31 Day Challenge - Day 5: Blue

This is another one of those manicures that is more beautiful because of its imperfections. A gradient using foil polishes is anything but easy; especially the clean-up, now that was a pain. Hopefully though, you think it's as worth the hardships as I do.

I used two polishes from Color Club's Fall 2011 Foiled Collection called Lumin-Icent, which is a light, icy blue metallic foil, and Cold Metal, a mid-tone cobalt blue metallic foil. Both of which were nicely opaque and only need one coat in a regular manicure. It's best to take you're time when applying them however, since like most foil/metallic polishes, they can be very streaky if not applied carefully.

What is a foil nail polish? Basically it's like if a metallic polish and a shimmer polish ever had a baby, a foil polish would be it. Another example would be if you have ever seen a sheet of metal leaf (used primarily for crafting), a foil polish, when dried down, gives the same effect. It's just as finicky as a metallic polish when applying, since you see every mistake and imperfection on your nail. It also shines like a shimmer polish, not as pronounced, but just as pretty. Foil polishes also tend to have a silver shimmer base to them, as these and all the others from this collection that I have do.

Since I chose to create a gradient using the sponging technique (I explain how to do this in my Goodbye Summer Gradient mani), the texture of the sponge left a kind of "crumpled" look to the polish. As if you had balled up a bunch of aluminum foil and then tried to smooth it out again. You'll never get it perfect, but the texture that's left is gorgeous.

I'm so pleased with this manicure, and I'm excited to try it with some of my other foils polishes in the future. See you tomorrow for my purple mani. I hope everyone had a wonderful Wednesday!