Reciprocal Gradient nail art and nail polish disaster!

I’m a big fan of Christine from simplenailological and she does this reciprocal gradient design (top left in above image) that I love so I decided to give it a try myself.

I was also at my sisters this week so I used all of her polishes. My sister also had this flaky glitter polish that I wanted to use as an accent nail.

Now all my nails broke while I was on holiday as I wasn’t taking as good care of them so that’s why they all look shorter. and i dint have my good camera with me so the photo quality is not the best (sorry).

Ok so first up, I applied Orly color care top + base coat as my base coat, this works well as a base coat but not as good as a top coat. and then took a piece of sellotape put it on m y skin a few times so that it wasn’t so sticky then cut the strip into thirds along the long side. This is an improvised thick striping tape as I don’t have any real striping tape. I repeated this as I wanted a total of 6 strips.

I then applied one coat of Aura bye Natio as by base colour to all my nails except my ring finger where I applied plum colour.

On a sponge I then applied plum colour in the Revlon nail art duo in moon candy and Aura and sponged it on to create a gradient with Aura at my cuticle. On my pointer, middle and pinkie.

On my ring finger I then applied the flaky glitter Satellite from the Revlon nail art duo in moon candy on top and on my thumb I applied another coat of Aura and then the flaky glitter on top.

For each gradient nail I then applied the tape down the centre (on my pinkie the tape was too thick so I applied it at an angle.  Then over the tape I sponged on the same gradient as before but in reverse so that Aura was at the tips of my nail this time.

I then immediately pulled off the tape to create the reciprocal look.

Then as I was going my other hand I spilt the plum polish on the carpet! So after some quick googling I dabbed it with a dry tissue until nothing more came out then wet a different tissue with rubbing alcohol and dabbed at it until no more came out then sprayed hair spray on the stain and scrubbed at this with cold soapy water until the stain was gone. I then dabbed it dry with a rag. This worked reasonably well and I’m sorry I didn’t keep the links but I was panicking.

Anyway so after all that my nails weren’t in the best shape the polish had been smudged so I tried to fix it with more polish and then with a clean-up brush dipped in nail polish on whether to remove any mistakes and it mostly worked. As you can see from the photos I mostly got the effect I was going for but it’s not as nicely blended and the lines aren’t as clean as I would like.

I then used Natio top and base coat as by top coat (see my empty nail polish bottles post to see why it’s not in its original bottle) then cleaned up around my nails and I was all done.

I like the colour combination of this look and I like the reciprocal gradient look, however there are some problems due to the spillage disaster and resultant clean up so I may try and do this look again sometime in the future.

Also this week I made another batch of cuticle oil as my supply was starting to run low. I used the same steps as outlined in my DIY cuticle oil post I did earlier.