Icing magnetic pink Wednesday!

This was my first attempt with magnetic polish.  I picked up 3 of the 4 colors at Icing Saturday night and decided to start off with the pink one for Pink Wednesday!

I started with a base of Color Club Hot Like Lava, which is a beautiful color in and of itself.  I love this Foiled collection - the polishes apply well, dry fast and are very forgiving of brush strokes.

The Icing polish applies nicely as well, it isn't too thick or too thin; but it is in a smaller than average bottle with .33 oz of product rather than the usual .5.  The price was much more reasonable than most of the other magnetic polishes that have been marketed to date (but that may soon be changing as more companies jump on the magnetic polish bandwagon).  I paid $9 for one bottle, but Icing was having a BOGO half off sale so the second polish rang up at $4.50.  That's $6.75 per bottle. (I are a math whiz)

The polish comes with a removable cap containing the magnet, so you dont have to flip your brush upside down to magnetize the design.  The magnet also contains little finger ledges to help with holding the magnet the correct distance from your nail without it coming in contact with it.  Well -- in theory anyway.  I actually had to redo 5 nails because I got a tiny bit too close and bumped the magnet into my wet polish.  So there is an initial learning curve.

And here is the lovely Hot Like Lava on it's own

Noobie tips

1) Do only one nail at a time, you want to magnetize the polish while it's still wet.

2) Hold the magnet stationery.  I was under the misguided notion that since I have wide nail beds if I kinda slowly pivoted the magnet from one side to the other I'd get a more uniform design.  Untrue.   Your best design comes from holding the magnet absolutely still.

3)  I found that the best way to judge the distance from my nail bed to the magnet was to hold my finger under a bright light and look down from the free edge toward my cuticles rather than a side or lateral view.  (see pics for example)

Yes

No

4) Base color (at least on the polishes I have tried) does not seem to impact your finished product much.  I swatched on 4 different base colors and my design came out pretty much identical on all 4 swatches.

This is such a different concept to me and I like it a lot more than I thought I would.  I think the phrase I used while I was working on this mani was "freaking awesome"!  hehe  Also the color variations don't show up as well in bright light (i.e. light box) than in normal ambient lighting so your design is going to be more pronounced than it looks here.