#ManiMonday 17/08/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! This weekend I had two horses racing, which only means one thing, horse nails! So, let’s get into this week’s yellow and black horse and stars design.

Products used:

Stamping plate: Lina Nail Art Supplies “All Mixed Up 01” and Clear Jelly Stamper “CJS LC-40 Horsin’ Around”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-WN03 Throne” and “BP-WN04 Pure”
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat” and CoverGirl XL Nail Gel “Haughty Lemon 740”
Top coat: Hit The Bottle “Water Tight” Smear Free Topcoat

As you all know by now, when I go to the races to see my horses run, I always have my nails matching their silk colours and a horse image of some type. With limited options, it certainly made this week’s design easy to come up with and create.

With two horses racing on Saturday, the colours were almost decided for me. One horse has yellow and red silks while the other has yellow and orange, so yellow it was. I was originally going to do yellow stamping but thought I hadn’t done a yellow base in a while. Plus, my outfit mainly had pops of yellow, so a yellow base seemed more fitting. With the rest of the stamping I wanted to keep it monochromatic, to also match my outfit but also not to favour a particular horse (I couldn’t see a red, orange and yellow combination working in this situation). The black stamping contrasts really nicely on the yellow, so that was that. Obviously, I couldn’t do a black horse with a black outline as that wouldn’t show up, so a white horse it was.

With the images, I literally decided on them while driving home from university and it was like yep that’s what I’m going to do. The stars popped into my head because I was trying to think what pattern I hadn’t a done for a while that would also be suitable for the races. I also like to think of my horses as champions/stars, plus Clairvoyance’s name kind of ties in with the stars as well. As I was doing a pattern on my non-feature nails, that ruled out my horse silhouette pattern, as having two different patterns might look a bit weird. This meant that I turned to my trusty Clear Jelly Stamper plate. I wanted something that was clearly a horse, seeing as the stars didn’t scream races. Ideally, I wanted something that I could use two colours on, as I feel that extra colour just adds that touch of interest. This ruled out the quotes and I was left with the horse.

In terms of pickup rate this week, it was an absolute dream. Literally only one or two of the stars pattern didn’t make it onto my nails. This great pickup rate certainly helped to reduce the time it took to create this design, plus I didn’t do any reserve stamping. I’m putting the pickup rate down to the fact that we used Born Pretty stamping polishes which always seem to work flawlessly and that the two plates we used are my most expensive plates at around $20 each.

What we did have issues with on two occasions was the stars splitting in half once they were stamped onto my nail (because they looked fine on the stamping head). This is rarely a problem we have so I was a little stumped. I thought this might have happened because of the ridges on my nails but I do buff them to remove the ridges, plus the base coat looked pretty smooth. The other reason could be the base coat. It is a Covergirl polish (so not super cheap) but it always feels a little stiff/dry (if you can describe a polish like that) when it dries on my nails. With no obvious suspect, we just used a lighter roll when placing it onto my nails and then we didn’t have any problems.

Overall, this design feels very edgy. It’s a touch boring compared to last week’s penguin design (which I was sad to take off) but given the limited colour and stamping options I think it turned out really well. Plus a quick mani is always a good mani! If you were wearing this design to the races, you can easily adapt it to be whatever colours you wanted.

Bye for now!