Week 49 - Glitter Sandwich

The theme for week 49 in The Year's Challenge was Glitter Sandwich Mani! I actually did do this manicure on time last week, but I was in San Diego and didn't have my photo editing program with me, so I had to wait to post it until after I got back. Which is why you all got to see my old mint stripes manicure (by "old" I mean I painted it maybe a week before I posted it?) last Friday instead of my pretty sparkles!

For my jelly to sandwich the glitter between, I chose Sinful Colors Daddy's Girl. I don't have a whole lot of jellies, honestly. When I started gathering nail polish, I bought a lot of shimmery polishes, because they were what caught my eye. After a few months, I realized that my nail art paint palette was missing a lot of colors, which I really needed cremes for, so I started buying creme colors. I actually avoided transparent polishes because it would annoy me that that beautiful color would take three or four coats to produce, which meant I couldn't use it on top of any other color. However, I've since learned the wonders you can produce with layering jellies, and now I WANT! Regrettably, no one has a nice listing of "which colors from which brand are translucent and which are opaque". I pretty much have to look up swatches of individual polishes and read the blogger reviews on them. One. At. A. Time. Not a fun research topic. :P

So, for the glitters! For index, middle, and pinky fingers, I used Essie Set in Stones, and for my thumbs and ring fingers, I used Essie A Cut Above. The pink versus silver glitters came out with a subtle but beautiful difference, I think! And I included an out-of-focus picture to show you how sparkly this mani was! Woooot!

Candy Green

My husband likes to watch car and motorcycle shows. Building, remodeling, jazzing them up - he's very mechanically inclined and he likes learning new things. Plus it's just fun to watch other people doing things you wish you could. He even recorded a show he saw a listing for that he thought I might like to see because it was on painting. Well, painting a car and doing nail art are two very different things, but regardless, I did enjoy watching it. The topic was "candy" paint jobs, what exactly that was, and how it was done. It's more of a technique than a color, you see, and it involves putting down a layer of metallic flake paint or just a metallic color, and then layering multiple layers of a sheer color overtop of that. How many layers you put on determines how deep the color is, while still allowing the metallic shimmer to shine through. We both decided at the end of it that, while interesting, the technique really couldn't be applied to nails unless you were using an airbrush.

Until I was swatching Sinful Colors San Francisco on my swatching sticks. I showed it to him and he thought that would make a really good candy color, which got me to playing. I pulled out my practice rounds and we tried multiple different colors under it (two silvers, a gold, and several different glitters), and I decided that I'd come very close to the metal flake version by using two coats of Essie Set in Stones, which makes as near opaque of glitter as I care to go, under three coats of San Francisco. I prefer the candies with a solid metallic underneath, rather than the flake, but none of my metallic polishes did the job. I'd love to try this again with a Layla Mirror Effect polish!

I think if I ever try this one again, I'll be more careful about keeping the underlayer of glitter from going over the cuticle outline, because they're nearly impossible to get out of there when doing cleanup. But personally, I think it came out gorgeous. This was done on V's nails, and she had given me free reign that day, with no suggestions on what she wanted on her nails. She looked verrrrrry skeptical after that second layer of Set in Stones, though, because while she likes glitter, she's NOT a bling sort of woman, and that was very bling! I assured her it wouldn't be so bright when we were finished, but she didn't look like she was too sure about that. ^_^ She was pretty happy with the end result, though.