Before & After: Valentine's blocked stripes

(The nail wraps in this post were sent for review)

Hello!

Are you tired of posts that only have ONE purpose? Why settle for that, when for the same price, you can get a post that fulfills TWO goals?! That's right, today's post is going to be two, two, two posts in one! I'm gonna do a before and after, while showing how to use those left-over nail wraps!

*Ahem*. Too much watching Mad Men late at night. My apologies.

Let's get down to business. I started today's manicure with an extremely versatile light rose gold textured polish, Orly's Rose Pixel:

Orly Rose Pixel

Orly Rose Pixel

Orly Rose Pixel

Orly Rose Pixel

In terms of color, this polish is almost a neutral--the soft rose gold blend with my skin well. But the sparkle definitely takes it out of the realm of something you want to wear for an understated look! Still, I love it, and it's a great base to use if you're looking to turn a non-textured polish into a textured polish; this color shouldn't interfere with another color you put on top of it.

To decorate, I decided to do some left-over nail wrap nail art. One of the reasons I used to be hesitant to buy nail wraps was that they were one-time use only, or so I thought. Since I started trying out nail wraps, I've been determined to make them work for at least 2-3 manicures, which makes the cost far more economical. Whenever I do a nail-wrap manicure, I usually have at least 4 wraps left over, usually a few more than that, and they are most often the biggest wraps, which makes them good for nail art purposes.

For this manicure, I used one of the sets from Incoco's Sweet Surprise Valentine's Day collection, Double Date:

I wanted to create a sort of color-block-yet-patterned look with these, with strips of color going off at different angles. I took the wraps and first cut off a large block from the silver portion, and put those on the tips of the nails. Then I cut strips from the pink section, and used those to make sort of a crazy-quilt style pattern, with a bold block of both sections on the accent nail:

I have to divulge that this manicure is much more sparkly than it looks in the pictures--if I caught more of the sparkle, it made it hard to see the pattern clearly--trust me, this is molto sparklissimo. I love the way this gives a bit of pink flash and pattern while not completely dominating the nail with pink and hearts (two things you know I'm not super fond of, lol).

This was a quick way to reuse these; because I was going for a random look, I just cut and applied, and the whole thing probably took about 10 minutes to decorate (after my base polish was dry). There is so much more you can do with them--I wanted to get you to start thinking out of the box with respect to those left-over nail wraps. I've found that even after a few weeks, they will still stick fairly well, and when you throw some topcoat over your finished project, they aren't going anywhere. I have some older ones I'm going to pull out to test if they'll still work for nail art, but I can't imagine there will be a problem; if they stop sticking down on their own, use a dot or two of topcoat to stick them down just like any other embellishment, and it should be fine. But I will be testing it out for you. :)

Hope you have a wonderful day,
M.