#ManiMonday 10/02/2020

I couldn’t do Valentine’s nails this year as I needed my nails to match my outfit this week so here’s a throwback to last year. With Valentine’s Day this Friday, it’s a perfect time to recreate this heart and xoxo design.

Products used:

Stamping plates: Clear Jelly Stamper “Horsin’ Around” and Lina Nail Art Supplies “Make Your Mark 04”
Stamping polish: Eclipse Long Lasting Quick Dry in “340” and “528”
Base: Essie base coat, “Blanc” and “Saved By The Bell”

When I did these nails, I had the races that weekend too, hence the feature horse nail. However, you can easily do this look without the horse. You could replace it with lips, a large heart or a cute couple image depending on what stamping plates you have.

From memory, this design did take a while to create and it’s one of the more complicated designs I’ve made my support worker do. We did do this design before I got stamping polishes though, so that probably didn’t help the situation. Getting the right colours was the first problem, as I didn’t want two dark stamping colours to compete with each other or make it look too busy. We were also limited by what colours we could get to pick up. In the end, though the two Eclipse colours worked quite well, I don’t think we had 100% perfect pickups. I’m not sure if it’s because of the Eclipse formula or because they were older polishes that made them work better than other normal polishes.

The next step was deciding what order to both the designs and the colours. From memory, I don’t think the dusty pink polish showed up very well over the dark maroon so that made that decision to go for the dusty pink first for us. This also influenced the order of colours we did for the horse. Then I think everything just flowed from there because the xoxo didn’t look any good behind the hearts and I think they also picked up better in the dark polish.

Looking back on this design I would say it’s still one that I love. It ties together well, looks classic and it’s not too busy (haha despite all of the layers). I think if you were to do this design in say a red colour scheme may be too much, so opt for your pastel, pale colours with one deeper colour if you like.

Bye for now!