Iridescent layering

Hi everyone!


When trying to find inspiration for the manicure I wanted to make for the letter I, I kept ending up with ivory. If you've seen more posts on my blog you might have noticed I use ivory, white and pale nude as a base quite often so I tried to think of different words with an I and of course my happy helper (aka husband) thought along with me: irrational, irritating, infuriating (could actually have done that... blobbicure comes to mind now that I'm typing this ;), idyllic, icey, immature... and the list of I words he produced went on and on but I won't bore you with that. Finally I decided to just skip the I for the moment and do something fun and summer-y, so I picked a yellow and an orange polish and then inspiration struck like a meteor! Next to the orange was a bottle that shouldn't have been there at all: Zoya Chloe, a polish from way back when flakies were not multichrome and opaque in two coats but sheer and... (wait for it)... IRIDESCENT (trumpets start to blare).

So I started out with the two polishes I picked, the stray one next to it and an assortment of tools and this is what my hard work looks like:

indoors, no flash

(disclaimer: if you continue to read you will be exposed to fingers that have not been properly cleaned up ;)

I started out by painting all of my nails with the yellow I picked, OPI Towel Me About It. It's not bad for a yellow (as most of them have horrible formulas) but one coat is definitely not enough for complete opacity. I wanted to do a gradient on top so I didn't bother with more coats. After that had dried I grabbed the orange, OPI I'm Getting A Tan-gerine and a sponge and created a gradient that took three passes of sponging before I was happy with it. Some more waiting to allow the polish to dry again and then I painted two coats of Zoya Chloe on top of the gradient. Chloe has small orange to green shifting flakies in a pink tinged, transparent base so it changed the color of my gradient a bit and made it look more apricot than yellow which was just what I wanted :)

I actually wanted to stamp on this from the start but when collecting all the things I needed to do this manicure I discovered I was out of liquid latex so I figured I could use a peel off base instead. Big mistake, big, huge! I painted it around my nails, did the gradient + flakies as I described above and tried to get it off after that... I think I spent about an hour picking and rubbing and scratching my hands and even used acetone to try and get it off (peel off base + acetone = bad idea... very bad) and there were still traces everywhere. At that point I took a picture to at least show off the gradient (and the dried out skin and the thingies stuck to my fingers... but hey, I warned you about that ;)

indoors, no flash

More picking etc. and even scrubbing under the faucet occurred until my hands were red and a little sore but most of the mess was gone and I felt I could go out in public without feeling too embarrassed. I grabbed my bike, cycled to the costume shop in the city center (as the one close to my place didn't have any latex in stock but they checked for me and their other store still had some) and got myself a new bottle of liquid latex and a backup, drove back home again (through the rain) and sat down to finish my manicure by stamping my middle and ring finger with an image from UberChic plate 3-01 using Cirque Colors Memento Mori, and a coat of Seche Vite on all nails... and done!


The polishes all nicely lined up:

OPI Towel Me About It, OPI I'm Getting A Tan-gerine, Zoya Chloe, Cirque Colors Memento Mori

I absolutely love how my nails look! The green and orange flashes that peek through the black stamp make me smile when I see them and the colors just make me happy :) I'll try and take a picture of them in the sunshine and update this post because you can't really see the beauty of the flakies in my indoors pictures but I'm not making any promises as sunshine and summer apparently aren't linked anymore (or at least not where I live ;)

What do you think? Do you still have some of the old fashioned flakie polishes or have you switched completely to the newer ones (that I still have to try out one day... *hangs head in shame, sees nails, perks up with a big grin*)?


These are the other I-inspired manicures:

ABC-Challenge - I

Zoya Chloe and Cirque Colors Memento Mori were bought from Pretty Polish.