Franken: Twilight Violet

kitneper Haziran 04, 2021

Here's something I tried for the first time which went much better than water marbling: frankening with eye shadow. In this case, some ancient L'Oreal that I haven't worn on my face in years but couldn't part with for sentimental reasons. I wore a lot of L'Oreal makeup in the 80s, which was a good decade for me, filled with lots of milestones: I graduated from high school and then college, got my first professional job, bought my first new car, and got married. (Mr. Karen and I almost bought our first house into the 80s, too; we closed on it in January of 1990.) These eyeshadows were part of a holiday set I bought during that time; the rectangle with the corners cut off shape was a distinctive part of the L'Oreal look back then. (What is that shape called? A lozenge? A biscuit? I'm a quilter; I should know this.)

The shadows are all frosty; I figured I'd end up with a shimmer polish no matter what, so I started with shimmery base: Confetti Tiara.

To keep it simple for my first go at this, I only used one color of eyeshadow, the medium purple.

I scraped shadow into a paper funnel I made with an ad flyer from the recycling bin and kept adding it to Tiara until I got a hazy purple shade I liked. Because Tiara is sheer, I expected the franken to be, too. Since I knew I wanted to see it layered, I put Borghese Mezzanotte Blue on one finger before I swatched the franken, which I dubbed Twilight Violet. I used four coats and still had visible nail line, but this is one of the cases I'm okay with it, since it wasn't too streaky going on. (The layered finger is two coats of the franken over the deep blue base.)

If I look really closely, I can see some little clumps of color where I didn't get the eyeshadow entirely mixed into the base polish; some more shaking (and maybe another ball) should fix that.