Happy Valentine's Day!
So today's challenge was Valentine's Day (duuuuh) or French Tip and I chose Valentine's Day. Mostly because I have a bunch of heart/love stamps I don't really have the urge to use except for on an occasion such as this! Here they are, my Valentine's nails:
For these nails I started by painting a base of Essie Blanc on all my nails. I used 2 coats. Blanc has a tricky formula and it's not that fun to work with, it really wants to pull at the cuticle where you lay the brush down. Maybe OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls has me spoiled, though. In any case, when finished - Blanc is a really beautiful stark white, brighter and whiter than MBSW. On two of the nails, I did a gradient with Essie Fiji. It's very faint but still really pretty. As I was working on it - it seemed like it wasn't working at all but turned out how I wanted. (I think the desk lamps were blinding me and everything just looked white.) This is about 4 layers of "gradienting"....
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| Holding Essie Blanc |
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| Holding Essie Fiji |
Then I put a coat of Seche Vite on all the nails and let them dry. For my index, pinky and thumb I used striping tape and painted Essie Fiji on some of the stripes and Essence Ultimate Pink on some of the stripes. This was very tricky. Normally when I put striping tape on the nail and paint over it, I just paint like "normal" - from cuticle to tip. But I couldn't do that with this...I had to paint diagonally and I just used the polish brush to do this. Worked pretty good with the Essie since it has a smaller brush, but the Essence one is wide and flat like a paddle...and since I'm left handed, doing the hand you see in the photos was even harder!
On my middle and ring fingers I stamped with Essence Ultimate Pink. This polish stamped very well! I used BM311 for the ring finger and BM317 for the middle.
I'm pretty satisfied with the overall look of these nails but normally my stripes are much cleaner than this!! So this is it for the first half of the challenge - 14 more days to go! Tomorrow is Stamping or Jelly Sandwich.
Take a minute and go check out the other gals blogs - can't wait to see what they do!
omgomg! I love this so much, ESP the gradient ones that are stamped! its so understated! I don't think I have anything like essie Fiji!
ReplyDeleteIsn't it cool? i think I expected the gradient to be a tiny bit stronger but I love the way it is. Contemplated just making all the nails a gradient and leaving it at that.
DeleteWhat do letters and numbers mean when stamping?
ReplyDeleteThey stand for the brand and plate used. Bundle monster plates are BM then the numbers stand for a particular plate. They're all engraved with a number. So I have a bundle monster set that's the 300...so 301 to 325. I have no idea if that made sense...
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