#ManiMonday 11/05/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! I wanted a pop of colour on my nails after a few weeks of greys and browns, plus it’s nice to wear something bright in isolation. So, let’s get into this week’s pink ballerina design!

Products used:

Stamping plate: Lina Nail Art Supplies “All Mixed Up 01” and Born Pretty “BP-02”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-AC01 Pomegranate Red”
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat” and Essie “Saved by the Bell”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”

I was lucky enough that the stamping gods were on my side this week and I think this could be a record nail design, taking around 35-40 minutes to create. That’s including cleaning up around my nails which does take a bit of time. Mum suggested that perhaps because my Lina plate is more expensive than my other ones and is a better quality, that the perfect pick ups plus the less time it took to clean the plates helped reduce the overall time. However, I think the Born Pretty lace plate was $4 (or something like that), though this lace plate has always been a dream to work with. It’s an interesting theory though and one to test in the coming weeks.

This week’s design kind of just popped into my head when I was looking at my plates for inspiration. I actually keep a record of my plates in a word document on my computer, which means I don’t have to get them all out when I’m looking for ideas. To keep it a little bit interesting I opted for a lace feature tip. However, if you had a ballet shoe image or the word “dance” then that would be perfect.

When I think ballerina, I think pink, so that was an obvious choice when it came to what colours I would use. It was either a light pink or this more fuchsia pink stamping colour. However, I went with the dark option because if I did the light pink stamping, I would have to go an even lighter base. In terms of the base colour, this Essie “Saved by the Bell” really stood out. It was light enough that the stamping would show but not too light that there would be too much of a contrast. This polish is also quite opaque which meant I didn’t have to put a white base underneath it (which also helped save time).

As I previously mentioned, the pick up rate this week was 98%, including the two testers we did. The only reason it’s not 100% was that one pick up looked like the tutu was missing a section. However, we then realised that this was actually just the image so that 2% was human error. We used the Beauty Big Bang cube stamper this week, which is Mum’s favourite to use as you can see through it perfectly; there’s no distortion like with the round stamping heads.

Originally, I was going to stamp a matte top coat onto this design just to try out the technique. However, once the design was on my nails it looked really good as they were, and the stamping polish has this subtle metallic shine. Therefore, we just did the usual top coat. I do look forward to trying the matte top coat in the future though.

So overall, there was nothing really to fault about this design. I love the colours and the simplicity yet effectiveness of it. The fact it hardly took any time to do was also a massive bonus. Haha if I was rating this design, I’d give it a 10/10.

Bye for now!