A2Z Series - E Is For 'Elegant'

Hi NaiLovelies!

This week the A2Z challenge has reached the letter E in the alphabet and the prompt word for this week is Elegant.

It so happens that I somewhat stumbled across this manicure which was lucky as I was totally stumped as to what an elegant manicure looks like. I had ideas of doing a funky French manicure, perhaps with some nail jewelry and some other ideas floating around in my head but none of them truly captured my imagination.

I had been wearing Cuccio Illumination for a few days and wanted to jazz it up a bit with one of my new MDU stamping polishes and thus, this mani was born and I am chuffed to bits with how it turned out.

The majority of the Illumination base is now covered with stamping polish but it still looks stunning peeping through the roses.

This is the stunning Cuccio Illumination, minus the stamped image. I wore two coats of Illumination over a base of Morgan Taylor Little Black Dress - a wonderfully opaque glossy black. This intensified the look of the polish and was necessary because I actually applied this entire manicure over the red roses and lace 'Copycat' gel polish manicure from a couple of weeks ago! This is something that I often do to save myself from having to perform repeated soak offs when I grow tired of my gel manicure. This means I can change my manicure as often as I like without drying out my skin from the acetone in the soak off gel polish remover and making sure my nails remain healthy.

The picture above shows the stunning duochrome shift of Cuccio Illumination which shifts from aquamarine to purple. Illumination also contains metallic blue hex glitters all suspended in a irridescent base which lends itself to the polishes duochrome ability.

It really is a stunning polish, next time I will wear it without the undies and I will mix it with Megamix to create my own gel polish.

Illumination - Cuccio
Blue Navy Stamping Polish - Mundo De Unas
Stamping Plate - Winstonia W04

The rose image which I used for this manicure is pretty small, the only fingers it was large enough to cover were my pinky fingers so for all other nails I had to enlarge the image by stretching the image.

I did this by picking up the image from the plate as normal and then before transferring it to my nails I removed the silicone pad and squeezed the sides of the silicone to stretch the image. To make the image longer squeeze where the shorter edges are or to increase the width squeeze the silicone pad along the sides of the longer edges of the image. The image is then applied to the nail whilst still squeezing the silicone pad - it is not replaced into the stamper holder until the image has been transfered. The same can be done to shrink the image but you have to do the reverse, i.e. squeeze the silicone stamper head whilst picking up the image with the silicone stamper head in your fingers - not in the holder. Then put the stamper head back into the holder and apply it to your nails as normal.

For my thumbs this was more difficult as I had to stretch the image both lengthways and widthways! It worked perfectly and luckily I didn't have to redo any of the nails and I am very happy with how this manicure turned out.