This mani uses a pale pink sheer polish with silver holo glitter strips. The thin strips of glitter sparkle through the pale pink, giving a durable yet delicate way to wear glitter.

The polish I’m using is Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure ‘Shall We Dance?’, a pale sheer pink. The pic above shows how sheer the first brushstroke goes on. You get 2 or 3 brushstrokes per brushload with a polish this sheer – any more and it scuffs. So the key here is to be sure where the brush is going before you put it down. In the pic above, a second brushload – loaded lighter – can now fill in to the unpainted edge on its first stroke, and on the second brushstroke take out the central ridge formed by the first.

This polish takes four coats for a smooth finish, but I’m stoppng at a still-bumpy three because there are three coats to go on top of this still, to make the jelly sandwich, and I don’t want the finished mani to ‘hump’ on the nail.

On with the glitter! This strip-glitter is ‘long’ enough to apply with a brush – it can be ‘snagged’ and moved with the brushtip.

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This is the glitter density needed for a jelly sandwich in this pale a color – the glitter should be on sparely enough to let the pale color show through evenly, but thick enough to provide shine through the jelly-mix which goes on next. For the jelly mixture, I used the ratio in the photo below – one drop pink to a big blob of clear.

Mixing in gently (no air bubbles!)

Above is one coat of jelly mixture – the holo flashes through strongly but the glitter is still too visible. Another coat of mixture blends the glitter-strips more into the color.

The finished jelly sandwiches needed two coats of pink-mixture, above, for the glitter’s silver color to vanish into the pink – yet the holo shimmer still flashes through the color (see brightest pic above). I left my middle finger in the sheer pink, which is at five coats in these photos.