#ManiMonday 09/03/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! With St Patrick’s Day just around the corner, I thought I’d do a gold and shamrock look to celebrate.

Products used:

Stamping plate: Born Pretty “BP-L013” and Lina Nail Art Supplies “All Mixed Up 01”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-ML01 Scenery” and “BP-WN01 In Fire”
Base: Essie base coat and “Blanc” and W7 Nail Polish “85 Summer Fields”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”

Let’s start off this post by saying that the luck of the Irish certainly wasn’t on our side this week. For such a simple design, it took quite a while to create.

I was inspired by a picture I had seen on Pinterest when looking for ideas on what to do on my nails for St Patrick’s Day (which you can see here). As I only have the one “Irish” image with the shamrocks and shamrocks are dark green, that also limited what I could do.

As I wanted to do dark green shamrocks, I opted for a light green background. If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I don’t have the widest variety of green polishes, so the W7 Cosmetic polish in the shade “85 Summer Fields” makes an appearance here once again (you can review my previous designs with this polish here and here). It is a cheaper polish, but it was opaque enough that it didn’t need a white base underneath it. The only downside to cheap polishes is that I do find some of them “bubble” for some reason, and this was the case this week.

To then add a bit of interest, I opted for a white feature nail with gold dots. This was featured on the Pinterest image, but I also feel it represents the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. To tie the nails together though, I put a single shamrock on the corner of that nail.

The reason this design took so long was because of the shamrocks. Neither my support worker nor I could get the shamrocks to pick up perfectly at one stage. Unfortunately, my old trusty stamper now has a split in it, which means it leaves an indent on my nails when we stamp the image on. This then leaves my other useless Born Pretty stamper, which is exactly the same as my old one (in terms of product ID number) but it never picks up anything or my hit and miss Beauty Big Bang rectangle stamper. In the end, we went with the second stamper but it’s still not as good as my old one.

Besides the stamper, there were a few other reasons why I think we had trouble. One problem was that this was our first time using the dark green stamping polish for Born Pretty. We usually never have trouble with them but this one was slightly thicker than the others. Another issue was that the Lina Nail Art Supplies plate is deeper to the other plates we’re used to, as different depths require different pickup techniques. As the weather was also warm, it meant that the polish was drying faster. To combat all of the above problems, a fast and medium roll pressure technique was used to pick up the shamrocks. It must be noted that the dots weren’t nearly as hard to pick up.

As suggested on the nail stamping Facebook group, I’ve left my new Born Pretty stamper out on a paper towel to draw out the oils. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try washing it in dish soap and letting it air dry. I’ll let you all know if they work in my future posts.

Despite all of the problems, I think this design turned out really well and is cute for St Patrick’s Day.