an End It Movement manicure featuring emerald & ash Road Trip polish

I follow the Indigo Bananas Facebook page and recently Andrea posted about a giveaway being hosted by the blog Confessions of a Sarcastic Mom for which she had donated a beautiful polish. The giveaway is to help raise awareness about the End It Movement which seeks to end slavery worldwide, including the human trafficking and slavery that is happening right here, right now, in the US. As soon as I read about the giveaway, I knew that I wanted to participate. The colors of the polishes in the giveaway are red and black (the colors of the End It campaign) and emerald & ash nail lacquer recently came out with a polish collection that included two colors I thought would be perfect. The Road Trip collection is a set of unique textured polishes that incorporate silica particles similar to those used in actual road signs to make them glow. The texture is smoother than most other textured polishes but still has a lot of visual interest, and the polishes have the added bonus of glowing under black light. Bike Lane is an asphalt black color and California Stop is stop sign red.

Unfortunately for me, when I went to grab the polishes to do my manicure, I had difficulty finding Bike Lane. After a fruitless search lasting several minutes, I realized why. I had not actually *purchased* Bike Lane. Derp! I had picked up the white color, Five Over, instead. Since I am not the kind of gal to let cold hard reality interfere with my plans, I decided to work around that little problem by using Five Over as a base for the texture and topped it with a mixture of Five Over and Wet'n'Wild Black Creme to give the black background color I wanted for the mani. I then used a nail art brush to add the red X using California Stop. This yielded (snerk) a dark grey base rather than the literal pitch black that Bike Lane would have been. I also lost some of the texture and shine I would have had from using just the e&a color but I think enough was retained that it was an acceptable compromise. 

So there you have it. Please go read Confessions of a Sarcastic Mom's blog post to learn more and to enter her giveaway. It is far too easy to turn a blind eye to the fact that human beings are suffering and being treated as commodities in this supposedly enlightened day and age.

The emerald & ash Road Trip collection can be purchased on their website.