Creamsicle Summer Mani

Hello Readers!

Today I have a summer inspired mani, because I am trying to squeeze every last drop out of this dwindling summer season. I love summer images; they are just so festive and fun. I am going to miss them when the summer season ends, but I'm also excited for fall themes.

Anyway, this mani was inspired by a bundle monster plate from the "Hangloose" collection, which has this adorable popsicle image.

I decided to use the popsicles as an accent nail, and do a kind of "creamsicle" theme on the other nails using a stamping image that is meant to me dripping nail polish, but makes a perfect drip pattern for any kind of theme. My stamping plate came from ebay, and I definitely noticed a difference in quality from the name brand plates I own. I had a lot of trouble stamping the images, though it could also be that this particular image has a lot of open space, which makes it trickier anyway. 

My base polish is Sinful Colors "Beaches and Cream", which is turning out to be one of my most-used polishes for nail art. Having a light cream color comes in handy so often! My orange polish is Sally Hansen's "Electra-cute". 

Here is the stamping plate I used for my popsicle image:

This is probably the sixth time I've used this plate in a manicure. I am such a sucker for cutesy images! 

I hope you enjoyed this mani, and until next time, happy polishing!

-The Midnight Stamper

Watermelon Nails

I love watermelon nails, especially in the summertime. They just feel so bright and happy.

For this mani, I used two stamping plates: one from Bundlemonster (BMS-408, "Summer's Bounty" from the "Hangloose" collection) and one for Born Pretty (BPL-008). I really like both of these plates- the Born pretty plate is such a great one for basic patterns, and Summer's Bounty has some super cute summer images that are perfect for advanced stamping!

I used NYC Fuchsia Shock Cream for the pink base, LA colors Fresh for the blue, and Wet N Wild Leaf Me Be for the green. By the way, that particular Wet N Wild polish doesn't have the best formula, but I tolerate it because I have a hard time finding that particular shade of green, and it really comes in handy in a lot of designs. I stamped over the green with Revlon Colorstay Gel Envy in High Stakes, which stamped beautifully.  

How NOT to do advanced stamping

So, I thought I'd try to be clever with this one. I thought I'd try to make decals the night before, and then apply them to my nails the next day. Yeah... that didn't really work out for me.

Maybe it would work better if I had used a nicer topcoat to create the decals (I used NYC's basic topcoat). Not really sure. But what I can tell you is that the decals became so brittle that they basically crumbled when I tried to pick them up from my non-stick mat. I managed to kind of get the pineapple one on my nails, but I had to piece it together. In the end I decided to completely re-do them, but by that time I was feeling impatient and didn't wait quite long enough to apply the decals to my nails, and they smeared a little bit.

But, there it is anyway. I really love the images, which came from Bundlemonster's "Hangloose" collection, plate BM-S408, "Summer's Bounty".

I used Sinful Colors Yolo Yellow and NYC's Fuschia Shock Cream for my foundation colors, and filled in the pineapples with Sinful Colors Let's Meet and Wet n Wild megalast "Leaf me be". I also stamped with the Sinful Colors Yolo Yellow, which showed up fine but probably wasn't as vibrant as a stamping polish would have been.