Having Custom Nail Polish Made by Cat Furniss (@nailastrophic)

With so many beautiful UK indies to choose from, we can be spoilt for choice when it comes to picking out colours! But have you ever seen a colour – or light splitting across the landscape – and thought, ‘Wow, that would make a beautiful nail polish!’? Well, I have good news for you – a lot of the UK indie nail polish producers offer a custom nail polish making service in addition to their own beautiful ranges. Here’s my experience with a few of those indies.

Opulent Essences - Space Cat Collection

The first custom collection I ever designed was a whopper – six polishes in bright neon colours. I’d seen a lot of beautiful flakie polishes, and with rainbow neons being just about my favourite colours ever, I decided to ask the lovely Sharon at Opulent Essences to create my dream collection.

We started with me sending her a few colour inspiration pictures. As different screens can show the same colours in different ways, it’s difficult to request an exact colour match, of course, so I sent a few different inspiration colours and nail polish finishes and trusted her to make them look beautiful.

Sharon mixed up very small amounts of prototypes to make sure the finish and colour looked about right, and guided me through the process. Sometimes you can’t have everything you want from a polish, because too many flakies, for example, will make a polish too gloopy to use, and certain colours or pigment concentrations can hide flakies or be too sheer to apply. So it’s best to listen to the experts in terms of what they can produce to be a perfect, workable polish for you!

In no time at all, Sharon had produced six absolutely beautiful flakie rainbow polishes and taught me a little about nail polish production to boot! Email opulentessences@hotmail.com for details!

Dystopia Nail Polish - Super Cool Cousins Trio

The second custom collection I ordered was through my very good friend Sara, who runs Dystopia Nail polish. When I designed my first collection, I named the polishes after close family members – but missed out my wonderful cousin, who I’m extremely fond of – so of course I had to dedicate my second collection to her!

My cousin is a very talented photographer, with a collection of Doc Marten boots, so the polishes I designed this time were based on two of her boot photographs, both originally based on album covers. I sent Sara the appropriate boot and album cover pics, and she got to work! Just like with the first collection, Sara made small amounts of prototypes, and sent me some pictures of various pigments/flakies that would work for the look we were going for.

This time, we found that the pigment and flakie combination we’d intended for one of the polishes just wouldn’t work, so Sara suggested making a flakie topper in a clear base, which could then be applied over the base polish. I loved this idea – I like toppers anyway – so we went ahead with a trio instead of a duo, and I absolutely love how these came out!

You can get information about ordering a custom polish from Dystopia Nail Polish here.

Overall, I had an amazing experience designing my dream polishes and having experts guide me through the process to help me obtain the perfect polish! In addition to Dystopia Nail Polish and Opulent Essences, some other UK indies also offer a custom polish making service, and I hope to try them all eventually!

What would your perfect polish look like? It could be just an order away!

Follow Cat (@nailastrophic) on Instagram for gorgeous swatches and nail art.

Find out more about Opulent Essences and Dystopia Nail Polish.