Mix and Match Mani

Today's manicure has a little bit of everything - I used crème polishes, metallic polishes, glitter polishes, nail stamping, light colours, darker colours, and two different but complimentary manicures on each hand! 

The main reason for putting the look together was to use two untried polishes: 'Cobalt Chrome' and 'Titanium Flush'. These blue and pink metallic polishes were both from the limited edition Sally Hansen Color Foil line that was released Summer 2014. My first ever post on this blog was a review on the Color Foil polishes. I recently realized that out of all 10 of the polishes in the collection, 'Cobalt Chrome' and 'Titanium Flush' were the only ones that I had not yet used in a manicure.

Originally I was thinking about doing two separate manicures with the polishes, each featuring one of them. However, as I was designing the blue manicure, on a whim, I decided to echo the design on my other hand in pink!

Polishes Used:

Blue Row	Pink Row
LA Girl Glitter Addict ‘Aqueous’	LA Girl Glitter Addict ‘Provocative’
Sally Hansen Color Foil ‘Cobalt Chrome’	Sally Hansen Color Foil ‘Titanium Flush’
Finger Paints ‘Beautiful Mystery’	Essie ‘Fiji’
Borghese Rapido ‘Marino’	Essie ‘Foot Loose’
Nail Stamping Plate Used
ÜberChic Beauty Nail Stamp Plates Collection 1: Plate 1-03

Truthfully, I'm a little disappointed with the way that the manicure turned out. The light blue polish that I used, Finger Paints' 'Beautiful Mystery', is a matte polish, and as I mentioned in my last post, I was really excited to try stamping my metallic polishes over matte polish, to try out the effect. The only problem is that I started doing my nails just before bed, and after finishing the base layers, I fell asleep! By the time I woke up again, my nails were completely dry. Luckily, they were not smudged or dented, but unfortunately, they were too dry for me to stamp over successfully. The metallic polish would not fully adhere to the completely dry base layer.

So not only did my stamping end up kind of wonky, but in order to keep the stamping design on the nail, I decided to top coat, which ended up negating the whole intention of stamping metallic over matte! In retrospect, I probably could have top coated with a matte polish, but I didn't think of that at the time!

I also didn't end up liking the way I executed the two separate manicures on each hand. I didn't include a way to connect the two manicures to each other, so they feel kind of disjointed. Perhaps I could have put a pink rhinestone on the blue mani, and vice versa? Oh well, back to the drawing board!

One element of the manicure that I did like, was the 'Marino' and 'Aqueous' blue polish and blue glitter combo that I did on my left index finger and pinky. Those two polishes look great together! The two polish shades are quite a close match, so I ended up with the illusion of perfectly full glitter coverage (in real life, not so much in the picture!), after only a coat or two of glitter polish.