I already posted my favourite nail polishes of 2013, but I also wanted to share my favourite manicures of this year with you guys. I have done similar listings in 2012 and 2011 too if you want to take a look. I've done quite a few manicures this year, so there's going to be quite many in this list too. I narrowed it down to 21 favourites and these will be in order from oldest to newest.
Which one was your favourite?
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Esittelin jo lempparilakkani tältä vuodelta, joten tänään vuorossa on lempparilakkaukseni vuoden varrelta. Erilaisia lakkauksia on tänä vuonna kertynyt melko runsaasti, joten valitsin mukaan 21 mieluisinta. Lakkaukset eivät ole mitenkään paremmuusjärjestyksessä, vaan järjestin ne vanhimmasta uusimpaan.
Mikä näistä oli teidän suosikkinne?
Let's continue with the challenge and some colorful nails as it is day 9 and the task for today was rainbow nails.
Last time I did some pastel rainbow gradient for this task and I have also recently done the skittle gradient with those Essie summer neon polishes, so eventhough a rainbow gradient was the first thing that came to my mind, I decided to do something different. Here's what I came up with:
I started the mani with two coats of Essie Blanc and then I did the splatters or what ever you wanna call them with the water spotted technique, though this time I wasn't aiming for that OPI Black Spotted look. I sprayed the water with the sanitizer in a way that made the polish look like those broken splatters. And of course as I wanted to achieve this rainbow look with all the different colors, I had to do it six times for each nail... But it was still pretty easy as I did the same color for different nails at the same time.
This was quite a loud look, but I really liked how it turned out! It's a bit different looking if I had done this with the splatter technique and I really like this different look!
I also really liked the fact how each nail turns out completely different, it makes the manicure look really interesting.
Here are all the polishes that I used for this mani:
Mereneid Base Coat - Ridgefiller Rose (I have gotten this one from one of our meetings)
Essie Blanc (I have gotten this one from L'Oreal Finland)
Essie DJ Play That Song (I have gotten this one from L'Oreal Finland)
Essie Avenue Maintain (I have gotten this one from L'Oreal Finland)
Barry M Key Lime
Essence Wannabe Your Sunshine
Essie Orange, It's Obvious
Zoya Sooki
Sally Hansen Insta-Dri
Here's the pastel rainbow mani from two years ago that I already talked about:
You can check out the full post here.
It was mandatory to name one (or more) favourite manicures that I've made in order to participate in my giveaway. Now that the giveaway is over I thought it would be fun to list some of the manicures that got most of the votes. The votes did split quite a much but there were few manis that got the majority of the votes. Also, several people said that it was hard to choose just one or they only named a technique or style that they liked the most. So in general my water marbling manis and my gradient manis were the ones you liked the most. Also quite a few said that all the glitter manis have been the best ones. All this is great news of course because those three are pretty much my favourite styles of decorating nails!
But let's see those favourite manicure's, right?!
It was really a tense competition with this green gradient and the next one and in the end (if I counted right) they ended up getting the same amount of votes! So this and the Birthday water marble are officially your favourites.
There's probably no need to say that these are both my favourites too... This water marble is of course a bit special as I did it for my birthday.
After these also few other manis seemed to get quite many votes, so here are all the runner-ups:
Just while ago in a Facebook nail art group I stumbled upon a video by cutepolish about wated spotted nails (you can see the video here) and of course I immediately thought that I needed to try it myself. I never got my hands on OPI Black Spotted (for a reasonable prize) and after trying it out recently, I'm not even sure if I'd like to own it. Well, maybe if I got it for free... But I'm sure I'm not paying any of those ridicilous prizes that you see it being sold on ebay and such, so a cheap alternative for a similar look works really well for me.
First I tried to do this with hand sanitizer (like used in the video), but mine wasn't really working as it just made one big hole to the polish. Also it seems that I don't own any black (or dark grey) polishes that would work nicely with water marbling in general, so I had to choose some other color to do this with. So, then I read from the same nail art group in Facebook, that some had succesfully tried it with hair spray and then also Sonne posted her nails that were done with hair spray, so with that and a polish that work nicely with water marbling I finally managed to do this. So basically I did this the same way that was shown in the video, but I just replaced the hand sanitizer with a regular hair spray. Still, you really have to be careful with the distance where you spray and also the amount that you spray, and it took me couple of tries to get them all right. But after you master all those things this is really quite easy to do and I think it gives a really fun look to a manicure. I know it doesn't look the same that you get with the Black Spotted polish, but it's definately in the same alley and with this you can use any colors you like.
I used my existing mani (which was this mani with Essie Mint Candy Apple and OPI GoldenEye) as the base and then I did the wated spotted look with Barielle A Bouquet For Ava.
If you haven't seen the tutorial video, here's shortly what you need to do to achieve this look:
- First paint your nails with the desired base color (and base coat) regularly and wait it to dry.
- Then you drop polish to water like in water marbling. I used only two or three drops of polish to each nail. Also you should cover your cuticles with some tape like when doing water marbling, this will help the clean up afterwards.
- When you have the circle of polish in the water, you spray the hair spray (or hand sanitizer) to it and then the spots will appear.
- Then you just dip you nail to the polish to the section that looks best like when you're doing water marbling
- After that you should have the water spotted mani, just do the clean up and apply top coat.
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