52 week nail art challenge - 30: Saran wrap

Hi everyone!

The 30th prompt for the 52 week nail art challenge is Saran wrap. I have to admit a saran wrap manicure isn't one of my favourite techniques as it usually turns out too chaotic for my liking. But since this challenge is all about getting out of my comfort zone, of course I couldn't back down. Let me show you the result and after that I'll tell you what I did.

I started out by coaxing my husband into shaking my terribly separated China Glaze Elephant Walk for at least five minutes until it was returned to its original, evenly colored dusty grayish-green beauty. When it was useable again, I painted two thin coats on all nails and discovered there is very fine silver shimmer hidden it, making the polish look even better than I had thought at first.

When the base was dry, I tore off a strip of saran wrap, scrunched it together to a small ball, unraveled it and scrunched it up again until I was happy with the amount of little 'corners' showing up. I then painted a small patch of Painted Polish Herb Your Enthusiasm, a lovely sage green polish with fine holo sparkles and some scattered golden flakies (I didn't see any flakies in my patch but I can see them in the bottle). I dabbed my saran ball in the patch, and started dabbing at my nails.

Unfortunately the polish didn't really show up on Elephant Walk so I decided to grab a polish that was a lot lighter, Sally Hansen Green Tea which is a mint green creme. A new piece of saran wrap, the same procedure: make a ball, paint a patch of polish, dab the ball in the polish, dab the ball with polish on my nails. This started to look a lot better! There was a bit too much mint for what I had in mind by then, so I went in with another ball and Elephant Walk to darken the lightest parts, and Green Tea again where things got too dark, etc.

When I was finally happy with what I saw, I did a last round of careful dabbing using Kinetics Sparkling, a warm marigold to bronze mixture of small glitters and flakies. It looks quite orange in the bottle but scattered around on my nails the gold shows up better. All that was needed at that point was a generous coat of Seche Vite on all nails and a camera to capture the first saran wrap manicure I actually liked when I finished it 😉

These are the polishes I used:

China Glaze Elephant Walk, Painted Polish Herb Your Enthusiasm, Sally Hansen Green Tea, Kinetics Sparkle

Let me start with the most shocking part (to me anyway): I like this! A lot!!! In fact, I am still wearing this manicure as I type this and I don't want to take it off, that's how much I like it 😊 I guess I can handle the chaotic result of saran wrap a lot better if the colors match instead of clash, so I definitely want to try more of this as a background for stamping. What do you think? Yay or nay?

Last but not least, I finally managed to cross off another prompt of what has to be the longest-running challenge in the nail art universe, the SBB Nail Challenge. Saran wrap is on number 39, and I've done it!