitter polishes out and a coat of Seche Vite to finish everything off.

CrowsToes Bone Daddy over Sinful Colors Cinderella

I purchased Sinful Colors Cinderella in Boots. If you're in the US, then obviously it's readily available in drugstores. I bought my Crowstoes Bone Daddy from Llarowe (who ships internationally). Alta Costura Vernis doesn't seem to be making polish at the moment, but there are other neon glitter polishes around - for example Darling Diva's I'm Fwee.