Lava Nail Gel Polish Manicure Featuring IBD Heedless To Say

Hi NaiLovelies.....I’m back after my relaxing summer break!

Since I have been away I have added to my already extensive collection of gel polish by investing in more IBD, OPI, Gelish and a few other brands of soak off gel polish.

As part of my love of all things polish, I am reaffirming my love of nail art and showcasing this with gel polish creating some beautiful manicures! I’m super excited to now have the training/qualification (I recently completed a fantastic OPI GelColor workshop) and the salon space available to bring to Simply Into My Nails manicures to my clients.

I have recharged my batteries over the summer and now I am back to show you some new manicures.

To create the 'Lava Nail' I started with a base of two coats of IBD Just Gel Polish Heedless To Say, which is a delicious bright purple from the Dolce Vita Collection. As this feature nail is created by lots of filing through different layers of colour I have found that it is a good idea to use two coats of the base colour you have chosen so you have a little more leeway when you have reached the final colour - before you hit your basecoat or worse still, your natural nails!

After applying several coats of different coloured IBD polishes from the Dolce Vita Collection (apart from the teal Jupiter Blue which is an earlier release) and curing each coat as I went along (for this manicure I had between 8-10 coats as some colours were not opaque enough with just one coat) I then set about filing my way through the layers to reveal the design as I went along.

These are the IBD Just Gel Polishes used for this manicure.

For the filing I used a 240 grit file as this gives the smoothest finish without leaving behind deep scratch marks in the design. If you click the link below you can see a very rough video of how I created the lava nail. It takes a fair bit of elbow grease but it is definitely work the effort.

The nail wasn't overly thick because most of the layers that were unrequired had been filed off. I am happy to report that despite the number of layers it took to create the lava nail, it only took an additional 5 minutes to remove.

I usually soak my gel polish off for 10-15 to negate the urge to scrape any gel from the nails and risk damaging the nail plate. I'm all about keeping the nails beneath the polish looking just as beautiful and healthy when they are polish free. I video of how I soak off my gel polish can be found here:

It's really great to be back - I can't wait to show you the new manicures I come up with. I also have some really excited posts in the pipeline so stay tuned for those.

Ciao 4 Now