#ManiMonday 27/01/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! Let’s get started on this week’s safari sunset design!

Products used:

Stamping plate: Harunouta “L072”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-WN03 Throne”
Base: Essie base coat, “Blanc” and Sinful Colors “Easy Going 300”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”
Ombre: BYS “N179 Nail Candy” into Sinful Colors “Easy Going 300” into Covergirl XL Nail Gel “740 Haughty Lemon”

This is a throwback to only the other week when I did a spare design for weeks like this where I don’t have a new design on my nails.

I had a bit of time on my hands when I was creating this design and my usual support worker had just gotten back from holidays, so I was keen to try out one of my new plates. This design wasn’t too hard to create but there were a few pressure points along the way.

This design took longer than necessary as originally I was going to do a night sky ombré with a silver stamp. You’d think that with the number of nail polishes I have that finding night sky colours would be easy, but no. For the life of us, we couldn’t find the perfect shades of blue or purple, so after about half an hour of trying out colours, we gave up and opted for a sunset ombré instead. This was actually the design that was pictured online with this plate, so that helped a lot too.

Even though these colours were closer to the real thing than my night sky colours, I only have one yellow polish, and this was slightly too neon for my liking. To combat this though, we found that if we put a neutral colour as a base (in this case it was a very pale pink) then this removed that brightness. As I mentioned in my products used section too, we then used that same colour to help blend the yellow and orange.

While this ombré isn’t perfect there were a few tricks to getting the colours to blend. The first was making sure there was enough polish on the sponge (we just used a makeup sponge) but not too much that it was just a blobby messy. To do this, paint the polish onto the sponge and then dab it onto some paper to remove the excess before dabbing onto the nail. You also have to work fast both in applying the polish to the nail, so the polish doesn’t dry out too much and then when putting a top coat over the ombré. We found that having a fair bit of top coat polish on the brush worked well because it helped smudge the colours together and by working fast it ensured the polish wasn’t dry which also helped it to smudge better.

Once the base was completely dry, we moved onto the stamping. As I mentioned this was my first time using this stamping plate (and any from the Harunouta brand in fact). I had my reservation as this plate only cost $0.91 AUD from Aliexpress but I was pleasantly surprised. I have 3 other plates from the same company so I’m excited to see if they pick up just as well. I think only the mountain didn’t pick up perfect once. This design is also in a strip, so we just started at one end of the image and worked our way along until all of my nails were done.

Overall it was nice to have something different on my nails for those few days and you can definitely adapt this design to use any colours you want.

Bye for now!