#ManiMonday 10/08/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! This week I didn’t have any events to attend which meant I could do whatever I wanted on my nails! So, let’s get into this week’s blue penguin winter design!

Products used:

Stamping plate: Born Pretty “BP-01”, PICT You “PY-J026” and “PY-J027”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-WN04 Pure” and “BP-WN03 Throne”
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat” and Revlon Colorstay Gel Envy “Sky’s the Limit”
Top coat: Hit The Bottle “Water Tight” Smear Free Topcoat
Penguins: Essie “Blanc”

As I didn’t have anything on this week and with no outfits to match my nails to, I was going to try one of my new Hit The Bottle stamping polishes. However, after flipping through my plates, one of my new PICT You plates with the penguins caught my attention. They’re just too cute, so I based this week’s design around them.

That plate only had the single penguin image on it, so I used a few plates to create this look. I was limited with what large image I could use for my non-feature nails, as I don’t have any winter plates or an image with lots of penguins. That’s when I decided to use the snowflakes from my Born Pretty Christmas plate. Then to create an iceberg look and so that the penguins weren’t just floating in the air, I used another one of my new PICT You plates which have French tips on them and some shapes. I wanted a straight edge for the iceberg, so I used the semi-circle instead of a French tip. If you don’t have a plate like this though you could easily just paint the white on.

With the images decided, the colours were pretty straightforward. The winter/snow feel lent itself to a blue base. I don’t have many blue polishes, especially light blue. However, I’m absolutely in love with this Revlon blue as it has this beautiful shimmer to it. This shimmer did influence my snowflake colour choice. I went with white for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to do a white iceberg, so it looked like snow. Therefore, to tie the nails together and to give the snowflakes a realistic look, white snowflakes made sense. Secondly, silver snowflakes would have been my second choice, but I felt that it wouldn’t show up as well on this blue and maybe even compete with it. As for the penguins, I stamped them in black to make them stand out and because penguins are usually black.

In terms of pickups this week, we had a fantastic pickup rate! The snowflakes from the Born Pretty plate were a dream to pick up with a 100% pickup rate! I was a bit hesitant about the PICT You plates because they were relatively cheap, and I haven’t used them before. On first impressions, these plates are incredibly deep! I thought this would make them hard to pick up, but surprisingly after a few goes the penguins picked up perfectly, even with the fine lines on the penguins’ back. The semi-circle, which I used for the iceberg, did require a really light scrap otherwise the polish didn’t fill the whole image. There were a few holes, but they weren’t on the part of the image I was putting on my nail and when they did, we just stamped another one over the top.

For those who read last week’s post, you’ll know that my new stampers didn’t pick up anything at all. After leaving them on paper for the week, a tonne of oil came out of them! After doing this I tried them again this week and they all worked perfectly! So, if your stampers aren’t working, I definitely recommend this trick.

Overall, I’m loving these nails this week! They’re very cute and were surprisingly easy to create, taking just over an hour to create. I feel like the base colour and the simplicity really makes this design. If you had a winter wonderland party, these nails would be amazing!

Bye for now!