Chinese Alphabet

Hello my lovelies! It's Saturday and the sun is shining! I couldn't be happier because I can finally spend some time outdoors after a very cold week. But before I go out, let me just show you a brand new manicure that I was really excited about. Even my boyfriend told me that it was possibly his favorite from my manicures he has seen so far. So that must mean something. Take a look!

The idea for this manicure started from one of the new Moyra plates, namely 20 Orientalist. I fell in love with this Chinese alphabet image and wanted to use it in a manicure. I thought about the traditional Chinese colors, red and gold, but I'm not such a fan of gold so I didn't want to use too much on my nails. I then thought about doing a red and black gradient with gold stamping on top. A last minute whim made me change the stamping color to black and I'm really happy I did that. I love the way the black stamping fades into the black at the top half of the nail. It's almost like a gradient stamping.

I decided to do my gradient with acrylic paints because cleanup is easier. I actually used two shades of red with the black but you can't really see them on the nail. They did help with smoothing out the gradient, I think. I did the gradient over one coat of Barry M Cotton and then top coated it with Seche Vite. After it was dry I went and washed my hands with soap and water to clean the paint around the nails. I then stamped using the Chinese alphabet image and black stamping polish from the Born Pretty Store. I finished everything with a coat of Seche Vite. The nails didn't photograph quite as shiny as they looked in real life. Another coat of top coat would have probably fixed that but I didn't notice until days later when I looked at the photos.

Unfortunately, these nails didn't wear well at all. The acrylic paint cracks easily and the top coat doesn't help much. I had to remove them after two days because they looked awful. I will probably avoid using acrylics for gradients in the future and I will stick with polish, even though it's harder to clean up. I really hope you like this as much as I did! Have a great weekend!