I hope everyone had a stellar 4th of July! If you are reading this from another country, I hope you had an awesome Wednesday celebrating you :) Every year I try and do some sort of festive nails for the 4th. In the past I have done more literal versions of patriotic nail art, but this year I wanted to try something a little different. I apologize ahead of time that there is only one photo, I was only able to get one good one before I started doing things and dragging the design around (I'll explain in a second). Anyway, here it is!
So I started with a peel off base coat, since I had to take the polish off the next day for work. I think this is what caused the dragging. The design wasn't smudged (at least not from this), but it looked like the whole nail was pushed to the side. I think this may have something to do with the fact that this base coat is meant to peel off relatively easily. I plan on eventually doing a comparison on some different peel off base coats when I've tried some more and have some more experience using them.
Anyway, for the base color on all the nails except the ring finger, I used Essie Gel Couture polish in Fairy Tailor. I may do a post at some point about this line and the polishes I have within it. I really enjoy this polish as a nice sheer wash of color on the nails. I used two coats and still have a visible nail line, but that was fine since I covered up the tips anyway. The colors I used for the dots were OPI Unfor-Greta-bly Blue, Zoya Vanessa (red), and Pop-arazzi Icing on the Cake (white). I started by putting each color on a business card. I used several different sized dotting tools to achieve the fading effect. If you don't have dotting tools, you can use toothpicks and just vary the amount of polish you use. I tried to make the dots decrease in size as they got closer to the cuticle. I decided to do each size at once, not each color (does that make sense?), which may have been to my detriment. The dots of polish on the business card started to dry a bit after a while, so they got a little gummy. If you could see my other hand you would see little strings of red from after I placed some of the dots. I kept having to add more polish so that wouldn't happen. All that to say if you try this I would recommend either doing all of one color at once or testing the polish between rounds.
For my ring fingers I used the same white polish as a base and topped it with OPI Happy Anniversary. I also sponged on some of OPI Pirouette My Whistle for that glitter. Not gonna lie, this was not the look I was originally going for. I originally wanted sparkly silver glitter, but I am totally in love with the result I ended up with! I'm definitely going to have to do this on all my nails sometime. I've never sponged on this glitter, but now that I've tried it I realize how necessary it is. It is ordinarily so hard to get those big glitters in there, but sponging is a big help. I will say, however, use a makeup sponge or something along those lines. Don't use a sponge-tipped eye shadow applicator like I did. Not nearly as effective. I topped everything off with Seche Vite top coat.
So those are my 4th of July nails! Let me know what else y'all would like me to write about, and if you did anything fun for the Fourth I would love to see! Hope y'all have a great week!
~ Mary Elizabeth
