Review: Liquid Latex

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Hello!!

Remember that purple stuff that I had on my nails the other day that I said was not Liquid Palisade? I'm back to tell you what it is, and why I think you'll prefer it.

I am not made of money, nor do I have a money tree. I'm guessing neither do you. So while I loved the idea of Liquid Palisade, I wasn't too fond of the $22 price tag for a small bottle. Especially when I change my nail art 3-5 times a week.

But, I will admit that I avoid certain messy nail art techniques because they are just too messy for me. Splatter, watermarble, waterspotting, spun sugar, and yes, even gradients at times. I've tried every other suggestion to ease clean up, and nothing worked to my satisfaction.

Then my friend Jenna from Inky Whisker's Musings shared a secret which made all the bad go away, and allowed happiness to reign over my world again: Liquid Latex.

Liquid Latex

She did a post on her blog about this, and I had to try it out. Following her suggestion, I bought this through Amazon; it costs $10 for 4 oz, and 4 oz will probably last you most of your natural life, unless you leave the top off and it dries out. Also at her suggestion, I decanted it into an empty polish bottle, for ease of application:

If you don't have an empty bottle, go to the dollar store and buy the cheapest bottle of polish you can find (something 4-for-a-dollar if you're lucky), dump it out, and fill it with this.

Now, as Shakespeare once said, the course of true love never did run true, and I had some problems with this. They had nothing to do with the product, and everything to do with me being a complete clutz. But on the off-chance that you have clutzy moments like me, here's a word to the wise. Be careful when you open the jar. For some reason, I thought it was going to be fairly thick--it is not. It's very watery, and I splashed it everywhere, including my jeans and carpet. While this will peel right off of smooth surfaces when it dries (tables, skin, even a plastic bag), not so much off jeans and carpet. The same lesson is relevant when you pour this into your bottle--use a plastic funnel or make one from a sheet of paper. Otherwise you will end up with 3 parts liquid latex on the counter to every 1 part that makes it in your bottle. 'Nuff said.


Once you have it in your bottle, you simply brush it on to the skin surrounding your nails:

Liquid latex is sticky!!!

As you can see, I had no problems getting close to my nails. This is one quick coat put on in three strokes--one on each side of the nail, and one across the top. As you can also see, if you allow the latex to touch itself, it will stick together:

One other thing I want you to note about this close-up--see on the pinky, how I came down a little from the top of the cuticle, onto the blue polish? We'll see what happened as a result of that in a minute.

The latex dried very quickly; by the time I finished applying it to my last nail, the first was dried; I'd estimate about 20-30 seconds dry time.


To test it out, I did the gradient that you saw in my last manicure; here's what it looked like after I finished applying the polish:

Liquid latex after gradient technique

My application was about right to catch all of the extra polish that I normally would have had to remove with acetone. It's hard to see in the picture, but on my ring finger a little bit went past the latex on to my skin at the top left; you can see the residual in the next picture below, when the latex is removed.

Peel off that latex, baby!

Next you just peel off the latex. It comes off very easily, mostly in one piece for me, with no muss of fuss. I was impressed to see that it took off almost all of the excess polish:

Liquid Latex leavings

There is some residual left, but it's small enough that it can be quickly removed with a little acetone and a brush, MUCH better than having to deal with all of that mess.

And while it might be tempting to try to paint as close as you can to your polish, beware--look at what happened to the top of my pinky where I accidentally overlapped the latex onto the polish. When I peeled off the latex, it took that bit of gradient right along with it. Which also means you can do some cool things with the liquid latex by painting it directly ON to your nails for nail art techniques; I thought Inky had done some art with that too, but I couldn't find it, so maybe it only existed in my mind! Either way, it's a good idea. :)

Inky also mentioned that if you get some of it down in the area between your polish and your cuticle and it doesn't come off when you peel, use a small dotting tool, orange stick, or similar pointy implement to get it out. :)

So, what's my verdict on this? Oh, heck yeah!! This is going to open up my world to a bunch of techniques that I tend to avoid like the plague. I highly recommend it, and send a huge shout-out to Inky for cluing me in to it!! You can get yours here. :)

Hugs and happy latexing,
M.