Wheel A13: Spotted and Crackle Polishes

Today's Nail Wheel Wednesday episode is a lesson in why one might want to swatch polishes right away. I pulled out all the spotted polishes I could find plus some crackles from less common brands and discovered that a lot of the spots weren't working well ... or at all. It was disappointing. The crackles still cracked, but the spots weren't behaving as they should have. Some did nothing. Some had a few spots in amongst cracks. Only one worked like I'd expected them all to, though who knows how long before that one degrades, too. I've read they can be picky about what base polish they're used with, and how wet/dry that is, and one person added some hair serum to their bottle and it worked again, so maybe I'll experiment a bit more before I give up on these, but maybe I'll just stick to crackles.



(all one coat over either black or white creme base, or in the case of #13 both black and white)

1. OPI Black Spotted [just a few spots, mostly cracks]
2. Fing'rs Get Spotted [even fewer spots than the OPI, just a few pin pricks among the cracks]
3. Layla Bubbly Effect Black Forest [straight lines in the finish here are due to an ill-advised attempt to topcoat before it was fully dry; I left topcoat off all the others, though I notice now that the area I put the topcoat does have fewer cracks]
4. Layla Bubbly Effect Cherry Muffin [the Laylas for the most part at least made more and bigger spots in amongst their cracks]
5. Layla Bubbly Effect Anise Shake
6. Layla Bubbly Effect Red Velvet Cake
7. Layla Bubbly Effect Meringue Pie
8. SinfulColors Hypnotic Transforming Top Coat Purpink [I can see that it's trying to work ... maybe if I'd concentrated on doing a thinner coat with it]
9. SinfulColors Hypnotic Transforming Top Coat Concrete Jungle [againk, maybe a thinner coat would have coaxed a few cells to pop here]
10. SinfulColors Hypnotic Transforming Top Coat Rebel Rebel [best of the Sinfuls by far]
11. SinfulColors Hypnotic Transforming Top Coat Punk the Town [nope, nothing doing]
12. SinfulColors Hypnotic Transforming Top Coat Redrum [fail]
13. IsaDora Graffiti Nail Top Masterpiece Pink
14. IsaDora Graffiti Nail Top Subway Green [took the cardboard cover off the cap of this one]
15. IsaDora Graffiti Nail Top Black Tag
16. Relouis Graffi Collection 08 [should have put this over white, maybe as it's darker than I thought]
17. Dior Crocodile Effect Top Coat 608 [took a long time to form the pattern, but worth the wait]
18. Barry M Croc Effects Black [a finer grained croc than the Dior; also took a while to show up, and one edge never did finish cracking]
19. P2 Crackling Black Explosion
20. P2 Crackling Silver Blast


Bottles 1 and 2:



3 through 7:



8 through 12:



13 through 16:



17 through 20: