Manicure Monday (93): The Chaperone
Hi and welcome to Manicure Monday, a feature that combines my love of reading and nail polish. Each week I’ll showcase one of my current reads along with a matching book manicure.
Hi, guys. Thanks for stopping by today. I had a really busy weekend going to the LA Times Festival of Books. I may have bought a few books. ;) This week’s manicure was inspired by a book that I am reading for my book club. The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty is a historical novel about a young Louise Brooks, who in a few short years will be a major silent film star, and her chaperone for a month in New York, Cora Carlisle. So far the book is pretty good and I like the historical setting. I have not gotten too far into it yet but am looking forward to reading more.
So I am not entirely sure if I like this manicure. It’s a bit disjointed and it did not come quite how I’d planned. Let me tell you how I created this look though. I was immediately drawn to the geometric pattern on the dress/top on the cover. It so cool looking and is perfect for the 1920’s setting for the book. I dots on the right side of the cover also caught my eye and I decided to use these two elements in my manicure.
For the dress detail I first did a thin coat of white nail polish (Cult Nails Tempest) on all of my nails except my ring finger. To create the geometric shapes I decided to try a new to me technique. I don’t know if there is a technical term for it but I have seen it referred to as a “blobbicure.” Basically you add nail drops of nail polish onto a still wet base and the polish will spread out in cool lookling “blobs.” I wanted my nails to be more than just round blobs but I figured I would try to draw different shapes into the wet polish so that they spread closer to the look I was envisioning.
After the first coat of polish was dry, working on one nail at time, I paint on a second thicker coat of my base shade. While that was still wet I added shades of black (American Apparel Hassid), lavender (Sinful Colors Candy Coated) and chartreuse (unknown Color Club shade) onto the wet base using the backs of some nail brushes. The technique is a little hard to explain but you can look it up online and there are videos of it. You don’t want the dots of color you are adding to touch because you want to keep the white in there to separate them. Since the base is still wet, the polish will naturally start to spread. I wanted my shapes to be less round so I added them as lines instead of dots onto the base. Be sure to let this dry really well before adding top coat so it doesn’t smear. It’ll be thick so it might take longer than usual.
For my ring finger, I painted on a pale blue base (Zoya Blu). After that dried I used a dotting tool to add in the polka dots on the right edge. For those I used Zoya Pepper (red), American Apparel Hassid (black) and Morgan Taylor Funny Business (med purple).
Like I said, I don’t love this manicure. In hindsight I probably should have just painted on the art deco design instead of using the blob technique. The shapes are not as defined as I would have liked them to be. My ring finger nail is OK but the dots are a bit messy and the whole nail looks a little out of place with my other nails. All of these colors somehow work on the cover but come across as kind of random on my nails.
Overall I give this manicure a meh. I am glad I did it but it’s not my favorite. What do you guys think? No need to spare my feelings. I can take honesty. :)
