#ManiMonday 27/04/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! Life in isolation still isn’t inspiring any designs for my nails, but this week I did try out a new plate (that I’ve had for a while). So, let’s get into this week’s grey marble design.

Products used:

Stamping plate: Harunouta “L079”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-WN04 Pure” and “BP-WN01 In Fire”
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat” and Maybelline Colorshow “Audacious asphalt 390”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”

As I said, I’ve had this plate for a while, but I haven’t really had the opportunity to use it, as not many of my outfits have a marble look. However, isolation means there are no outfits to match (haha because it’s just a t-shirt and leggings every day), so now is the perfect time to try it!

The colours this week were largely decided by what stamping colours I had and what real marble looks like. As I don’t have a stamping polish in grey, I opted for a grey base. This then influenced the white stamping to start with. Most grey marbles also tend to have mostly white veins as well. To make it that little bit more interesting, I choose to add a gold vein as well. Obviously, silver wouldn’t show up very well on grey and, again, grey marbles tend to have a gold vein.

In terms of pick up success rate this week it was fantastic (at least 90% I’d say), except for one small problem. When designing this look, I picked out two images from my plate that were almost the same, so they matched, except one had smaller veins than the first one. The first, bigger vein image picked up perfectly in white, though this image does have a bit of wiggle room (which makes it perfect for beginners). Then we moved onto the small image, which was to be in gold. For the life of us, we couldn’t get it to pick up at all. To be honest, we didn’t spend too much time trying and it was very shallowly etched, but literally nothing was picking up on the stamper. This definitely put a spanner in the works. However, there was another design which had thin veins and areas with big gaps, so we ended up stamping that in gold.

If you’re recreating this design, my biggest tip would be don’t be afraid to have the base colour showing through a lot. Placement is key as you don’t want the two colours overlapping each other too much. Also, try to have less of your second colour than your first. Of all my nails, my right thumb is my favourite (shown below), which is good because it’s the one I see all the time when I’m on my phone.

Overall, I really love this design! It’s something different and looks intricate but is easy to do. If you had a grey stamping polish you could do a white base with grey veins or even black and silver veins.

Bye for now!