Happy Monday! Here’s your final installment my guest posts for the month of November, brought to you by the lovely Beth from The Polish Influenza. Her designs and swatches never cease to be colorful, and I just love reading her posts over coffee. AND, congrats to Beth on her recent change from a WordPress.com domain to one of her very own! 🙂
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Hi there!
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Beth, and I’m the author and creative mind behind the blog The Polish Influenza! I’m so thrilled to be able to write for Jenn here at Polished PR. It’s one of my favorite nail blogs and I’m so honored to contribute!
When I asked Jenn what she wanted me to write about for my post, she simply told me “autumn themed”. And how appropriate, given that the leaves have JUST started falling in my home state (we’re having a SUPER late fall this year since it’s been so warm). I immediately wanted to do a nail art design that incorporated the colors I associate with falling leaves: oranges, browns, greens, yellows, reds, and even corals. But I didn’t actually want to paint leaves because I’ve tried that before with disastrous consequences (trust me on that), so I decided to take a more abstract route.
I opted for the cellophane nail art technique, which basically involves using plastic wrap to blot polish on your nails into a blended, watercolor-esque effect. To create the look, I started with two coats of white nail polish (I used Ulta’s Snow White). As you can see in my pictures, the white does not have to be perfect, just opaque.
Once the white is COMPLETELY dry (as in more than just dry to the touch- I’d recommend 30-40 minutes of dry time), take your desired fall colors. I used the ones shown below.
I put small blobs of color on my nails using the brushes in the polish bottles. To speed up the process of “blobbing”, have all the bottles of polish open before you start. It prevents the blobs from drying too quickly. Don’t worry if there’s white showing at this point, it wont matter later. The placement of the colors is completely up to you: do what you like! I placed mine like this.
Immediately after the polish is placed, take a crumpled piece of saran wrap and blot the nail until you’re satisfied with the look. I recommend you do one nail at a time to prevent polish from thickening or drying prematurely on the nail. Also, polish WILL get on you cuticles, but you can remove it later with a q-tip. Here’s the finished look!
These nails would be absolutely gorgeous on their own, but I decided to take the design one step further. I used striping tape to create random linear designs across my nails. For those of you unfamiliar with striping tape, it’s just really really thin tape used to make patterns on the nails. I’ll include a picture below.
I opted to create a different design on each nail. Once the tape was in place, I painted over it with Rue Beauté’s 063, a rich, coffee brown, and immediately pulled off the tape to create this super fun autumn inspired striped look!
So there you have it, a super fun, simple fall inspired manicure to rock at school, a party, or any occasion you like! Ignoring the drying time, this design only took me about 20-30 minutes from start to finish. What do you think of the design? Let Jenn and I know in the comments!
Once again, I want to offer my sincerest thanks to Jenn for this amazing guest blog opportunity. Thanks for checking out my post, and be sure to visit me at The Polish Influenza!
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You are so welcome, Beth! It was a pleasure hosting your beautiful autumn-themed post on my blog 🙂 What a creative way to incorporate autumn colors with striping tape and a unique textured design!