Valentine's Day Mani

Happy Valentine's Day!

So I thought now that I have a blog, I might get into the holiday spirit a bit more and so I decided do a bit of a Valentine's day theme for the weekend.

I started off with 3 coats of OPI's 'Mod About You' from the 2006 brights collection 'Brighter By The Dozen', though 'Mod About You' is now one of OPI's classic Brights By OPI colours.

'Mod About You' is a whited-out pink shade that just makes me feel like a walking, talking Barbie! Not necessarily in an entirely bad way either :) It's just fairly in-your-face considering it's a pastel pink.

In indirect light, 'Mod About You' becomes a little warmer and slightly pinker, which is really pretty.

Next, I stamped hearts using Konad plate m3. I used OPI's 'Manicurist Of Seville' as my stamping polish. I have to say that it's one of my all time favourite polishes and it stamped pretty well! I found it impossible to get the filled in hearts to be actually filled in, as you can see, but I didn't really mind. It reminded me of when I used to draw balloons (or hearts) over all my school books as a kid and I always had to add the little line for where the light hit the balloon (or the heart). I felt like, at this point, my nails looked pretty boring and were clearly missing something... Enter Essie 'Shine Of The Times'...

In direct light (see my ring finger), 'Shine Of The Times' appears to give a slightly purple tinged texture rather than a full rainbow effect. When light hits it from more of an angle (see my index finger), you get the full glory of 'Shine Of the Times' and this is just what I thought was missing from this manicure.

         

All of the colours seen in 'Shine Of The Times' were so incredibly hard to photograph! The photo on the right is about as good as it gets in showing you the elusive bright red/copper that appears every now and again. To see more of this absolute beauty of a polish, have a look at my previous post of it.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how my Valentine's nails came out. This manicure is so unlike me in so many ways, but I've really enjoyed wearing it. But now to the business side of things... The formula. 'Mod About You' is certainly not my favourite polish to apply, though it's not the worst. You just have to be a little patient and take a little more care than usual. Typical pale polish application - beware of streaks and bald patches. I had to use 3 coats in order to get full opacity and get rid of streaks. The photos of 'Mod about You', on its own and with just the stamps on, are without top coat and as you can see, a top coat would add a bit of much needed shine to this polish. 'Manicurist Of Seville', as I stated earlier, was a fairly successful stamping polish. It's beautifully opaque and I think it has just the right amount of red to sit nicely with 'Mod About You'. I used a fairly thick single coat of 'Shine Of The Times' and that was easy to apply and spread evenly. Underneath all of this, I used Essie 'Millionails' and on top I used Sally Hansen's 'Insta-Dri'. 'Shine Of The Times' can be prone to eating up top coat, leaving a gritty texture, so I decided to go with this slightly thicker top coat and it still has a slight texture to the touch - though I'm not too worried. Hope you are all having a lovely Valentine's Day! I actually celebrated yesterday as I'm working tonight :)