Lippmann Superstar Franken

This was a request from Brooke at Getcha Nails Did. Check her blog out if you get a moment- it’s cool and she has a really cute doggie!

But, anyway. Onto the franken du jour: Lippman Superstar. I checked out some color swatches online and it looks like a medium brown jelly with thick, dense, chunky copper glitter. Very festive and lots of fun, but it will dry gritty and needs a few layers of topcoat to smooth it out.

Here’s my franken. I used the chunkiest glitter I could find, but Superstar’s is larger. Oh, and I got horrible tip pull from my Seche. But I hope you can get the general idea.

First, let’s mix up a medium slightly reddish brown jelly for the base. It has to be dark so the copper sparkles pop out. I mixed China Glaze Red Curl Girl, a medium red shimmer, and a green creme that I frankened from orange and yellow creme. My green was close to Nubar’s Green Tea, or maybe China Glaze Tree Hugger. You want a color like Kermit the Frog, not a dark forest green.

So, after mixing your red and green together, you should have a brown base. Shimmery is OK, but you want to keep it sort of jelly-like. Add about 10 drops of clear polish to the brown. Don’t use quick dry! The clear polish will make the brown color a little more jelly-ish and translucent. You can skip this step if you like, but the original polish looks like a jelly base to me. It shouldn’t make much of a difference. Save a little of the brown base because you will use it later.

Paint on a couple coats of the brown. You want to make sure you can’t see your nail lines, because this is a pretty opaque polish.

Here comes the fun part! Glitter bomb! Get some copper glitter at the craft store. Flat, chunky glitter will work best for this. The glitter in Superstar looks square to me, but square glitter is hard to find. Try to get a good quality glitter so the color won’t come off when it comes in contact with the polish.

Add a thimble-full or so of glitter to a clear topcoat. Try adding a bit of your coppery glitter topcoat to your brown jelly base polish. If your brown base was not too opaque, you can add the copper glitter mix directly to the brown base. However, if the base got too thick, or is opaque, the copper glitter will just get swallowed up. Boo hoo! If this is the case, just paint on the copper glitter topcoat over the base.

However, it’s the copper glitter swimming in the brown jelly base that makes this look unique, so try to combine the brown base and glitter.

Without a topcoat, this polish will be thick and gritty! I added two coats of Seche Vite to smooth it out because I prefer glossy, smooth nails rather than the semi-matte chunkies.

Hope you like this- not an exact franken due to a difference in the glitter, but I think it’s a fun festive copper. Oh, and it cost about 10 cents to make. Always good news for us gals on a budget! I’m still not sure what I’ll do with the leftover glitter, but it will go to good use somewhere.