Stamped watercolor nail art featuring e.l.f. polishes - TPTC

Hey y'all!

Tri-Polish Tuesday rolls round once more, and we're still working with the April colors of blue, pink, and yellow.  With today's look, I wanted to accomplish two things:  create a soft pastel watercolor effect, and use all three polishes by the same brand, and this nail art featuring three elf polishes fits the bill!

I wanted to be able to say that this look used exclusively elf polishes, but unfortunately there are two nail art essential shades that elf just doesn't make - white and black.  I'm almost positive that there used to be both white and black available in the core line (circa maybe 2010?), but I've searched both the US and the UK sites and cannot find plain white and black cremes anymore.  What up with that, elf?

Since I really needed a white base on which to build my watercolor background, I turned to my latest best friend for white bases, Pure Ice Superstar!  You'll remember it from just about every other nail art I've done since returning from Texas, but for good reason.  It's nearly opaque in one coat and it dries super fast, plus it was less than $2 at Walmart.  It's hard to argue with those talking points!  So, yeah, you'll just have to forgive that my base polish isn't the same brand and work with me a little bit here.

L-R elf Dark Navy, Metallic Elegance, and Yellow, Pure Ice Superstar!

To create this fun spring look, I began with one coat of Superstar!  When it was dry, I used two small pieces of cosmetic sponge to dab on Metallic Elegance and Yellow randomly on all nails.  Metallic Elegance is a super soft, pale rose pearl, so it took several coats to build it to the opacity shown here.  The trick with the sponging here was to let the two colors touch, but not overlap very much (which would result in a lot of orange on the nail).  You can see on my middle finger where this happened a bit, and while it's not terribly offensive (especially if you like orange sherbet), it wasn't the look I had in mind.

Once my background was sufficiently opaque, I sealed it in with a coat of SV and began preparing for stamping.

I used two images from the Cici&Sisi 10 plate with Dark Navy to get the swirly patterns.  Since Dark Navy actually has a bit of shimmer in it, it wasn't ideal for stamping, but I think it worked pretty well.  I could very easily have used Skinny Jeans for this look as well, but since I used that shade last week in my GOT Polish look, I wanted to grab a different blue.

I sealed the stamping under a coat of HK Girl because it shouldn't have smeared, but you can see from the macros it clearly did anyway.  Luckily this wasn't visible at arm's length. 

I think I've mentioned before how much of my entire cosmetic collection (ie: not just nail polish) is made up with elf products, and that's for some really good reasons.  Primarily, the price-to-quality ratio is very, very good.  The line was designed to rival high end cosmetics at drug store pricing, and it definitely delivers on that.  Secondly, the line is cruelty free, which although admittedly is not always a breaking point for me, I definitely feel the pull to support companies who go this route.  Thirdly, *every* experience I've had with elf, whether it was ordering online in the States or in the UK, or going into the elf store in Cardiff, has been extremely courteous and professional and just full of solid customer service.  I hope that kind of thing resonates as much with my readers as it does with me, because nothing will turn me off a company quicker than bad CS.  I've only ever had a couple of things go wrong with my orders in the past 5 years or so (one item mis-ship, and one broken item) and both times the CS team was prompt and efficient with solving the problem.  I cannot say the same for a lot of other companies from which I've ordered.

I know some of you haven't had any experiences with elf yet, so I really do urge you to go take a look at the company's online sites, or drop in at one of the two retail stores if they're close to you (one in NYC and one in Cardiff).  There are currently several online stores, including US/Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Italy, France/Belgium/Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Germany/Austria/Poland, Romania, Thailand, and one for the UK which services most of the rest of Europe and Russia.

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