Aerosil Update and Swatches :)

Girls…wow! Just wow. I have never had so many hits before on my blog, I received so many e-mails, comments, backlinks from discussions on MUA, Facebook and various forums. Thanks to everyone for all the fruitful suggestions and discussions, I will try to summarize what all of these lovely frankeners and I found out during the past day.

But first of all: This is what the glitter looks like after approximately 50 hours without moving it. As you can see, I have added some bigger glitter particles, because most frankeners would like to include these in their creations. Both glitter types are still very nicely suspended, there is no sedimentation and no settling – the bottom of the bottle is completely free of glitter. That’s how we like it 🙂

Now to the swatches. You will now understand why I’ve been wanting you to wait with your order of the normal Aerosil 200 that I used. There is this kind of structure on the surface of the nail polish – it just doesn’t want to dry even and shiny… this was such a disappointment when I saw it on my nails!

Close-Up of the structured surface:

Some of us might think that they will add a top coat after applying a glitter nail polish anyways and that this is not a problem. But it just doesn’t feel right and shows me, that just mixing the pulver into nail polish isn’t enough. To complete the swatches, the following swatch is after applying a top coat:

And now, a summary of all the discussions:

How did I disperse Aerosil 200 in the nail polish?

I simply added it to a half-full bottle of clear polish. I added as much as there was space for in the bottle (lots). There are also 2 beads in the polish to help suspend the glitter and powder. And then I just shook the bottle for a while! The pulver is so fine that it almost immediately disappeared in the polish. But as we can see on the swatches, it seems like the Aerosil didn’t actually disperse enough.

Ideas about how the dull / matte / rough drying of the polish can be stopped?

Actually, there are a few things that need testing. I think the structured surface comes from the fact that Aerosil is not dispersed enough in the polish. First of all, I might have actually used the wrong Aerosil. Some frankeners pointed me to the Aerosil website again, and there it says that there are hydrophobic and hydrophilic fumed silicas.

hydrophobic = doesn’t like water and cannot be mixed with it

hydrophilic: = loves water and is dissolvable by water

In general, nail polish is hydrophobic, so the fumed silica should also be hydrophobic for a nice dispersion. The Aerosil I used is hydrophilic though, which means that this could be the problem. So what you might want to look for is hydrophobic amorphous, colloidal fumed silica. Geez, thats a hell of a name! It is commonly known as AEROSIL® R 972. Now, this hydrophobic fumed silica is not as easy to get as Aerosil 200 :(. I have one seller willing to sell me 10kg for 40 Euro, but I really don’t need that. I haven’t found any smaller amounts yet. I did however request a sample from the Aerosil website – no clue if this will work.

A better dispersion of Aerosil can also be reached by using high speed mixers. Well, I hardly produce more than one tiny bottle of nail polish at a time plus I don’t own a highspeed mixer. But there might be another possibility the lovely Chiro pointed me to in the comments – I might try and use an ultrasonic cleaning device (you know, where you can throw your jewlery and glasses in and the ultrasound dissolves all the dirt). She said they also use this method in labs when a high speed mixer is not available. I’m still optimistic about this – if the hydrophilic silica already behaved so well in my polish, the hydrophobic one might be just perfect 🙂

While I’m busy experimenting, other frankeners are really working hard to find another supplier of nail polish glitter suspension base. I really hope they will succeed and that they will soon be able to continue their frankening without problems.

That’s it for today, if you have any questions, feel free to comment, twitter me, or shoot me an e-mail 🙂

Check out my follow up postings. Here i compared swatches of a hydrophilic and a hydrophobic fumed silica, and here I tried to sum up everything I found out about suspension agents in nail polish!