Esthetics Nail Chrome Powder?

I don't see any reason that it wouldn't work. The secret to those nail powders is to buff it down. Its going to be the adhesive that I would be asking questions about. Are you going to use the nail polish to adhere it and seal it?

 

If you put acrylic gloss under and over the powder I don’t think it’d hurt anything to use chrome powder. My thought would be maybe the metal in the powder could scratch if you removed it, but I can’t imagine it’d be that catastrophic.

The best parallel I can think of if this doesn’t work and you want tried and true and absolutely safe, is acrylic interference paint. There’s also always the liberal use of Pearl Ex powders to consider for straight up shimmer, but you’d have to experiment to see if you could get some of those two-tone effects with it. Maybe a base layer of silver Pearl Ex suspended in gloss with an interference color on top?

 

Pearl-exs sell a few of those chrome-y pearlescent colors. I've often gotten an effect very similar to your examples simply by mixing some into my normal gloss

 

There are some paints that emulate the look seen on the above nails. They are usually added on top of other paints to give them a multicolor sheen or boost the color (like adding translucent red shimmer over blue makes a blue that shimmers red, but adding it on top of red will give you an extremely intense metallic red). As such they are usually clear paints with added pigments, which means if you add them onto a white surface you get the above effect.

There are for example Mr. Hobby Crystal Color (lacquer, difficult to get, only has one color per paint), Vallejo Shifters (acrylic, easy to get, multicolor interference paint) or Green Stuff Colorshift Metal (acrylic, somewhat easy to get, also multicolor interference paint). Especially for the latter there are a few videos you can check.

I would not go through the hassle of using the powders because it's quite a mess for bigger surfaces. I'd rather glossy seal the surface, spray on the paint via airbrush/thinly paint it on, and then glossy seal again.

 

Pearl Ex powder can be used to create a paint by adding it into an acrylic medium. It starts to look like what you've shown in the picture quite quickly in my opinion. I would recommend the duo colors for the holographic look. The duo red blue looks a lot like those shown on the hands above. Depending on the base color of your doll and the desired finished appearance you may need to later a base color of paint or pastel underneath before you apply the pearl ex paint mixture on top.

 

While I don't have any photos handy at the moment, I've used a chameleon powder very similar to that on some doll parts and it works very well! It's just a powder pigment, nothing in it that would harm the doll, so the only concern is what kind of adhesive you use underneath the pigment to get it to stick.

 

Yeah I've used duochrome Pearl-ex powders for similar effect but it's hard to seal it and maintain full shine.
just a reminder to readers to NEVER put nail polish on resin. We have paints and things for that. Nail polish can really destroy resin.

 

i have never tried this myself but i have seen a person do the same thing with metallic nail powder in a offtopic doll customization video, albeit on just an 3d resin printed accessory. 30:25, she 3d printed the item, glossed it with uv resin, and then buffed the powder in with an eyeshadow applicator.

i think it'd be okay as long as you used uv resin and not actual gel nail polish. but like what other people have said, it's going to be a hassle for bigger surfaces, and shimmers/chrome REALLY shows any imperfections in the underlying base coat application IME of painting my own ridged nails. so just something to keep in mind if you do go for it!

 

Look into Spaz Stix, they have mirror chrome and color shifting effect acrylics that come as airbrush paints or aerosol cans. They are translucent so if you apply them over a white or pearly white base then you can probably get the result you want. (I used them to paint joycons)