Friday Triad: inspired by @thenailartbabe

Hi everyone!


It's that time again, the end of the month approaches and here is the post I never skip... the Triad manicure, where Juanita, Michelle and I take turns in picking a manicure from our to-do list and we all use that manicure as inspiration to do our own nail art. This month Juanita picked a lovely gradient-and-then-some by Courtney aka thenailartbabe. I was very tempted to do an exact recreation as I really love how it looks but in the end I decided to run wild with it and this is the end result:

I started by painting my thumb, index, and pinky with Kinetics So Much and More, a beautiful dark brownish red (or is that reddish brown?) polish with a fabulous formula that is just about a one coater. My middle and ring finger were done in one coat of Barry M Gelly Mango, a bright but not eye-searing orange that definitely needs a second coat for full opacity but I didn't need that as it was going to be the base for my gradient. I made sure to NOT paint as close as possible to my cuticle area as I knew I wanted the gradient to be darkest at the base and lightest at the tip and when doing clean-up there is a chance the light base can peek out so I wanted to make sure that couldn't happen.

Time for the gradient! I painted stripes of So Much and More, Barry M Gelly Ginger (a medium orange-red) and Mango on a piece of sponge and started dabbing away, making sure the darkest color ended up near my cuticles. It took three rounds of dabbing to reach the effect I was looking for.

The last part of my design was the most time-consuming. I picked up part of an image from UberChic Lovely Leaves using So Much and More, removed all but the leaf I wanted to use (using tiny strips of scotch tape) and carefully placed it on the tip of my nail, and repeated that until the outline of my tips were covered in leaves.

Last but not least everything was covered in a generous coat of Seche Vite to make sure I could wear this bit of Autumn as long as possible.


The polishes I used:

Barry M Gelly Mango, Barry M Gelly Ginger, Kinetics So Much and More

Can I just say how much I like doing these Triad manicures? Sometimes J and M pick inspirations that are so far outside my comfort zone, I would never have thought of trying something like it. When receiving such a manicure I usually freak out a little, but after the first shock has worn off I try to think of how to make it my own, turn it into something I would like to wear (as I usually wear my manicure for at least a couple of days, to a week). So far it has made me use techniques and tools I had never tried, and color combinations that I wouldn't dream of putting together before.

Having said that, the colors in this one aren't that much out there, but me doing some sort of French manicure? Definitely not a thing I would normally do! But in this design, I love how it turned out and I hope you do too. Also, if this manicure doesn't scream Autumn, I don't know what does so how's that for season-appropriate? ;)