Candy Cane Mani

Today I have a candy cane themed manicure to share:

Candy Cane Mani

Polishes Used:
China Glaze 'Define Good...'
China Glaze 'White on White'
Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear 'Celeb City'
Konad Special Polish in White

Plate Used:
MoYou London Festive Collection - 03

Other than a few issues with getting my lines straight, I love this manicure! Incidentally, I discovered a great tip for getting my lines straight, just as I was finishing up the manicure. Just before I was about to put polish on the image plate to stamp the last unfinished nail, it suddenly dawned on me that instead of my trustee hard Konad stamper, I should try using my larger, squishy stamper. With my Konad stamper, not only were some of my lines becoming crooked during the process of rolling the images onto my nail, but also, at times I was having problems with a little bit of polish bleeding onto the negative space of the image when I tried to pick it up.

When I tried the squishy stamper, not only did the image pick up beautifully, with no bleeding, but I found it was also much easier to transfer this particular image cleanly by pushing my nail onto the stamper, than it was to roll the image onto my nail as I had been doing with the hard stamper. I realized that this is because when I roll an image onto my nail, I don't always use one smooth, continuous motion. In areas where I stop momentarily, or my hand moves a bit too fast, I end up with a crooked bit of the image. Pushing my nail onto the image with the squishy stamper solves this. It also makes it a bit easier to line up the image exactly how you want it on your nail.

You'll notice in the above picture that my index finger turned out perfectly straight, and the angle looks great. That's because I used the squishy stamper for that finger. I used my trusty hard Konad stamper for all of the other striped nails - you can probably see the difference!

 I love using the hard stamper because it's really great at picking up every detail of very fine images, whereas many times I have problems getting detailed images transferred onto the squishy stamper. Also, when I first started stamping, I only owned hard stampers, so when I'm gathering my mani materials, I often instinctively reach for them out of habit.

This experience really helped drive home the message that I really have to take the time to evaluate which is the right tool for the job, before I begin. As a basic guideline: the squishy stampers are better at picking up images with thicker lines and/or larger, open spaces of polish, while the hard stampers are better at picking up detailed images.

Polishes Used

Now, I just want to take a moment to talk about how beautiful 'Define Good' is.  I think I mentioned before that I'm normally not the biggest fan of red nail polish, simply because it is so common, however this red polish is gorgeous! It's dark and sultry with blue undertones, and has this magnificent shimmery metallic finish to it. It also stamps really well, which is a big plus. I'm so happy I bought it! This is a red that I probably wouldn't even mind wearing on it's own (sans nail art) - now that's a big deal!