Sunday, August 7, 2011

China Glaze--Island Escape and the Mardi Gras Manicure!

One of the reasons I HAD to get the China Glaze Island Escape collection was seeing the video tutorial on their website for the "Cheetah Nail Art". Anything bright with animal prints? Yep, that's me!!

However, I wanted to put my own twist on it. I tend to call myself The Medical Zebra. In the med world,the saying is "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." When I hear hoofbeats, I cover my head, wait for the stampeding zebra, and run like hell. LOL

Anyway, so I decided I would do stripes on my fingers and then accent it with Nubar's black art pen.

After doing my traditional nail prep, I did 2 coats of Electric Pineapple. I have to say this is really an unflattering color. Not only is it NOT yellow, it's more like "unripe pineapple" with more green than yellow. By comparison, the color is almost identical to Zoya's ModMatte Mitzi--which I like better. I would only use EP as a base (and am offering it up for swap at MUA).

After letting it dry, I began to try to put on stripes. I say try because the brush--being a normal nail polish brush--was too thick. In addition, China Glaze polish is not as thick as other polishes. I had to wipe the brush a bit more on the bottle before painting. So I decided to just go with the flow and started decorating my nails.

Papaya Punch is the other creme in the collection, the rest having shimmers. The fun in decorating my nails is that there were no mistakes. I also didn't need to worry about adding more than one coat, so the colors show thru each other.

Then I started using the black art brush in random strokes. I *love* this art pen by Nubar and can't wait to get more (I also have 14K aka gold). I haven't used the tip end yet for finer detail but will soon I'm sure.

After making sure it was good and dry, I used my OPI polish remover pen--a MUST HAVE. I added some Zoya Remover+ using an eye dropper from the Color Lock system. Though be careful, I overfilled and it spilled when I tilted it to use it on my hand, dousing one finger. So now I look a little funny using it upside down LOL.

Though my finger was a bit tacky, I let it dry a bit before adding 2 coats of Sally Hansen Diamond Top Coat.

When all was said and done, I decided my nails looked alot more like Mardi Gras than Zebras! Behold:



Laissez le bon temps roule!

1 comment:

  1. That's really cool looking, Angel! I love it!

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