#ManiMonday 06/04/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! There’s nothing really to report on this week as I’m still in isolation. So, let’s get straight into this Easter chick and egg look!

Products used:

Stamping plate: Beauty Big Bang “XL-058”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-WN03 Throne” and “BP-Q01 Party Dress”
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat” and BYS “French White”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”

With Easter just around the corner, I decided to do some Easter nails a week early so you could see it before Easter. While this design looks simple, it was a nightmare to create!

Let’s first talk about the colours. When originally picking this cream base colour, I had a different design in my head, with a mostly pastel colour palette. Originally, I was going to yellow chicks, but the yellow didn’t show up at all on the cream. By now it was too late to change the base colour. To make the chicks look like chicks and stand out we had to stamp them in black. We’d then picked the purple stamping polish to contrast with the yellow, plus it was a process of elimination. Green and yellow looked too much like Australian colours while blue and yellow looked like Eagles colours. I’ve had two people say the colour combination looks great, but I feel like the nails don’t tie together well. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Do take note too, that if you’re looking at buying this purple stamping polish, it’s definitely more of a pink purple than the blue purple it looks online.

The nightmare came when we got to stamping the images. We did the chicks first and they picked up perfectly in three different colours, yellow, bronze and then black. Considering they have small details with the eyes and beaks, we thought we were in for a good day. However, then we got to the eggs. These wouldn’t pick up for the life of them. We first tried a single egg that had bunny ears coming out of them, but the ears wouldn’t pick up at all, no matter what technique we tried. I think the problem here was that the ears were etched very shallowly, and the egg was etched a medium depth. This meant that different pressure was required on different points of the image and that was just too hard to get perfect.

We then tried lots of different images and the hatching chick picked up pretty well, but I didn’t want all black stamping and they wouldn’t look good in pastel colours. Of all the eggs, the image that ended up on my nails, was the “easiest” to pick up. However, we did try different polishes (because it was the first time we’ve used this purple polish) and a different stamper to see if that would help. In the end, Mum found that not too much polish, applied to the plate in a dabbing motion and a medium pressure roll pick up worked the best.

Overall, it’s definitely a cute Easter design, but it’s probably not one of my favourites. Hopefully, the stamping gods are on my side next week!

Bye for now!