Week 36 - Tape Mani

Yet another week come and gone, and this week's theme for the Year's Challenge is tape! Now, there's two ways to use the word "tape" in a manicure. You can use tape to block off areas of your nails to paint them, or you can use striping tape on top. I did both!

I started with a base of two coats of China Glaze Hook and Line, and added topcoat on top of that. I put scotch tape across my nails as if I was going to do a french tip, and then on my left hand I did a stripe of China Glaze Reggae to Riches, while on my right hand I put China Glaze Jungle Queen across the tips of my nails.

Another lovely layer of Seche Vite to make sure the tape didn't pull up the color when I took it off, and scotch tape was again put down, but this time lengthwise and a bit off-center on my nails. On the left hand, of course, Jungle Queen was used for the vertical stripe, while the right hand got a larger stripe of Reggae to Riches. I only used one coat of each, so of course on the right hand, it created a four-block look, since RtR isn't opaque in one coat and Jungle Queen shows through.

Then I added the striping tape and another couple of layers of top coat - and for the first time in my own nail art history, I succeeded in getting striping tape to actually stay on my nails for more than a day! It wasn't until the third day that the striping tape started curling up in more than one spot.

I was really happy with this manicure. Though I will ask you to please forgive the lack of clean-up of the topcoat, as I was on vacation!