Friday Triad: inspired by JauntyJuli

Hi everyone,


it's the last Friday of the month again, so that means Michelle, Juanita and me should be ready to show you our manicures that are inspired by a manicure one of us chose. This month was Michelle's choice and she picked a lovely manicure by JauntyJuli. The moment I saw it, I thought I had the perfect base color... but when checking it out even closer the base Juli used was a creme and not a multichrome. The idea of using a multichrome stuck though so I had sort of made my mind up about what to use when an email dropped in my inbox and lo and behold, I wasn't the only one who had come up with that idea! So that meant back to the drawing board for me. While rummaging through my stash my eye fell on a polish I recently acquired and that had absolutely nothing to do with the vision I had. I was curious how it would look on my nails though so I pulled it out of storage and started swatching it... and then some... and then some more... and then this happened:

I know, nothing like the inspiration, right? But several elements of the original are in there though:
- dusty base color? Check!
- glittery gradient? Check!
- mandala like stamp? Check!

Let me tell you what I did :)

I started out by painting all my nails with the beautiful The Moon by Illyrian Polish, a medium gray with a linear holo that is a bit more elegant than the usual BAM-in-your-face-holo flares that I've seen lately. I used three thin coats to make sure it was completely opaque. It dries a bit satin-y so it does need a glossy top coat to show off it's inner beauty, which is why I covered all my nails with a coat of Seche Vite.

indoors, with flash

When all that had dried a bit I had gorgeous gray nails but not a clue on how to proceed. The original had a glittery gradient at the tip of her nails (and at the base as well but I decided to skip that early on in the thinking process) so I figured I could try that and see what it looked like. I used KIKO 271 Sparkle Touch Silver Multicolour, a polish that contains silver and holo glitters for that and sponged on the sparkles, concentrating mostly at the tip of my nails. It was a bit too light for my liking so I added El Corazon Art Top Coat 421/5 Dalmatian, a watery top coat filled with teeny tiny black glitter thingies, to darken it a bit. I didn't want to use bigger black glitters because by then I had decided to stamp in black and I figured bigger glitters wouldn't look nice with that.

Soooo... I added a coat of slightly thickened Seche Vite to smoothen out the glitters and finished my manicure by stamping a round image from Born Pretty BP-L051 on top using my go to black stamping polish As Black As Night by Hit the Bottle. Of course another coat of Seche Vite sealed it all in and... done!


Here's the culprits that sneakily turned into a full manicure when I only wanted to swatch The Moon:

Illyrian Polish The Moon, KIKO 271 Sparkle Touch Silver Multicolour, El Corazon Art Top Coat 421/5 Dalmatian,
Hit the Bottle As Black As Night

I love these Triad manicures. We share our choice a month in advance so we have plenty of time to think about what we want to do (or at least I have plenty of time because I suspect Michelle and Juanita have their manicure done within a week of receiving the inspiration). Can you imagine I started out by thinking I wanted to do this in a pink/magenta-to-gold multichrome? From there I went on to a teal-to-blue-to-purple multichrome, a dusty creme with either a silver or a gold gradient and even green passed my mind. And in the end this is another happy accident that I ended up really liking a lot. I hope you like it too, and of course that you can still see a bit of the inspiration in there :)

If you're curious to see what Michelle and Juanita did... you can check their nails out by clicking their names.



Illyrian Polish The Moon was bought from Nailland Hungary.
El Corazon Art Top Coat 421/5 Dalmatian and Hit the Bottle As Black As Night were bought from Hypnotic Polish.