Aerosil as a suspension agent in clear nail polish – R972 vs. 300

Hey beauties (or should I say chemists) 😀

first of all I would really love to thank you all for your support, your several e-mails, suggestions and comments. I really seem to have found a topic that is of great interest right now – worldwide. This is really exciting for me as I can finally see that I’m not the only crazy one here. Especially outside the USA it seems to be almost impossible to get a glitter suspension base for your frankening, but also in the US it has been becoming somewhat of a struggle. I’m glad that all the lovely indie sellers and frankeners seem to have found a way to deal with it though.

So after my last experiment, where I threw Aerosil 200 in clear nail polish, the swatches revealed a somewhat rough surface when dry. A possible explanation for this was that I can only shake the bottle with my hands and this is not enough to disperse the Aerosil in the clear base. But then a couple of readers said that it could also be because I used a hydrophilic Aerosil instead of a hydrophobic one. Hydrophilic means it loves to bond with water, while hydrophobic means you can’t disperse it in water at all. Since nail polish in its nature is also hydrophobic we figured it might work out much better with hydrophobic Aerosil in nail polish!

I tried to get samples of hydrophobic Aerosil suitable for this purpose, but I never heard anything back from the chemical company, probably because I can’t say I’m affiliated with a company. But then the lovely Chiro from Nailofthisweek was able to send me a “sample from her sample” lol. Thank you again girl, this posting would have never been possible without you! ❤

So today I’ll show you two more “kinds” of Aerosil: The hydrophobic Aerosil R972 and the hydrophilic Aerosil 300 which is just a finer grade (even smaller particles) than Aerosil 200. Here are the three versions in comparison, and as you can see, I added a drip of water to each of them to show you the hydrophobic behaviour of R 972:

Let’s see what I did with the nail polish! First, I filled some (pretty thin) clear nail polish from Catrice in two bottles, and added small and large glitter particles. See how it sinks to the bottom right away!

Even after shaking, it settles at the bottom within minutes. Frustrating for every frankener!

Next, I added Aerosil bit by bit until I was satisfied with the suspension of the glitters. I always added one more “spoon”, and by that I mean tip of a straw like this:

I ended up with 11 of these spoons for each bottle, which contained around 2,5 ml of clear base each. This sounds a little too much and I think I was a little impatient because now I have a feeling that it still expands a little after a while and makes the suspension even thicker. Anyways, I was really happy with the result. This is what it looked like after 24 hours: Still nicely suspended, also the big chunky ones. The base is still clear, no signs of mattification due to the powder. The R972 as well as the 300 keep glitter suspended in nail polish:

Now to the swatches: The Aerosil 300 showed the same rough surface like the 200 – this means that the particle size has not been the problem in the Aerosil 200 of my first experiment. The hydrophobic Aerosil shows a slightly rough surface, but not nearly as bad as the hydrophilic one. Can you see the difference?

Conclusion 🙂

The problem I had in my first posting with the roughness of clear polish with Aerosil seems to be solved by picking a hydrophobic fumed silica. So if you need something to suspend glitter in thin clear nail polish, hydrophobic fumed silica is what you need! For me, it is not easy to get though. The only thing I can order in pharmacies here is hydrophilic Aerosil 200. But I heard that there are hydrophobic fumed silicas sold on ebay – usually as fishing equipment. I still have to figure out the right amount of Aerosil per ml – if the dosis is reduced it might end up as a perfectly clear nail polish with no signs of a rough surface at all!

One last thing: Please be careful if you wish to use any of these fine grained pulvers: Use a breathing protection, the particles are so small, you can’t even see them. They float through the air and you really don’t want to get them into your lungs!

I hope my posting was useful, I will keep you updated while I try to use it in frankening. Have a great sunday everyone!

Check out my sum up posting, where I tried to conclude everything I learned about suspension agents in nail polish!