#ManiMonday 15/06/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! This week I had a horse racing but my support worker who is great at doing my nails was also back. So, let’s get into this week’s red and yellow unicorn design!

Products used:

Stamping plate: Beauty Big Bang “XL-007” and Clear Jelly Stamper “CJS LC-40 Horsin’ Around”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-WN03 Throne” and “BP-WN05 Dark Armor”
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”, Essie “Blanc” and CoverGirl XL Nail Gel “Haughty Lemon 740”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”
Unicorn: Essie “Fifth Avenue” head and CoverGirl XL Nail Gel “Haughty Lemon 740” body

Mum is fabulous at doing my nail but she doesn’t like reserve stamping (the technique of colouring in the image before stamping it onto your nail) so with my support worker back, I was dying to do that technique. However, as you all know when I have a horse racing, I like to have a reference to horses on my nails. My normal horse plate doesn’t have any images suitable for reverse stamping, so I had to get creative this week.

When I decided I wanted to do reverse stamping this week, I was racking my brain as to what image I could use. Then I remembered I had this cute little unicorn. While it’s not a horse it’s close enough. To accompany it, I opted for red horseshoes because they were simple enough that it didn’t distract from the unicorn while also bringing in that horsey element.

The colours were the easiest part this week. My horse races in yellow and red silks so that decided the colours for me. I also only have one normal yellow polish and luckily, it’s not too neon for the look I was after. As I previously discovered, my yellow stamping polish doesn’t really show up on a red base, which is why I went a yellow base with red stamping. The red was also pretty straight forward as I only have one red stamping polish and I wanted the unicorn’s hair to match the horseshoes. The stamping red throws more orange tones than blues and Fifth Avenue was the closest match, compared to other Essie polishes such as Really Red and Russian Revolution which are more blue reds. The unicorn ended up with a yellow body and red hair just because I thought this would look better, but also as it ties in nicely with my other nails. I then obviously couldn’t have these two colours as my base colour, so I went with white instead so the unicorn would show up.

The pick up rate this week wasn’t a complete success but it wasn’t a disaster either. We put it partly down to human error, as my support worker was getting her touch back but also because of how the images were etched. The horseshoes were quite deeply etched for a small image and we found that a roll pick up following the lines of the horseshoe worked the best. The unicorn image, on the other hand, is quite fine and detailed in some places. The etching depth also varied depending on how detailed that section was. This resulted in often the top half of the image picking up and not the bottom or vice versa. In the end, a roll pick up worked best of it too.

Overall, I think this design is super cute and just something different for the races (especially as I was just watching it at home). You could also easily adapt the colours to suit whatever you wanted; pastel colours and glitter would look very magically!

Bye for now!