This month's prompt in the Sci-Fi Because Nails facebook group is dinosaurs, and you know there's going to be a trove of awesome stamping designs going on in there! Obviously the very first thing I thought of:
I'm not going to pretend to be modest here, I nailed the crap outta this one:
outdoor, afternoon sunlight
For a deep jungle green base I started with Tonic You'll Move Mountains, and for the dinosaur hide base I instead started with a stone grey crelly on my middle fingers. The amazingly detailed velociraptor eye is from the top image on HeHe 086, part of their delightful science series of stamping plates. Though the design is complex with very fine lines, I had no trouble picking it up on the first try.
indoor, CF lighting
The eye was stamped in black, then filled in with Esmaltes da Kelly Pleiades on the stamper head before placing it on the nail. The leaves are from different parts of MoYou London Tropical plates 06 and 12, using Esmaltes da Kelly Carmelo and Emily de Molly green stamping polishes.
window-filtered daylight
HeHe plates are consistently fantastic and are very affordable, absolutely worth the wait on shipping from China. Buy them directly from her here, since plenty sold on ebay or Ali Express are knock-offs with poor quality etching for the same price.
Every time I Love Nail Polish releases another batch of their multichromes, my wallet is going to take a little hit. Their formula is always great, but the colors . OMG, I die with these super shifters. From the most recent release, my first pick was Masquerade. Ginormously pic-heavy post in 3...2...1... Masquerade is a very sheer charcoal grey base packed with magically light-bending pigment that goes from a rich magenta-wine color, through a lighter pink, then bronze, on its way to a vibrantly saturated emerald green. It took 3 coats to get it to visible opacity, of the sort where it can look sheer if you hold your fingernails up to the light. Though it's most often a metallic to slightly brush-strokey chrome, in the sunlight, a sparkly shimmer peeks out. outdoor, bright sunlight The color range can be soft and muted: ok, "muted" for something like this, anyway. outdoor, overcast/cloudy day It can be mostly wine: outdoor, overcast daylight
I'm sure that every polish geek has a half a handful (or plenty more) topcoats - I myself have my go-to quick dry, a thicker one for chunky or unsmooth finishes, some back-up "lesser" quick drys, and a matte. Having that many, though, honestly means we're all still looking for MORE! For a couple of years now, my holy grail TC has been HK Girl. I'd been pretty happy with INM Out the Door for a year or so, but HKG dries much faster to a harder (aka more chip-resistant) finish, so I made that switch around the time we started blogging here. I've never had the love affair with Seche that plenty do - it seems more stinky to me and I get shrinkage often enough to have never bought more after my first 99 cent mini of it. I've seen a few blog posts mentioned some behemoth from WalMart, and remembered to pick up a bottle when driven to the commercial den of iniquity by a wild goose chase for multichrome notebooks, which brings us to... Topcoat Battle!!!!
Just a few weeks ago, I saw a stunning swatch pic in the facebook dupes/comparisons group that led me (and I think several others) down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what we were looking at. Turns out that the original pic was both photoshopped all to hell and from a brand that's no longer active... but several people suggested alternates, including this: indoor, CF lighting Well, hellooooo there, vampy dream. outdoor, bright sunlight The end result of all the image searching is that Sally Hansen released a whole red collection in 2018, several of which weren't truly red, and that one of which was reported as a dead-on dupe for OPI Every Month is Oktoberfest, with a more opaque and smooth formula. Oktoberfest is one of the ones that got away - it looked identical to Germanicure in the bottle, and by the time I realized I'd like both, it was going for crazy prices on ebay. For a mere $5, I was more than willing to take this possible dupe for a spin. outdoor, dire
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