Pink Half Moon Tricolour Gradient.

Inspired by the pink polish in yesterdays post I've gone for a pink themed mani today, something simple but quite fun to look at. 

To do this mani I painted the light pink base that was a no namer from a Kmart christmas gift set. I let it dry completely and then stuck round shaped stickers that I bought from the stationary section at K-mart onto the moon area of the nail. Then I painted the middle colour pink YSNY no.18 all over the nail and let it dry, I removed the stickers revealing the light pink half moon, moved them up my nail towards the tip, stuck them down again and painted the tips with the darker pink, Nail Advantage no. 28. If your are going to try this, it's good to start with the lightest colour and make your way up to the darkest, if I had done it the other way around, the light pink polish would have needed too many coats to show up over the darker colours. If you want to do the colours the other way round and layer light colours over the top of dark colours, you are going to need some very highly pigmented polish!

Just the one picture this time as it's so simple it doesn't require much more, it really reminds me of the cheshire cat from the Disney movie (the original one) of Alice in Wonderland! Soooo cute!

There are a couple of things to consider should you stick stuff to your nails that need taking off again, be they round stickers for half moons, french tip guides, masking tape or whatever. First of all make sure that the layer of polish you stick them to is completely dry otherwise when you take it off it will either peel the polish off completely or ruin the surface finish. One thing I like to do with sticky stuff before I put it on my nails, is stick it to my face first. It sounds crazy I know, but with these K-mart round stickers for example, the glue was super strong and even if my polish had been dry, removing them would still have left sticky residue all over my nail. Your face is the oiliest part of your body, and by putting sticky bits on your face first, your skins natural oils will interfere with the glue on your stickers making them only slightly sticky - enough to adhere to your nail but not enough to leave residue or pull your polish off!

Another thing to remember when sticking things to your nail that you will paint over and then remove, is that there are only 2 moments that you can take that sticky bit off, you must remove it immediately while your polish is still wet, or you must wait until the polish is completely dry. If you try to remove stickers while the polish overlapping them is tacky, the sticker will pull on the polish and make it stringy, ruining your nice clean edge.

Personally I prefer to remove sticky bits immediately while the polish is still wet before moving onto the next nail, that way I also reduce the risk of glue residue from prolonged contact with the sticker.

I want to do a proper classic half moon mani at some point, but these stickers I have are a little too big for that, so I'll have to keep looking for the perfect vintage half moon sized sticker and do that mani later!