Sunday, July 14, 2013

Before & After: Fashionista

Hello!!

Okay, so here is my attempt to recreate, with a twist, a look that I believe was started by Nailasaurus. She initially did this with dark stripes over naked nails, inspired by a dress that had see-through stripes, if memory serves, and many others have been inspired by it since. I thought it would be fun to do a version of this with a sassy glitter as the undies. :)

I used Lucky 13 Bowties Are Cool as my base--but keep in mind that I only used one coat here with no undies because of the look I was going for. So don't judge this as a finished polish look for this polish! It's a gold-based glitter with orange-red hexes, brown small hexes, and lots of shimmer:

Lucky 13 Bowties Are Cool, no undies, for nail art purposes

Then I put some strips of tape over in two patterns; one meant to look similar to the original style, and two diagonal nails for some contrast to create a skittle sort of look; then I painted over it with Pure Ice I'll Never Tell, a unique dark brown with silvery flakes:










What do you think? I do love this color combination, and I love how the glitter comes through. However, you can tell I did this back when I was still using pointed q-tips for clean-up, before I got better at the acetone + brush method, and it's not as clean as I would like. Also, if you look closely (okay, you don't have to look *that* close to see it, lol), you can see I tried something that didn't quite work. To mask off my areas, I put two (or three in some cases) stripes of nail tape side-by-side, to get more width, and then I painted over everything. Unfortunately this led to very tiny micro bleeding between the lines of tape; this wasn't so obvious in real life as in these close pictures, but it's there. Next time I'll just cut regular tape to the sizes I want, or I won't pain over the entire nail area. :)

In these pictures, I'm not sure how I feel about this manicure, but in real life it looked better than it does here. I think that's because the flaws that are obvious in the pictures weren't so visible, and the effect was a little more even from a distance. I'll tell you this, I love Sam's work for tons of reasons, and one of them is the impressive precision she gets on things like her tape manis! It's not easy, but she sure makes it seem like it is. :)

Big hugs and happy Sunday,
M.

10 comments:

  1. very nice! You can barely notice the bleeding either :)

    I've ordered some nail tape, can't wait for it to arrive to give these types of designs a go!

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    1. You're gonna have so much fun! So many possibilities. And thanks! :)

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  2. Mishka, do you use pure acetone or Zoya plus for clean-up now?

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    1. I just did a test of this for someone else, and the results I came to were that the pure acetone is better, because it allows more targeted, precise quick cleaning. The Zoya is a close second, better than drugstore polish remover. :)

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  3. I really like it. This looks really cool. you did the same with the tape as I did with my manicure for the CH50 one. Two tapes next to each other. I experiences some tiny micro bleeding as well. I'm thinking about getting thicker nail tape, or just get some regular tape and cut it, but i'm afraid that if I cut it, it wont be completely straight...

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    1. Thank you! Good minds think alike, or in this case, fail alike, lol. I did it for the same reason you did--I was worried I wouldn't cut the tape evenly. Next time I think I'll still use the nail tape method, but will just only paint each section so it just barely overlaps the nail--so hopefully it won't make it to the middle where the two tape pieces meet.

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    2. Do we know somewhere where they sell thicker nail tape? hmm..

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    3. I don't...I think you should start a business making some!!

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