31 Day Challenge - Day 10: Gradient

Since I posted a gradient for a previous challenge, I wanted to change things up slightly. And because I don't think I'm good enough to tackle more than a two-colour look, this is the manicure I came up with.

This angled gradient creates a chevron effect across the nails which I personally have never seen before. Due to my fading lighting (sorry, the sun was going down), I had a ton of glare off the super shiny top coat so please excuse that as it skews your view of the actual design. For this nail look I used Revlon - Posh as an all-over base to start. This is a fantastic bright, summery green with a formula that is to die for. A one-coater, smooth and fast-drying, it's definitely one of my favourites that the brand has to offer.

I then painted some of Posh and some of China Glaze - Smoke And Ashes from the Spring 2012 Hunger Games Capitol Colors Collection onto a sponge. Smoke And Ashes is an almost black green base with beautiful green-blue-gold multi-chromatic shimmers throughout. Obviously these pictures do this polish zero justice to its beauty in real life. I then transferred the polish from the sponge to the nail by dabbing it on the nail at a 45 degree angle, and redoing this step until the China Glaze colour was opaque at the base. I repeated this step for each nail, alternating directions so as to create the chevron. I then finished the look off with a coat of Essie - Good To Go top coat, just to even out the the surface and add a beautiful shine.

It may be that these polishes don't look great together, or together as a gradient, but whatever it is, this definitely is not one combination that I'll be trying again. I do love both polishes separately, so we'll experiment with them in different looks for the future.

Thanks as always for reading, and be sure to check out my post for tomorrow because I'm completely enamoured with it!

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!

Goodbye Summer Gradient

With back-to-school where I live starting on September 5th, this will undoubtedly be our last day at the beach this summer *tear*. So in celebration of such an event, I did a simple and easy sponged gradient with a twist using all Essie polishes.

I first started off this manicure with a coat of Blanc to act as a clean base for the colours I use on top to be better shown off. If you want a light, bright, or neon polish to be even more vibrant, just put a base of white "underwear" on beneath the coloured polish!

After the underwear has fully dried, I put a generous swipe of both Navigate Her (pastel pistachio green creme) and To Buy Or Not To Buy (light white-base pastel lilac creme, with purple shimmer in the bottle but those mostly disappear once on the nail) on a makeup sponge directly beside each other.
I slowly apply the sponge to the nail bed, with the center of where the two polishes meet with the center of my nail. Then I move the sponge in the slightest up and down motion on my nail to gently blend the two colours seamlessly. This should give you a perfectly blended gradient effect, and you can stop there with a coat of fast drying top coat.

To add an extra bit of oomph, I topped my gradient of with a coat of Pure Pearlfection top coat from the Luxe Effects Collection. It's gives just the right amount of subtle silver sparkle without being over the top.

I hope everyone had an amazing summer... I know I sure did! So who else is really looking forward to wearing dark, vampy, and rich colours for fall/winter?