Spiral Dotticure and a Nail Fail

As you may know from previous posts, my fellow hobbyists, I bought two of the twelve polishes in the new China Glaze On Safari Collection last month: Desert Sun and Call of the Wild. Once payday came, though, my friend V and I agreed that we needed the rest of the collection, so we split the cost half and half...and they arrived on my doorstep just a few days later! Aren't they gorgeous?

I'm sure you've all seen a metric ton of swatching posts on these polishes, so I won't bother to list off the names, but feel free to ask if you actually don't know which is which! :)

I of course wanted to do my next manicure using some of the new polishes...but honestly? I think I should have stopped part of the way through. It's a common failing of mine to not know when to *stop* when I'm doing a manicure. I've been making it a point to Pin things that show off how beautiful simplicity can be, so I'll remember it when I'm doing my own nail art. This weekend, however, I clearly forgot.

I started with a base color of China Glaze Man Hunt, which is quickly becoming my favorite blue (it pushed out my previous favorite, Frostbite, also a China Glaze.) The accent nails got a layer of Prey Tell added. I meant to do just Prey Tell on those nails, but I zoned out while painting on the pretty blue and forgot to leave those two nails plain. That was the first part of the fail - the Prey Tell just didn't look as gorgeous as it should have. Then I tried to do lace with a dotting tool...which came out pretty well, actually, though it probably would've looked better 1: in a straight line, rather than the curve I went with, and 2: if I'd STOPPED THERE. But I really wasn't happy with the way the Kalahari Kiss looked with the other two colors, though I should've. Mr. IJAH thought it was gorgeous at that point, actually. But...well...I added little flourishes in I'm Not Lion, and spread it thinly over the lace.

My 8-year-old daughter thought it was gorgeous. Me, not so much. I just couldn't like it, so I took it off. Let me know what you think, though - Hail or Fail?

Anyway, I'm very happy with what I replaced it with! Two coats of China Glaze Agent Lavender, and then dots in a swirl with two sizes of dotting tools, in Purr-fect Plum and Man Hunt, and this is the result:

The accent nail is kind of subtle - most of the nails have Purr-fect Plum on the tips and Man Hunt on the base of the nails, while my ring fingers have the colors reversed.