Curved deep blue scaled gradient with glitter placement

Dive into the ocean! That's how this mani makes me feel. Except I hate salt water and love this mani.

 

VIDEO TUTORIAL AT THE END OF THE POST!

This mani is the same concept as all my scaled gradient mani's, but using a french tip sticker as a the gradient divide. You can read more about what kinds of nail vinyls and guides I use for my scaled gradient mani's and on the steps involved in executing a scaled gradient mani such as this one in the Gradient Guide.

The inspiration behind the colour scheme was a new beautiful deep blue dark holo polish from A England, Tristam, which is basically a must have for any A England lovers out there. Its depth is simply fascinating, and I don't even think this mani captures it at its best given that I've blended it with two blue cremes. This mani shows more of a deep/shallow end of the ocean kind of continuum. 

I topped off the scaled gradient divide with loose dark blue hex glitters I got from Born Pretty Store. They are super affordable ($2.00USD a container), and you can also get 10% your order with my code (SIMX31). This mani marks my very first glitter placement! I'm no Polish All the Nails, but I'm trying.

Ooohh, ocean so deep.

Here's what my make-up sponge looked like after the mani was done. This goes to show how you don't need to thoroughly blend the polish on the actual sponge for it to appear blended on your nail. The trick is to move the sponge (vertically) up and down slightly as you dab on the polish, which will result in an overlapping of the colours on your nail and yield a more blendy blendy effect.

1 MIN OR LESS VIDEO TUTORIAL:

(see also 15sec version on Instagram)

Polishes used:
- A England 'Tristam' (dark blue holo)
- Nails Inc. 'Baker street' (cobalt blue creme)
- Nails Inc. 'Chelsea physic garden' (light blue creme)
- Pure Ice 'Superstar' (white creme as base coat)

Here's a shot of two top/clear coats I used in this mani. First I used Glisten & Glow's HK Girl quick dry top coat after the first gradient layer before placing the french tip guide and tape down. This top coat is key to a true quick-dry with no polish peeling after taping. The second, Revlon 'Natural' is just a clear coat (not a "top coat" nor quick dry) that I used a thin layer of just before placing the glitters. To be honest I'm not the person you should follow any advice from when it comes to glitter placement, cause I didn't even do a final topcoat on this mani, as I wasn't really sure what that would do to the glitters. But nevertheless, I used a dab of the clear polish on a toothpick to pick up the loose glitters, and then quickly applied them over one coat of freshly applied clear coat.