NOTD Before and After: Orly's Space Cadet

Hello!

Here is my most recent nail of the day, using Orly's Space Cadet. If you haven't seen it, this is another beautiful duochrome (hmm...I'm starting to think maybe I might have a thing for these...ya think?), this one wine-purple and olive-green. Also, this one looks glittery, but it doesn't have glitter--it's from the Cosmic FX collection which contains mineral and glass particles to create amazing texture. And it succeeds, at least in this polish (I haven't tried any of the others). I found this polish hard to take pictures of before I stamped it--the tips of the nail and the color in the bottle are dead on, while the nail near the cuticle is clearly reflecting a lot of light:

It almost broke my heart to stamp it because it's so beautiful, but I knew it would look good stamped; I knew this because I had seen something similar done on Konad Abuse's blog with Color Club's Alias and gold stamping (you can see it here). Alias is similar enough to Space Cadet that I wanted to see what I could  make happen here with a little stamping. I decided to go with Bundle Monster plate BM-11, which has an olive leaf-y pattern in a strip shape; I didn't want a big rectangle, so I applied it at an angle across the top of the nails. I used Konad polish to stamp, a green-gold color that I can't find on their website anymore, but that looks very similar to their gold, with a slight olive green tint:

    I couldn't be happier with how this came out. Far from hiding the beauty of the duochrome, the stamping works well with it. I'm not sure how it would have been if I had stamped over the whole nail, but this seems to be just enough of an accent to complement the greens and contrast with the purple. If I were going to do anything else to the accent nail, I might put dots of purple glitter over the 'olives' in the stamp. But I don't think it needs it, and I'm scared to mess it up, so I won't try it until it's time to take the polish off. Then I'll know for next time--for now I'm just going to enjoy this.

(PS: I'm getting better at not getting the polish on my cuticles, lol!!)

Thanks for looking,

M.