GOT Polish Challenge - Stripes: Optical illusion purple

Hey y'all!

Other nail polish enthusiasts out there may recognize this scenario.  It's getting late and you want to do your nails.  You start in, but have no idea where you're going.  You add this and that, maybe turn around and go another direction until you've finally got something you sort of like?  That's what happened with today's Stripes challenge look.  I knew I wanted to work with a french tip, and I had lots of striping options on my MoYou London Pro Plate-01, but that was about as much planning as I had done.

Digging through my stack of oldies, I came across two that I thought would pair prettily - elf Cranberry and L'Oreal Jet-Set Jet.  Both polishes have a shimmery finish and I thought if nothing else, they'd look a little bit patriotic together in a stripey manicure.

I created the french tips with two coats of Cranberry on all but my ring finger (which I painted full), and used an eyeshadow brush to clean the lines up with acetone.  Some might use a cleanup brush, but my cleanup brush is very thin to allow me to get into my deep nailbeds, so I wanted a shaping brush that would hold a little more acetone for shaping out the curve of my nails.  When they were perfect, I topped with SV for stamping insurance.

Here came the tricky part - stamping the stripes.  I'm still a novice when it comes to stamping, and while I feel I've had some great successes, I've also had some bigtime failures.  I knew that my biggest problem would be lining it up so that the stripes all looked like they were going the same direction and at the same angle.  I had many stripe options to choose from, but ultimately decided that if I was going to mess it up, it would be far less obvious using the small diagonal pattern rather than the bold vertical or horizontal stripes.

Luckily, my fears were pretty unwarranted... THIS TIME.  I used my squishy stamper and of course the beauty of that is that you can honestly just line it up from the underside, rather than trying to anchor it while looking down on the nailbed.  I was easily able to turn my fingers over and hold the stamp behind them, line up my X:Y coordinates, and press in, with a little bit of side-to-side rocking to catch the edges.  You may notice I didn't catch all the sides precisely (check the corner of my thumb), but for the most part, the stripes came out even and they're all pretty uniform across the nails as far as directionality.  Color me pleased!

Again, some cleanup was necessary using the same eyeshadow brush.  After viewing the pics, I realize that I didn't quite tight-line it perfectly (my stripes extend beyond the red tips), but this is practically invisible to the naked eye.  Another huge upshot to using the small stripes and these two particular colors is that at arm's length, they look purple.  It isn't until you really inspect them that you see the stripey pattern emerge.

Alert!  Bonus macro shots incoming!

Of course, never one to let sleeping dogs lie, I had to bling it out before I was done.  I searched through the new gemstone wheels I got with my MoYou London plates, and found these square rhinestones, though I nearly went with the diamond-shaped ones.

What do you think?  Have I created stripey optical illusion?  Sound off in the comments, and then be sure to check out my stripey sisters from Crumpet's Nail Tarts, below.





Hope you're all having a fantastic week!