Announcing...

Mentality Nail Polish would like to announce its very own color of 2014: Red-purple. We have also launched what appears to be a first in nail polish: textured holos. Check out our store at http://www.mentalitynailpolish.bigcartel.com/ and/or Google for swatches. Hope everone had a great holiday season!

Metallic Creams and Swatch: Male Hand

Metallic and cream are two words that usually do not go together. I am not sure why. When I mixed this line of colors, Hillary asked me to describe them. I called them metallicreams. She smiled and said that she had never heard of such a thing. After a bit of research and debate about any other type of description, we decided that yes, such a thing does exist. Well, kinda.

The result is a color line with a very interesting spectrum of creamy greys and neutrals with a brushed metallic reflection and a satin finish. Each has a creamy reflection for a "base color to silvery white" color shift. I am eager to use these polishes with an airbrush.

They are great for stamping nail art.

Then there is the light versus shade difference. The swatch photos on Facebook have come out a bit darker than the polish appears in real life. I mean, at the reflection angle that my eyes are at when the photos are taken versus the camera and light source angles. And don't forget the gravitational pull of the moon, humidity levels on Venus, time of galactic day... lol. You would not believe how many thousands of pictures that we have taken in vain attempts to photograph our various polishes. Shade pictures show different color saturation than do full light pictures. The colors also look different at different angles. This is a reality that continuously presents itself when we take pictures of Mentality polishes. Rest assured that we will take many more pictures.

The colors in the set remind me of lots of different things. Some remind me of pewter tones. Others look like they could be part of a science fiction movie set. Various shades of metal tones abound in the set.

Today I have a swatch on my hands using a single coat of Shadow stamped with Discreet using a Cheeky image. The first picture is in filtered sun/partial shade. The second picture is under florescent light. The third was taken under a day light color high pressure florescent lamp.

I also posted another version over on Instagram

You can find swatches of the Metallic Creams and all of our polish lines at www.mentalitynailpolish.bigcartel.com Like us on Facebook www.facebook.com/mentalitypolish

Orgasmic - The Brilliant Collection

The Future of Mentality Nail Polish

Today’s blog is about business and being in the business of nail polish. The integrity of the Mentality Nail Polish brand is extremely important to us, and to all of our fans that wear our polish. We have worked very hard to bring you the best and highest quality pigments that are to be found and will continue to do so at the most affordable price that we can. We often refer to it as “T-shirt boutique”. It’s boutique made affordable.

We have seen comments in various forums regarding the quality of our polishes versus the low prices that we strive to keep them at. It has been our goal to drive down the cost of inputs so that we can keep prices low. This means we have sought out the primary manufacturers of raw ingredients wherever possible.

To this extent, we are in the beginning phases of registering with the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the FDA. We believe in the product that we make and believe that our government will stand by it as well. It is an ongoing bureaucratic nightmare at times, but the effort is worth it every time that a fan posts another one of what is becoming a relentless stream of nail art pictures to one of our pages. Those pictures keep us motivated.

International shipping

Nail polish is a big deal. It is a really big deal. I mean it is an every world government United Nations controlled dangerous goods throw you in federal prison tax collector postal inspector and men in black kind of big deal. Nail polish is a flammable substance and mail goes on airplanes. We do not have the luxury of ignorance in the 21st century regarding the actions of hateful people and what they might do to their fellow human. We have even been required to sign anti-terrorism papers by our major suppliers just to be in this business. It is a massively big deal.

So, we are now certified with the International Aviation and Transportation Administration. MSDS sheets are available for our product including ingredients declarations for the European Union. We have secured a special permit with the US Postmaster to ship via the United States Postal Service. Mentality Nail Polish is registered with the US Department of Commerce as an official cosmetics manufacturer. We are registered with the US Customs and Border Protection after registering with the US Transporation Security Administration as known shippers of dangerous goods so that our products can legally leave the country. We are even authorized to use the US Customs Automated Export System so that we can be tracked in the official import/export GDP numbers of the US and every country that we ship to. We have done this to secure the integrity of the Mentality Nail Polish brand so that our product can make it legally onto the hands of our fans.

That said, we cannot knowingly an international package to a domestic address for international forwarding. Don’t ask. We can’t do it because we are required by law, like every other nail polish manufacturer, to tell the government where our product goes, what it is packaged in, and how it gets there. That is what the shipping label is about. It is an automatic registration of the route each bottle of polish has taken. It is information communicated directly to the governments of the world that can be tracked to anyone that handles or receives our product.

If you live overseas, we will only ship via Fedex legally which is reasonable only for very large orders. Otherwise please see Sally Magpies or Edgy Polish for international orders. They have taken the time and made the investments necessary to retail our product at the international level.

Prices, Coupons, and Black Friday

You will notice that our prices have changed. Domestic orders still receive free shipping. Some polish prices have gone up. Many, many prices have gone down. Reasons range from accounting adjustments to changes in the real costs of inputs at the manufacturing level. Where we can save our fans money, we have aggressively done so and will continue to. We will send you a bottle of top coat for $5.50 shipped domestic. The Brilliant Collection went up to $9.25 to reflect the real cost of materials. So for all of those pictures that our fans have submitted with Rapture or Fervor on a shelf next to one of the more costly designer or boutique polishes, you are correct. That is where a high-quality boutique stained glass holographic polish belongs, and we are delighted that we can bring you such a product as inexpensively as we can.

