Rather than just putting the crackle polish straight over some plain, bright (or dark) color, you can experiment with the polish and what goes underneath it.
One fun thing to do with the black shatter polish is to paint the rainbow on your fingernails, and then put the black shatter on top so it gives a hippie, almost tie-dye affect to it. The bright colors of the rainbow are a great contrast to the black, and it makes your nails unique. Also, if you put the rainbow in different directions on each nail, you have even more uniqueness to your nails, it will be a great unexpected twist.
Also, rather than putting the crackle polish on every nail, you can do two full nails and just do the tips of the remaining three on each hand and give it a french manicure twist. This works especially well if you have the white crackle polish, but any other color works too. Simply make a pattern on the entire two nails of your choice, and apply the crackle on the top, but on the other three, only apply the pattern to the top half of the nail. Underneath the tip of it, it’s often very cute to put a few dots or quick lines for added flare.
Another popular design with the crackle polish is to put very sparkly nail polish underneath it, because then it is shining through the cracks. This look is very fun and flirty, and will be sure to grab people’s attention. The top coat will cause the sparkles to stand out even more, so it is also a great contrast to the matted crackle colors.
A cute idea for the polish is to take two somewhat similar colors, such as purple and pink, and paint around with the different colors by overlapping them. Put pink on both sides, with the purple in the middle, and then add a few more dots and lines to the purple. When you paint over them with a thick coat over crackle polish (one of the lesser opaque colors, such as the blue) you can see the pattern underneath and it gives the crackle even more dimension. It makes the crackles to be in different shades, so it is a lighter blue and a darker blue, and everyone will simply think that you picked up a limited edition crackle color that they wished they had!
If you have the crackle polish, it is always fun to paint your nail a contrasting color to your crackle color, and then paint half of every nail in a diagonal coat, so across half the nail has a crack, while the other diagonal half is the plain color. This is a really cool twist to the traditional manicure, or even the crackle manicure, and looks very cute if you put a couple rhinestones underneath the crackled design.
You could also even paint your nails in your favorite color, and then put the crackle polish over only one or two fingers on each hand so it isn’t terribly noticeable, but it’s shocking and cool when a person finally does notice it.
Finally, putting crackle nail polish, especially the black, over a shiny gold color causes both of the colors to really pop, and it makes the gold polish look like it is actual gold. Everyone with think you put priceless gold foil underneath your polish, but they will never know your little secret!
