Wear Test: Indigo Bananas Telephasic Workshop

When I receive items from makers for review, I choose one of their polishes to wear for a longevity test.  I'll wear the polish for as long as it takes for it to chip.  As you'll see today, I take pictures each day to show exactly how the polish is lasting each day.  At the end, I'll review the polish as normal and discuss a little about the longevity.  Today's wear test is for Indigo Bananas Telephasic Workshop.  First, let's finish the remaining question and answers I had for Indigo Bananas creator, Andrea!

3) What was your inspiration for the polishes I've chosen to review?

Telephasic Workshop is a medium blue leaning teal polish with a teal/purple/pink duochrome shimmer and fine holo glitter and is one of my favorite polishes out of all the ones I've made. I have so many teal polishes, and so many are yellow leaning/too green or plain cremes, so I tried to make something I really wanted to wear but didn't have.  So. initially my inspiration was definitely "a teal that will not make my hands red and with a lot of hidden color changes, shimmer and sparkle" paired with one of my favorite Boards of Canada songs.  

Anansi is a glass fleck duochrome, deep emerald green to lighter greenish silver to purple.  The name also came first for this polish - Anansi is a lesser folk-god from West Africa & the Caribbean, and a darkened emerald green with deep purple shift seemed perfect for that kind of sneaky trickster.

First, here's the basic info with photos from day one of Telephasic Workshop.

Color: Teal with flashes of blue and pink.

Finish: Chrome – a polish that shifts between colors depending on the angle you look at it.

Bottle / Brush: Round bottle brush (i.e. Seche Vite) – standard width and length.  Easy to control and manipulate.

Opacity: High – opaque in two coats!  Probably could've done three easily, but I only needed two.
Glitter Application: N/A

Consistency: Medium – applies easily and doesn’t flood the cuticles.

Overall Ease of Application: Easy – applies well without pooling, dragging, streaking, or balding.  Spreads evenly and smoothly.

Stampability: Not tested for stamping.

Dry Time: Medium – dry to the touch with minimal smudging in 3-8 minutes.

Day Two:
Still going strong!  No tip wear.  Gorgeous shift.  Fantastic finish.

Items used:

• Basecoat: Orly Bonder 
• Topcoat: OPI Topcoat (black label) 

Day Three:

Minimal tip wear, but still no chips.  Shift is still strong.

Indoor light brings out the green in Telephasic Workshop.

Again, the indoor lighting brings out the green in the polish.

Minimal tip wear.

And the mix of florescent lighting, computer monitor ambient lighting, and  little bit of sunlight, and you get this amazing shot of pink.

Day Four:

One chip on my middle finger on my right hand when I woke up.  Otherwise, everything else still looked great.  Minimal tip wear, no chipping anywhere else.  Granted, as you can see, my nail itself chipped, so that could be the culprit for the chipped polish!

That is, no chipping until I got into the hot tub.  Pools and hot tubs are horrible on my nails.  After I got out, Telephasic Workshop was chipping all over the place.  Poor guy didn't stand a chance...

Overall Thoughts: Indigo Bananas Telephasic Workshop is a seriously gorgeous polish.  I wish I would've waited to hop into the hot tub to see exactly how long this bad boy would last.  Honestly, though, I don't usually wear polish more than a day or two, so I wouldn't have gotten to the point where I had chips on a normal wear.  The consistency was great.  It applied so easily without any pooling or dragging.  It dried relatively quickly, but I didn't use a quick dry top coat, so it did take a little bit longer than it would've had I used Seche or LL No Time.  All in all, this polish is amazing.  Based on the microcosm of polishes I've sampled from Indigo Bananas, the brand as a whole is solid.  The polishes are highly pigmented, they apply easily, last a long time, they're unique, and they're beautiful.  I can't get enough of them!  I have like 10 more on my wish list for after my no buy is up.  If you are interested in them but are worried about IB being a newer brand, I can tell you that Andrea has tested these polishes for a very long time, some since last summer, before she put them out for sale.  She's very communicative if you have any questions or problems, which is great when looking for a company with good customer service.  In conclusion, I love Telephasic Workshop as well as the rest of the Indigo Bananas that I received, and I can't recommend them enough.

You can purchase Indigo Bananas at her shop.  Follow Andrea and Indigo Bananas on Facebook and her blog for news, updates, and links to blogger reviews.

*I was not financially compensated for this post. I received a sample for review purposes. The opinions are completely my own based on my experience.  For more information, please see my Disclosure Policy in the tab above.* 

Muse!!!

Tonight I'm going to the Muse concert in Orlando!!!!  I'm sooooo beyond excited.  To celebrate, I decided to try a little nail art.  I settled on doing gradients as base colors, then taping them off to do a peekaboo styled mani with the gradients popping through the black.  I also decided to attempt to recreate the album art for Muse's last album, the Second Law, on my accent nail.  It may come as a surprise, but I've never done a legitimate gradient, so I used this tutorial from Lissa's Polish Addiction.  I think that came out well.  Here is my first step.

