I had some time to myself, my nails were showing some signs of tip wear, and I had just received a small package with a few plates and a little jar of pigment powder... and this is what my nails looked like when I stopped playing:
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I started by painting my thumb, index and pinky in two coats of plain white OPI Alpine Snow, and my middle and ring finger in three coats of minty Barry M Sugar Apple.
I then pulled out MoYou plate Tropical 36 and carefully pried open the jar of Yours Elements pigment powder in Green Peacock, a beautiful teal with iridescent shimmer. I used an eyeshadow applicator to dab a bit of powder on the leaf I wanted to stamp on my nail. I scraped away the excess powder, picked up the image with my stamper and tried to remove the parts I didn't want using a bit of sticky tape as I usually do with nail polish. That didn't work so well, but I discovered I could get rid of the unwanted parts if I rubbed the sticky tape over them (fortunately I had used an old stamper as I don't think I want to subject my favorite stamper to that kind of treatment). When I was finally ready to roll it on my nail nothing was transferred as my base had dried too much. So I covered my base with a layer of base coat, waited for it to become tacky and tried rolling the image from my stamper on my nail again, and this time it worked perfectly!
I repeated the same process on my ring finger, and finished my manicure by stamping a smaller leaf image in white Painted Polish Blanc Slate and covering all nails in a coat of Seche Vite.
Of course the color is gorgeous, and the shimmer is very visible on the nail so I really like the result. I noticed the stamping is a bit blurry so I guess I'll be using this for background images. Of course these pigments are meant to be used with gel polish but they work great with normal polish too, as long as you make sure your base is still tacky. I have seen some other ways to use pigment powder so I'm pretty sure I'll be doing some more experimenting in the near future 😉
A word of warning about closing the jar. When I pushed the lid down, the powder flew just about everywhere. It's quite easy to remove it with some acetone from a smooth surface like my matte, but the specks that landed on my shirt were a lot more stubborn. It's an old shirt that I usually wear when doing chores so it doesn't matter very much if the stains don't come out, but I would be less than amused if this would have been something else. While I really like that the packaging is made of mostly card board and has way less plastic in comparison with a "normal" jar with a screw-on-lid, I think those last ones are less prone to cover my desk and walls with pigment when I close them. So please remember to very carefully and slowly close the Yours Elements jars!
Nice :-D
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