#ManiMonday 07/09/2020
Happy #manimonday everyone! This week was another week where I had nothing on, so I took this opportunity to try my last new Hit The Bottle polish. So, let’s get into this week’s green and grey geometric leafy design.
Products used:
Stamping plate: PICT You “PY-J023”, “PY-J014” and Beauty Big Bang “XL-038”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-WN04 Pure” and Hit the Bottle “Cactus Juice“
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat” and Maybelline Colorshow “Audacious asphalt 390”
Top coat: Hit The Bottle “Water Tight” Smear Free Topcoat
As I previously mentioned, this week design was majorly influenced by the fact that I wanted to try my last new Hit The Bottle stamping polish, Cactus Juice. I also turned to Pinterest for some inspiration as I don’t often do green nails.
I’d previously seen a design that was similar the this (which I unfortunately can’t find now to show you all) but I had to adapt due to the fact that I didn’t have all of the images that they used. Their colour palette was grey, white and green, so I decided to go with that. They may have done a white base with grey stamping (I can’t exactly remember), but I wore a white base last week so wanted to mix it up a bit. I do have a few green stamping polishes but I went with Hit The Bottle not only because I wanted to try it but also as their polishes show up amazingly on dark base colours, so I knew it would stand out on the grey and over the white.
With my non-feature nails, the image selection was pretty straight forward. I wanted a geometric line base and leaves. I only have a few line patterns so that narrowed that down for me but deciding on the leaves was a bit trickier. Originally, I was going to go with a solid leaf but it didn’t pick up very well and considering I would need to pick up 16 (2 for non-feature each nail) I scrapped that idea pretty quickly. This then brought me to the image I ended up using as it had lots of leaves so I didn’t have to pick it up multiple times but it wasn’t too solid that the white lines wouldn’t show through underneath.
As my non-feature nails are pretty busy, I wanted to keep my feature nail simple. I thought a quote would be cool and I was originally thinking about along the lines of wild, but of course, I didn’t have anything like that. However, then I saw this happy quote which had leaf like arrows either side of it. This helped it to tie in nicely with the leaves on my non-feature nails. To then bring that green in, I opted for a triangle, which again mirrored the white geometric lines.
In terms of the pickup rate this week, it was very hit and miss. The green triangle and white lines picked up fine, though we did find with the latter that you had to place them onto the nail with a squish technique so that they didn’t distort. The leaves, on the other hand, were a little bit harder. They seemed to miss spots and weren’t as thick as I would have liked them. It was weird though because it couldn’t be the polish because it picked up the fine triangle perfectly but yet I had gotten this image to work before in my koala design. In the end, I just tried not to overthink it when I was picking it up and used a light-medium squish. The quote also took a couple of goes but I think that’s mostly because it’s so little and thin that you have to get the technique just right.
Overall, I really like this design. It’s something different and I think the simple feature nail and busy non-feature nails really complement each other. If I was doing this design again, I would maybe opt for a simpler line design, just so the leaves stood out a little bit more. However, once we put the top coat on, they really popped, especially with their metallic-like finish.
Bye for now!