Here are macros of the gradients.

Next, I taped off my mani using some striping tape.

Yeah, I may've been over ambitious with the taping...

Then, I topped the gradients with Wet 'n Wild Black Out.

Next, I removed the tape.

Once the polish is tacky, you can push down the parts that are sticking up, and take a  manicure stick and clear off the bits that fell back into the gradient parts.

Here they are without any topcoat.

Next, I applied a topcoat and did the album art on my accent nail.  

Here's the album cover for your reference.

It's not 100% accurate, but I think it looks pretty good.

Here's another shot of the final product!

I used polishes from Color Club, OPI, Kiss Nail Art, and Sally Hansen to create this look.  I decided to split it up into two nights work, so that I wouldn't spend too much time at once, which worked out pretty well.  I'm so super excited about this concert!!!  I'll be adding photos all night with my Instagram, so if you aren't a follower, you can find me here.  I'm set as private, but I will add you if you request.

Have you ever done a striping tape mani?  What about an album art mani?

Comparison Thursday: Teals with Pink Flash

It's only fitting that I show you a comparison using one of my newly acquired Indigo Bananas polishes since I've been gushing over them for the past week.  Even though tonight's polishes aren't even near dupes, I did want to give you options to other polishes that have been discontinued.  Thus, tonight, we're going to take a look at teal polishes with pink flashes: Rescue Beauty Lounge Aqua Lily, Liquid Lacquer Lounging Lily, and Indigo Bananas Telephasic Workshop.  I will have proper reviews for each of these polishes at a later date.

Each of these polishes has a teal base with pink flash.  However, you'll notice that the teal base is very different in each polish.  Let's take a look at these guys a little closer.

RBL Aqua Lily

Aqua Lily is a teal leaning green with a pink sheen that shows up in certain lights.  Application was easy, but the polish is much thicker than I had anticipated.  It wasn't so thick that it needed thinner, though.  This was two coats by itself topped with Liquid Lacquer No Time quick dry top coat.  The pink in Aqua Lily is much more obvious in the bottle and didn't translate very well to the nail.  That's the only true negative about this polish.  Sadly, Aqua Lily has been discontinued.  I had to purchase mine from a swap group on Facebook.  If you see one for going under $30, grab it as quickly as your little hands can snatch it up!

Liquid Lacquer Lounging Lily

Please excuse the ravaged cuticles...  I had a picture with mass quantities of cuticle oil, but it turned out blurry.

Lounging Lily was Melissa's, Liquid Lacquer's creator, attempt to make an Aqua Lily dupe.  It's lighter in color, leaning more sky blue than green.  The pink flash is much more noticeable than in Aqua Lily, but the base is much more translucent.  This is three coats.  It looks a little wonky because I got waaaaaaay too much top coat on the brush when I was applying it.  It pooled and got a little goopy because of it.  Lounging Lily was also a tad on the streaky side.  Once I had three coats, though, the streakiness was gone.  The base is close to OPI Sonic Bloom or Sinful Cinderella, but it's decidedly more teal than those two.  Like most Liquid Lacquers, Lounging Lily is from a batch of 30, and I'm not sure if she has anymore bottles left.  However, Melissa is super nice and communicates well, so I wouldn't hesitate to contact her to see if she has anymore left.

Indigo Bananas Telephasic Workshop

Telephasic Workshop is a dark teal base leaning dark blue instead of green with a blue to pink shift.  Pigmentation is high, so I only needed two coats.  Application was easy without pooling, dragging, or balding, and it dried quickly.  The pink and blue flashes aren't like the sheen you see in the Lilies.  Instead, it's a larger particle size giving it a greater shift.  It's funny, most chromes are much more vivid in the bottle than on the nail, but that's exactly opposite of Telephasic Workshop.  It's much more vivid on the nail than in the bottle.  It's simply stunning, and I've decided to use it for a wear test for the brand.  For once, I'm not getting bored with the color before the end of the wear test.  As I've said the past 3 days, you can purchase Indigo Bananas polishes at her Etsy store.  Also, you can follow Andrea on Facebook and her blog for news and updates.

Check them out side by side.  Be prepared for picture spam.  It was a bit difficult to pick up the color shifts.

It wouldn't be fair to make a statement of which I think is the best because each polish is just different enough to make it worth having all three.  However, if you're not looking to have the limited edition or discontinued label and you don't mind having a darker base, I definitely think that you could get away with purchasing Telephasic Workshop to at least somewhat squash your lemming for those other DC polishes.

Which is your favorite?

*I was not financially compensated for this post. I received a sample (Indigo Bananas Telephasic Workshop) for review purposes. The opinions are completely my own based on my experience.  For more information, please see my Disclosure Policy in the tab above.*