Grape Pop, Some Stripes and Some Bling

I got really bored and decided to play with some nail deisgns.
First of all, I really wanted to wear a purple polish as I haven't worn a purple in a long time. I opted for China Glaze's Grape Pop. This is a lovely purple cream colour, very opaque and with a top coat, very shiny. I also have CG's Grape Juice, which is a similar shade of purple, but with shimmer.

Another reason I wanted the purple was because I had an image in my head that involved silver and gold stripes, so I needed a colour that would go with both silver and gold. Purple was all I could come up with.

The silver I used was China Glaze's Millenium and the gold was China Glaze's GR8, which is holographic.
I started out with vertical stripes

But I didn't like the way those looked, so on my other hand I went for horizontal stripes

Yeah, the stripes aren't really even or anything, but I like them. When asked which he preferred, my BF said the vertical, but I still preferred the horizontal. I think I'm going to do more horizontal stripes in the future, with different colours, maybe like a gradient starting with a light colour and ending up with a darker colour.

After all of that, I still wasn't happy with the finished product, maybe it was just that I was really bored after finishing my exams and having no work to do! I was looking through some nail pics that Katy Perry had tweeted and saw her blinged nails, silver with loads of nail gems, so I stole that look for my accent nails. I painted over the stripes with one coat of China Glaze's Millenium (amazingly opaque and quite space-age looking) then added the nail gems.

I was really suprised at how easy it was to add the bling! I thought it looked quite simple and had the method in my head, but I was sure that it was going to prove to be really difficult and end up looking like crap!

I used one of those orange sticks, dipped the tip in top coat to make it a little sticky, picked up a gem, added a little top coat to the bottom and put it in my nail. I used the orange stick to move the diamante into the right position if it looked slightly off.
Usually when adding these nail gems, I put a layer of top coat onto my nails then add the gem using an orange stick with the tip dipped in top coat, but as I had so many gems to add the top coat was sure to dry before I was finished, so I added a little top coat to each gem and then added a thick layer of top coat once all of them were on and in place.
I have to say that they really were a pain to remove! I had a cotton pad soaked in polish remover held against my nails for ages, but they still didn't come off! I had managed to remove all of the polish, the silver, the stripes, the Grape Pop, everything had gone, but those gems were still stuck fast! I had to pick them off with my nails and remove the polish underneath. There was no damage to my nails though, so that was good!

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