Review and How-to-use: MoYou London Tropical 07

(Nothing to disclose)

Hello!

Today we're going to pause for a moment and put aside our preconceived notions of fall, in order to go on a happy tropical voyage...courtesy of MoYou London Tropical 07.

Here is my video reviewing the plate:

And here are the stills of the plate:

MoYou London Tropical 07

MoYou London Tropical 07

And here it is next to a Konad plate so you can get an idea of the relative sizes:

MoYou London Tropical 07 vs. Konad

So, how do you use it?? Let's take a look *rubs hand together with glee*. This is a collage-style plate, but unlike most of MoYou London's collage plates, the images don't come together to make larger images; it's just a hodge-podge of tropical stuff, more along the line of the Pueen Stamping Buffet collage plates. But there's still a ton of fun to be had!

1) Go crazy with fruit. There are so many different styles of fruit on this plate, it'll keep you going for ages. There are some standard strawberries and bananas, and of course some citrus fruits--but there are lots of different types of citrus to give you a great variety to work with, either for different manicures or for a manicure with a variety of images in it. Then we get into the pomegranates and the mangoes and I think even some kumquats. Let alone fie different styles of pineapple, each sporting a very stylish top!!

Fruit salad galore!

2) Jungle manicures. This plate has leaves and fronds and vines and more leaves and more fronds! There's even a stone path which could also double as a few different animal prints. All the awesome without the deadly bugs and snakes:

Jungle Boogie

3) Flowers: There aren't as many flowers as fruits and leaves, but there are still enough for a cool mani or two. And I think several of the pineapple tops are pretty enough to be flower-like (or at least like tropical leaves):

For each of these ideas, the ability to isolate an image from other images around it is helpful (although not necessary; the surrounding images make pretty background, depending on the look you're going for). If you're not sure how to do this, take a look at my tutorial on isolating images here.


4) Full nail images: While that isn't the main point of this plate, there are certainly several areas you can use to get single-image (or close to that) full nail designs. The fronds, the vines, the huge citrus fruits and the hibiscus-with-frond-leaves are easy to spot; I also think the watermelon would make a very interesting full-nail stripe design:

5) And the last one I'll talk about is what I call 'transition' manicures, where you transition a design over several of your nails (sort of like scenes in a comic book). This plate gives some interesting opportunities for that; the pineapple in the upper left-hand corner is the most obvious example of that, you could put the pineapple on your middle finger and the fronds coming off either side. I've circled some more less-obvious examples; I think with this particular plate slightly overlapping the images on the nail will give you a really cool effect:

Yellow: fruit salad!
Blue: Watermelon delight
Red: Tropical fruit salad!
Purple: Jungle fever
Green: See below manicure...


I used this last idea for my sample manicure; I started with a base of Sinful Shine Man Hunt, a silvery olive-gray green shimmer:

Sinful Shine Man Hunt

Sinful Shine Man Hunt

Sinful Shine Man Hunt

Then I stamped with Konad Golden Green, using the portions of the plate shown above (roughly):

Jungle-tastic

Jungle manicure with tropical 07

This is what I love about MoYou London collage plates. You can get a simple, easy manicure where each nail is different, but it all goes perfectly in terms of style and size. So much flexibility!

So there you go--a tropical manicure from a tropical plate, perfectly suitable for your fall mani needs. :)

Hope your week is off to a great start!! :)

M.