BFF Friday: Fishscale Nails

Hello!

This week's BFF Friday theme is: Fishscale nails! Myself and Laura of Naileymabob both made an order in the past few weeks from She Sells Seasells, who supplies fab nail accessories like studs and vinyls. When chatting, we realised we'd both ordered the new Fishscale vinyls, and were both eager to try them out, so decided we'd both create a manicure using the vinyls somehow, and this would be our theme.

Obviously with them being fishscales, I wanted to create something that made me think of the ocean. Luckily, I'd also ordered some seashell studs which are soooo cute, so I used these too. This is what I came up with!

I used Greenberry and Guava and a bit of Prickly Pear gelly polishes by Barry M. On all my nails except my ring finger nails, I created a water marble using these three shades. I was quite proud of this as I've never really done a successful water marble.... and I definitely won't be trying it again for a long time, so much messing about!!

For the accent nail, I started with a base of Greenberry (two coats) and let it fully dry. Can I just say, Greenberry is the most beautiful polish ever! <3 anyway, once it was FULLY dry, I stuck on the fishscale vinyl, painted over my nail with Guava, then used tweezers to remove the vinyl.

Firstly, I was very impressed that the vinyl covered my whole nail - I have had several products before in the past like stamping plates etc that claim to cover a full nail, but because mine are quite long they haven't.... but these vinyls were definitely long and wide enough to work really well!

Something I found difficult was actually getting the vinyl on and off the nail. Due to it being quite a complex shape, I struggled. When removing the vinyl from the backing paper, some of the little 'scales' that were meant to pop out of the pattern didn't, and I had to use a pen to press them out - which was hard because I didn't want to rip or stretch the vinyl. Also when removing it I had to be careful not to stretch it and mess up the still-wet polish. I did manage though, and I think I'll be a lot better at using these next time round having learnt how best to do it!

I wish I'd used more contrasting colours as the watermarble and fishscale patterns are not too obvious unless you look closely - although I do think you can see the patterns more obviously in real life, so that's okay!

Here's some pics with and without flash to try and show the marble and fishscale off!