Nail Polish Lexicon ~ Jelly Sandwich

For quite a while I was stumped by the term "jelly" and "jelly sandwich". I kept getting it confused with Gel nail polishes and tips. The main trait of a jelly is it is very translucent with a weak or watery color. To make it opaque would take a crazy amount of coats if you could get it opaque at all. I used to hate the few jelly bottles I had thinking they were lame polishes and the color too weak to do anything with. I've since apologized to them :) Now that I'm using them correctly I think of the colors and squishy (no idea why) or like Jolly Ranchers or some other hard candy.

The most popular use of jelly polishes are layering them with other polishes, usually glitter. Layering them is what is known as a jelly sandwich. This gives depth and dimension to a manicure. Check out a few samples after the jump.




First up is a classic jelly sandwich using OPI "Guy Meets Galveston" and Wet n Wild "Explosions After Dark".

Naked Nail

1 coat of glitter.

Then the coat of the jelly.

Another coat of glitter.

And another of jelly.

Glitter.

Jelly.

Glitter, starting to see the pattern?

Jelly again.

Last coat of glitter. If you were counting that's 5 coats of glitter
 and 4 of jelly. 9 total not counting the base and top you'd
use on your normal nails.

Now that is a lot of polish and no way do you have to do as many coats as I did, but I got carried away and was having fun. To make the color stronger faster do a couple of coats of the jelly first before sandwiching in the glitter. In this example I really wanted to show the depth. You can still see the first coat of glitter, but its embedded deep in the polish and I love that effect. Here, check it out again.

Now just last week I saw a new way to make a jelly sandwich. Instead of glitter, she did a stamping of fish in a blue jelly. It blew my mind, so here is my first attempt to do something like that.

It needs some work, but you can see what's going on. I did 2 coats of OPI "Do You Think I'm Text-y?" then stamped the first rose in Milani "White On The Spot" using BundleMonster BM323 (I isolated one rose from the full nail image). Then another coat of the OPI jelly. Another stamped rose. Another coat of jelly. The larger stamped rose. One final coat of the jelly. I like the effect, but I want to experiment with other colors to stamp/sandwich with.