Valentine Nail Design #2: Hearts of Gold

Hola amigos :) Second and last Valentine look coming up! The last one was the cutesy, girly one. This is more refined and elegant, I think :)

:D

I had the idea in my head for a while, but was thinking, "no way this will come out looking as nice as it does in my imagination". But I surprised myself--I really love these!

I started with Orly Rock-It, a nice shimmery red-wine colour. In the bottle it appears to have gold shimmer, but that doesn't come through on the nail at all. However, that doesn't deter from how gawgeous it is. Here you can see it alone:

Makes me want a glass of Shiraz.

As I often do, I wore this alone for a day first. I then got the idea to try a matte topcoat over it, and wow, it was stunning! Hard Candy Matte-ly In Love is the one, and this is what it looked like at this point:

Doesn't it look like red velour or satin? I love the feel of matte-ified polish, too.

I decided it was a great base for some frilly valentine hearts. I figured the easiest way to do this was to use a dotting tool to make a white heart-shaped frilly outline out of dots, then fill in the centre. This was surprisingly easy to do--start with the bottom dot, then do two to the sides and above it (touching the first dot). Then do two more a bit above those two, this will be the top-middle of the heart, then you just draw around for the outside and fill it in. It's hard to explain, I guess, and I wish I'd gotten step-by-step pics here. But I did take a photo of this step finished--hopefully you can get an idea:

They look kind of like heart-shaped clouds at this stage.

Next, I pulled out my new favourite gold, OPI Goldeneye. So shiny and warm :D I had set out a small brush for this step, but ended up creating the hearts with the dotting tool instead. This took some time and patience, but I was surprised at how easy it was. You just use the dotting tool to make the hearts by dotting and pulling down to the middle once for each side, and then I touched up the base and any wonky edges with a toothpick, for a finer point. Surprisingly nice! (No topcoat, as that would have ruined the matte finish of the base colour.)

In lower lighting than the first pic. You can see that Rock-It looks more red and loses the purpley hint when it's dimmer. Goldeneye, on the other hand, knows no such concept as "dim" :D

And, bonus pic, because although I have used Goldeneye before, did any of you notice it has HOLOGRAPHIC SHIMMER? I just barely noticed it once, in certain lighting, and was like WOAH! I spent a lot of time trying to capture it on camera, and got it just once, in this blurry image:

Goldeneye, like you weren't beautiful enough. I see what you did there!

I've spent more time than I should probably admit trying to see the holo-ness in different lights. The bright shiny gold takes over most of the time.

Anyway, I hope you all liked this one. See you next time! xoxo