Black Friday is coming up, so everyone expects their favorite brands to offer incredible discounts. We are less-than-fans of Black Friday. The news is filled each year with people hurt in stampedes, mob fights over the latest toy understocked, and people forgoing holiday time with family to camp in front of their favorite store for a chance to out-sprint the next person in line for a soon-to-be-discontinued thing. We would rather not participate in that type of activity. There are no coupon codes active. We will instead continue to offer our current promotions: free domestic shipping and free shipping to Canada on orders of $50 or more.

Thank you for reading and we hope all of our fans around the world have a happy and safe holiday season.

Danny and Hillary

Mentality Nail Polish

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INTERNATIONAL GIVEAWAY!!! 33 MENTALITY NAIL POLISHES!!!

We are offering a choose-your-own giveaway of 33 Mentality Nail Polishes on our Facebook page. We will ship to a winner anywhere in the world on the list of approved countries for shipment of dangerous goods (nail polish is flammable). We will cover the shipping and any associated duties for the contest package. No duplicates. Enter by 12: PM, October 11, 2013.

Either of the two links posted below will connect with the giveaway. There are many chances to enter. Enter as often as you would like. Good luck!!!

http://bit.ly/17LneMm

https://www.facebook.com/MentalityPolish/app_228910107186452

Insight into Mentality

Hey, everyone. This blog is another "thoughts from the maker" where I will continue to introduce myself to the other members of the nail art community. So often in the world of indie nail polish, the maker is the same person that models, maintains social interaction, and runs the business. Here at Mentality, my wife is most often the person conversed with online. She is a gorgeous hand model and is a smart business person. I love being her team mate. I spend my days working at production. We both work at shipping, and make as many color-line decisions together as we can.

I do the color building itself. I don’t know how or why, I just do it. My wife asks me for color families or helps me establish guidelines for a line, and then I go to work. I call it seeing color clouds. I can push a color back and forth in my head to make it do what I need from it for a polish build.  I found a color book by Tauba Auerbach that keenly describes the cloud that I see in a way that I could never fully describe: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/09/tauba-auerbachs-rgb-colorspace-atlas-depicts-every-color-imaginable/.

When I work to build a color, I usually describe it as pushing a color. I “backbuild” the components to the color and then push the color values to where I want them. It’s probably what the makers in the big color houses do. I don’t know. I am not them. I am also not a CMYK-type machine. The colors that I build are all customs. I do not knowingly dupe anyone else’s color. I do work in a bit of a vacuum, and when I produce something that is similar to something else already produced, my wife is quick to ask me what makes it different. It has to be different. There are 16 million colors, and when accents are considered, there is simply no reason to exactly copy anyone’s stuff. That’s not Mentality. We build an alternative color set to the existing color houses. 

Our named polishes are tied to the same line of thinking as our company name. Mentality is defined as a way of thinking. Each of us is the sum of our individual experiences. Who we are and what we want to aspire to; all of it is our own individual mentality. We choose the names of our polishes in the hopes that we share these characteristics and aspirations with you. Sometimes we are Irritable and sometimes Ecstatic. Perhaps you have a grandmother named Virginia and a cousin named Jackie. We hope that you find Elation in your lives, and practice Charity. I hope that better answers some of the questions that we have received on the subject.

Pigment and glitter is quite a bit of fun, I do have to say. I mean as a stereotypical male that has done all the stereotypical things that I could as a guy, yay for colors. Then again, I am not exactly a stereotypical kind of guy. I am proud to say that both I and my wife graduated with a 4.0 GPA from Texas Women’s University. Yes, I graduated from a woman’s university. One of our vendor reps did a double take the other day when that came up in conversation. Good times.

My reasoning was simple. It is a great school and offered outstanding online classes. The education that I took away from that school, however, is as deeply important to what I do now as has been the life experiences that have brought me to this point. I received an immediate crash course in sensitivity training there. I challenge any man to successfully graduate from a woman’s university and act like a cretin while doing so. I learned to question my own status quo there in a way that I never could have imagined. I also came to the realization there that I was receiving a specific insight into the world that had thus eluded me. I hope to spend the rest of my life describing by my actions what I learned there.

Now I have the honor of making nail polish for the most beautiful hands on the internet: my wife and our growing list of friends. I am consistently amazed by the pictures of nail art that my wife shows me proffered by both women and men to a seemingly relentless stream of internet postings of our polish in action. There, in visual proof I find the product of my work. The color choices that I decide on as a maker come to life on the hands of insanely talented artists everywhere and I get just a little giddy for it.

I also feel extremely humble for it. Thank you to everyone that has worn or will wear our polish. It is custom, boutique, and all those special things that go along with being an exclusive micro-batched hand-made indie nail polish. Many of you even wear polishes mixed in their own bottle and thus have no exact duplicates even if the recipe is the same. I hope you love them.

Thanks for reading!

~Danny