Yes, it has been way too long since the last nail of the day post. Bad blogger, I know, but my nails have been splitting and peeling for months now and I took a break from nail polish to see if that would help them. It didn’t. So today I started using something that I bought before Christmas and see if that will help them. Anyway, on to my nails. The past few days have been a bit grey and dreary and I was inspired by that but needed to sparkle it up a bit, I mean come on, it’s a new year! Positivity and happiness is what it’s all about and glitter = happiness. Fact. Instead of just layering glitter over a base coat which is my usual go to method when needing a bit of glitter in my life, I decided to give the gradient method a whack and see how I got on. This is what you need:

1. Your base polish. In this case it’s NYC’s Sidewalker.

2. Your glitter polish. We have OPI’s Spark de Triomphe which I found in TK Maxx recently.

3. Top coat. I’m using Seche Vite.

4. A make up sponge. You can find these in Boots, Penneys, Superdrug etc.

5. Something to put the polish on, in my case it’s an envelope for a birthday card, classy.

All I did was apply a couple of coats of my base coat on and let it dry. Then I applied a couple of dollops of the glitter polish on to the envelope and lightly dabbed the edge of the sponge into it, comma ca.

I dabbed the glitter polish onto the tips of my nails, working towards the middle of the nails. I stopped just under halfway up the nail and let it dry. I did this a second time, but concentrated the glitter just on the tips of the nails, so that it was more densely packed there and lighter at the middle of the nail, giving the aforementioned gradient effect. Here’s a step by step collage of what I did:

Top: Base coat, NYC Sidewalkers. Middle: One coat of OPI’s Spark du Triomphe. Bottom: Two coats of OPI’s Spark du Triomphe

I’m still getting used to my new camera so apologies for any blurriness and even more apologies for the absolute state of my cuticles. I’m going to get a tripod soon to eliminate the dreaded blurry macro shots. If my nails were a bit longer, I would have had more room to make the gradient a bit more gradienty, but I’m happy with the finished look. It looks really pretty in artificial light and it’s something easy peasy that anyone can do.

Go on and give it a go! You can do it with any polishes that compliment each other. I can’t wait to give it a shot with some other shades, I’m thinking navy base coat and maybe a silver gradient? It’s kind of good that the nail treatment I’m trying out at the moment says I have to use it every second day, it means the polish will be coming off soon and more playing around!