Hello!
Here are my nails today. I am at work again today, with two days off coming up. On my days off I'm desperate to try some bright, patterned designs on my nails, especially with the weather getting nicer! Today, however, I've got to keep my nails quite plain for work. My uniform has a pink/purple shirt, so I picked a purple polish for my nails today.
This is Prickly Pear by Barry M; one of their gelly shades. I love all of the gelly polishes for both their colour and shiny finish, and I use them loads! I was initially just going to leave my nails plain purple, as I'm going to be changing them tomorrow anyway, but then I saw this blogpost by Rebecca over at Lane's Lacquers where she'd done a fishtail accent nail. I was inspired to create one myself, as I've not done fishtail for ages!
I used Blueberry (Barry M gelly) and Snow Me White (Sinful Colors) to create the fishtail braid design. You just need to paint on stripes of polish diagonally, building it up one side at a time, leaving a few mins for the polish to dry between stripes. Unintentionally I made each stripe really small so it actually took ages to build up the design right to the end of my nails! Next time I'll make each stripe wider like Rebecca did in the above mani!
Also, I should have waited a little longer before adding a topcoat, as it kind of smeared the design a little. Arghhh! Usually I would remove a design if it smudged, but this took me too long so I'm going to wear it for at least a day, haha.
Here's a quick pic of the mani in progress, taken on my phone:
And another one of the finished product!! x
Hello!
I seem to be really into following other bloggers' tutorials and recreating looks at the moment, mainly due to the awesomeness of designs I'm seeing. I totally loved my Ikat nails from my last post, I only changed them because one chipped, and I wanted something less bright for work (again- failed! these are so bright! I don't know how I thought that this pink and orange, that are practically neon, could be subtle...)
For my nails today, I followed a tutorial by the super-talented Claire over at nuthin' but a nail thing: click here!
I picked three of my favourite gelly Barry M shades to work with, Lychee (nude), Papaya (orange) and Grapefruit (pink). I thought the gelly polishes would work well because you get great coverage in just one coat, which is kinda vital for this method. I started with a base of lychee as it's quite light, then began following Claire's steps, painting each strand of the plait on each nail one by one, then swapping colours and doing the next strand etc.
In progress:
I found the method really simple! It took quite a while but that's no problem if you're chilling out in front of the telly. As the gelly dries quite quickly, I didn't have to wait between 'strands', by the time I'd done each nail with one colour, when I started back at the first nail with the next colour they were dry enough. The only tricky part is keeping each section evenly spaced, and making sure the 'plait' doesn't lean to one side. They are a little wonky, but hopefully not too noticeable if you don't look closely!
I had to clean up quite a bit around the edges, and then finished off with two coats of Sally Hansen's Insta-Dri. I think if I was to do this again, I'd pick three completely different colours. From a distance, I think the pink and orange kind of merge into one.
With flash:
Without:
other hand:
