#ManiMonday 08/06/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! I’m sad to say that this was Mum’s last official nail design, as we slowly look to come out of isolation this week. She’s gotten quite good over the weeks and I’ve enjoyed letting her come up with the designs. So, let’s get into this week’s wavy sixties design!

Products used:

Stamping plate: Lina Nail Art Supplies “Make Your Mark 04”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-Q01 Party Dress” and “BP-AC05 Lucky Clover”
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat” and Essie “Blanc”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”

As it’s was Mum’s last design (though she’ll always be on call), I let her take the reins this week. She was feeling inspired by the sixties, so that’s the look we went with.

Unfortunately, this week she wanted a more geometric swirl stamping image which I don’t have (haha she said she should pick my plates from now on). After playing around with two or three images that were slightly more retro but didn’t look as good, we opted for this one because it layered the best and had that sixties vibe.

Colours was also fairly straight forward this week. Originally, we were going to go pink and green because they looked really nice together in their bottles. However, after playing around with them (and the different images), we decided that the pink overpowered the green. They also didn’t tone as well together on paper (which is what I practice on), hence we went with purple instead. We were always going to do a white base as it really makes the colours pop and it’s a bit sixties as well. One thing to note is that we did stamp the purple first and then the green, just because I feel like then the paler colour (which is the green in this case) doesn’t get lost or overpowered by the other colour.

The pick up rate was also very good this week (it was smooth sailing really once we’d worked out the design). Include practice design pick ups, there was only two or three that wouldn’t have been good enough to put on my nails. We put the good pick up rate down to two possible reasons. One, this is one of my most expensive plates (think it was $19 compared to say my Born Pretty plates which on average probably cost around $2) which means it is a better quality plate. The second reason was that this plate seems to be quite deeply etched. This made it hard to clean but does mean that there’s a good amount of polish to pick up. Despite the deep etch, the image didn’t need a lot of polish, with Mum only covering about one third of the image before swiping.

One exciting thing that did happen this week though was that we tried stamping a matte top coat. I was worried that it wouldn’t work because you can only paint a thin/medium layer of top coat onto the stamper, so that then it doesn’t slide and smudge. However, surprisingly it actually worked really well. We thought this matte finish would really tie together the design, but we preferred shining instead, so that’s what we went with. I’ll definitely be featuring some matte finishes in my upcoming designs now that I know the technique works.

Overall, I really like the design and think it would look amazing if you had a sixties themed party, especially if you did the colours to match your outfit. I’ve also done this overlapping with monochromatic blue colours to look like waves, so that’s another option too. It shows you how many different looks you can create with just the one image!

Bye for now!