#ManiMonday 17/02/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! Summer is nearly over so I thought I’d squeeze one more summer ocean inspired look in.

Products used:

Stamping plate: Born Pretty “Flower Yarn – S002” and Harunouta “L-080”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-BW03 Ingalla” and “BP-WN02 Time Fly”
Base: Essie base coat and Revlon Colorstay Gel Envy “Sky’s the Limit”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”
Mermaid scales: Born Pretty “BP-BW03 Ingalla” and Essie “Turquoise and Caicos”

With not much on this week and summer coming to an end, I wanted to put one last summery design on my nails. I was also a bit sick of wearing purple and pink, so wanted something different, hence the blue colours (which are perfect for this design).

The Harunouta stamping plate has a lot of single images, which are a great size for my small nails. However, I thought that it would be nice to do something extra on my feature nail. I’d also seen a few mermaid inspired nails on Pinterest, so we went from there.

The base colour is one of my only pale blues, though the sparkle made it perfect for the mermaid nail and it kind of looks like the water is glittering. This polish is slightly more translucent than I remember, so I would do a white coat under it next time. The base colour then determined the stamping colour, with us deciding to go for a dark blue to look like a shadow in the water. Black would have been an option too, but it probably would have been too dark against the light blue. I also felt like silver scales would look better than gold, due to the tones of the base colour. To tie the look together, we incorporated the dark blue colour into the scales and then picked a lighter turquoise because it matched nicely with the other two colours.

In terms of our pickup rate, it would have been 98% had it not been for one human error (which is actually a pretty funny story). The dark blue is one of my new stamping polishes and I’m pleased to say it works just as well as my other Born Pretty polishes. If you’re a beginner looking for polishes, I would highly recommend them because they pick up fantastically and are very affordable. We had a slight issue with the scuba diver’s small head picking up but there were more successful pickups than not.

The funny story is how hard it was to pick up the mermaid scales. I’d done this design before so we knew it worked, but for the life of us, we couldn’t get it to pick up. Luckily, I had my usual nail support worker this week, so she tried everything under the sun; a rolling pickup, squish pickup, hard touch, soft touch, a different polish, two different stampers … you get the idea. In the end, I was like let me try (and you know when I try, we’re desperate). Funny thing is, I picked it up perfectly first time round. This plate is super shallow so obviously, a very very light touch is needed (consider that I can’t press hard to start with). My second pickup wasn’t as good but the third one was fine (one featured in the picture).

Once picked up, the scales were pretty easy to colour in, as it’s in straight lines. The only thing that let us down was that two of the stripes flipped back on themselves when we stamped it onto the nail. However, my left hand was perfect (right hand is shown in picture) and I think the mistake might have happened because I didn’t let the top coat dry enough, so it was too sticky when the scales went on.

Overall, this design turned out really well and a few lessons were learnt which will help future designs!

Bye for now!