Muted Mani Fail!

Today's manicure was so unsuccessful, I can only show you the 2 fingers that came out the best!

Muted Mani

This started as an emergency manicure. My previous 'Tulip Themed' nails started chipping a tiny bit on day 3 of the manicure, and I couldn't stop myself from peeling off the chipped nail polish (a terrible habit, I know!). This left me with a completely jacked up mani that had to be addressed!

I kind of expected my tulip mani to last about a week, since I noticed that all of my other leadlight manicures lasted about that long. So I really hadn't counted on doing my nails so soon after spending all of that time on them just 3 days before.  I was so reluctant to do a new mani that I kept putting it off.   By the time I finally got around to it, it was late and I was really tired. This was definitely not the best time to experience technical stamping difficulties! 

I was trying to stamp Sally Hansen's Color Foil in 'Yellow Gold" over Essie's "Playa del Platinum"  (after the bright colors of the tulip mani, I wanted something calm and muted for my next one). I was using an image from PUEEN11. I was having major problems trying to consistently get the image to pick up perfectly.  Most of my attempts had missing areas, or the edges weren't crisp. I think it was because the Sally Hansen polish dries quite fast, so you have to work quickly. Perhaps it also helps to use more deeply etched image plates with these fast drying polishes. I'm guessing that with deeper etching, you won't have to worry so much about taking away too much polish with your swipes, which might give you that extra little bit of time you need to pick up the image cleanly. I've also noticed that you can't slack as much on technique when you're not using deep images. For example, I find that you can't get away with not cleaning the plate after every transfer! I'm going to have to experiment a bit more with all of these theories on a day when I have more time and patience.

Anyways, my nails didn't end up looking horrible - just not good enough to be memorialized on this blog! And they definitely looked a heck of a lot better than the semi-peeled off mess I had before, so I still rocked the mani for the last 2 days of my work week.