Morgan Taylor Core Sample

Sample provided for review

Recently I was fortunate to receive a sampler of Morgan Taylor core colors for review: Coming Up Roses, Wish You Were Here, All Dolled Up, Scene Queen, Mint Chocolate Chip, and Nautically Inclined.



I decided these colors would be ideal for trying out the "dry water marble" or "no mess water marble" technique I'd seen around the blogosphere, so I pulled up the tutorial from Alps Nail Art and started playing. The basic idea is instead of dipping your fingers in the water to get the marbled design on them, you let the design dry a bit in the water then carefully lift it out and use like a decal. (Confusingly, "dry water marble" is also used to describe a technique where no water is involved at all; I call that "dry marbling".) I started this adventure with the four cremes in the group; when it was dry enough, I slid my fan brush underneath and transferred the circle to a napkin to absorb the water clinging to it.



I did two coats of Mint Chocolate Chip, a mint green creme, on all my nails, then applied the water marble decal to three of my nails. This was so much easier than wet water marble, with minimal cleanup needed and one cup's worth of marbling able to cover multiple nails. I added topcoat to smooth over the decals; they weren't too bumpy but since it was my first time trying this method, I didn't get them quite as flat against the base color as I'd like.





I combined the two shimmers in my next marble. Scene Queen is silver flecked shimmer; All Dolled Up is a bright pink pearly shimmer. I should have used Scene Queen as a base under the marble; I did not, so you can see some of my natural nail color showing through weak spots in the marble. I didn't make that mistake again. I did two coats of All Dolled Up as my accent nail here.





I used marbling on just an accent nail for the next look featuring Wish You Were Here, a dusty lilac creme.





Around this point, I decided it was easier to cut the marble circles into sections before putting them on my nails, rather than placing the whole circle on the first nail and trying to be careful not to wrinkle up the leftover section to use on later nails. This opened up the possibility of doing color blocking with the marbling, which is what I tried over Nautically Inclined, a perwinkle blue creme (I thought I spotted some shimmer in the bottle but it disappeared on the nail).





I went with stripes of marble for the next color, Coming Up Roses, a dusty rose creme.





Scene Queen, the silver shimmer, got both marble stripes and a full marble accent nail.





I did one last look with these colors, Skittling Coming Up Roses, Wish You Were Here, Nautically Inclined, and Mint Chocolate Chip before adding marble stripes containing all four shades.





The formula on all the Morgan Taylor colors was great. Two normal coats were ample for full coverage both for the cremes and the shimmers; I didn't have to concentrate and do thicker coats to be able to stop at two. I haven't found a local source for this brand yet; the ones I've bought were in beauty supply stores in Las Vegas and Wisconsin. It looks like they can be purchased from a link on the Morgan Taylor website. There's also some information on local salons to purchase from; maybe I should check out some of those salons first, since I do like to ponder colors in the bottle before I buy when possible. Individual bottles are $8.50, which I think is a good value considering the bottles are a full 15ml and they're two coat colors. I noticed they have a matte topcoat, so I definitely need to get that at some point.

The polishes shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider, and I get to keep the polishes for my own use.