Orange and Gold Mani - Using Moyou London Artist Plate 04

Today's manicure was supposed to be the second in my design series using the Moyou London Artist Collection plates. My goal was to create a manicure featuring Artist Collection plate 04. However, I've decided that I want to try another manicure with this plate, as this one doesn't fully capture the essence of the plate. I had such a horrendous experience creating this mani - but before I get into it, here's the picture:

Orange and Gold Mani

The polishes I used were OPI's 'Where Did Suzy's Man-go?', Sinful Colors' 'Energetic Red', and I reused my gold glitter accent finger from my last manicure, and ended up adding the same polish to my middle finger to cover a messed up nail. The glitter was OPI's 'All Sparkly and Gold'.

I started this manicure late at night, and I was super tired (that always seems to be the start of my manicure disaster stories!).  I had just finished applying the second coat of my base colour, and decided to lie down and watch TV for a bit while it dried. So now, I'm going to fast forward to the part where I woke up hours later with smudged nail polish, imprinted with bed sheet cross-hatching!

Now, just so you know, I hate removing nail polish. I find it to be such a hassle that I try to avoid doing it if I can get away with it. So instead of removing the messed up polish, I decided to try to salvage the mani by touching up with another coat. After that dried, I tried stamping with my original stamping colour choice - a nice coral polish. However, that didn't work out because the polish wasn't pigmented enough to show up well over the mango colour.  I switched to 'energetic red' on the remaining nails, however I wound up with a few misapplied stamps due to me trying to cut corners to speed up the process (my patience was running very thin at that point!).

After all of these mishaps, I decided to try to use nail polish remover to take off only the top layer of polish, and leave a fresh base coat to start stamping on. It worked, so then I had to stamp my nails all over again. This time, I tried a different pattern idea for my middle fingers, but it didn't look very nice when completed (hence the glitter cover-up).

After I finished stamping and applying top coat, instead of waiting for my nails to dry completely, I started to put away the stamping materials I used. That's how I ended up with the little smudged area on my index finger.  Now by this point I was completely over the manicure, and was not the least bit interested in redoing the nail to fix the smudge!

In the end, I was kind of relieved to have at least a semi-decent mani to show for all of that trouble, however I don't want to move on to the next plate in the series without doing a proper job with this one. For my next post, I hope to have a beautiful mani to share using this same plate.