Friday Triad: inspired by @nail_muse

Hi everyone!



It's the last Friday of the month again, so that means Triad time! The inspiration of this month was picked by me and I had a really hard time deciding. In the end I went for a manicure that actually I saw popping up in my feed and immediately saved, this pretty dry marble/smoosh by Anastasiya of @nail_muse.

I especially loved the horizontal lines so I knew I wanted to try and get those too and boy, did I set myself up for trouble... but I think I did sort of okay. I'll let you be the judge:

Originally I wanted to use coral as the main color but I couldn't find the right polish to fit my vision and I didn't like the ones that I picked so in the end I let my husband pick a color for me, just anything he liked. He picked Red Hook by Cirque Colors, a beautiful brick red that has Autumn written all over it. I combined it with Cirque Colors Minetta, a pink-leaning nude, and OPI Be There In A Prosecco, a cream colored polish with a hint of peach in it.

I started with the easy part: two coats of Red Hook on my thumb, index and pinky and two coats of Minetta on my middle and ring finger, and I let that dry completely.

After that, the smoosh... and that's where the trouble started! I have done smoosh manicures before so I figured it would be easy as well. No such thing! Every time my nails looked pretty but not with the horizontal lines I had my heart set on. It was only after I decided to let the polish dry on my stamper for about 30 seconds before rolling it on my nail that those coveted horizontal lines showed up. Still not exactly as in the inspiration but good enough for me to like it :)

So what did I do? Quite easy actually, I painted a square of Minetta on my mat, immediately put small blobs of Red Hook on it, Prosecco on top of that, made zig zags through it with a dotting tool, pressed a stamper in it, waited for half a minute and rolled it on my nails that were surrounded by lots of liquid latex for easy clean up of the polish that would have ended up on my skin without it.

To add a teeny bit of sparkle I grabbed Cirque Colors Himalayan Pink, a swoon worthy sparkling rose gold foil polish with some holo shimmer thrown in for good measure, and a striper brush and painted a few thin lines along the lines created by the smoosh.

I really liked my nails like this so I top coated everything and took pictures:

But the inspiration had two accent nails and I was kind of curious how that would look on me (and I had already taken pictures so the worst that could happen was that I wouldn't like it and the entire manicure would fall victim to cotton pads and acetone). It took several (read: a lot!) more attempts but I ended up with the middle finger you can see in the first picture... and to be honest, I liked it even better than the version with just one accent nail and I ended up wearing this manicure for almost a week :)


The line-up:

Cirque Colors Red Hook, Cirque Colors Minetta, OPI Be There In A Prosecco, Cirque Colors Himalayan Pink

There's not much to say about my nails that I haven't done already. I had a lot of fun playing with polish and I loved wearing the result. I'm not so sure Michelle and Juanita were very happy with my choice... but I hope they had fun doing their nails too. To see what their manicures look like, just click here or here.