Pink & Nude Gradient With A Sprinkle of Fairy Dust

As I'm currently testing out the durability of some polishes I've received this week, so here is something I did a couple of months ago but just left sitting in my unpublished folder.
I'm not as good at gradients as some of the other girls, I always have trouble blending the colours properly and they cause me such a headache. Not to mention that they are super messy and I spend ages cleaning up! I like the way this one turned out though! The colours I used were inspired by my Instagram friend (@cassgooner). If you have IG, check out her awesome designs!

I started off with a coat of ELF Desert Haze which I also used for the gradient along with Andreia No.109 which is actually a very vibrant pink neon but it turned into a medium pink on the nail. Probably because it's a jelly and also because it's sitting over another polish! The side positioned leopard was done with the smallest edge of a dotting tool and I topped everything off with China Glaze Fairy Dust.

I wish doing gradients wasn't so messy because they make for really pretty manicures!

Isn't Fairy Dust pretty?

Thanks for reading and commenting!

Nude & Peachy Gradient

Since my last "cotton candy" looking gradient, I've been trying to get that gradation of colours to smoothly blend together, just like in Sammy's tutorial. I thought that the easiest way to achieve this would be to use soft and light colours since I have such a hard time blending very contrasting colours.

So for this mani I opted for Elf Desert Haze and Collection 2000 Fruit Loop. However, after I had finished, I realised these colours are way too close to each other to get a massive contrast, but I think I got a hang of the "blending" bit without that noticeable line of where the two colours meet. Next step is trying to do this with more contrasting colours!

Apologies for the picture quality. These two colours were really hard to capture under a lamp. Even my iPhone pictures turned out better than my camera pictures.

Pastel Tips - Take your pick

I've been wanting to do this mani for a while, since I saw a girl on the train wearing something similar. She had some sort of nude polish and yellow tips! At the time I remember thinking how cool and fashion forward of her, she even had stiletto shaped nails! It's not something I see everyday at my local train station. She could have been a nail blogger?!

I couldn't decide on which colour I wanted for the tips as nude goes well with pretty much anything, so I used a different pastel for each finger. I can't pick my favourite although my least favourite combo is the pinky.

Which combo do you think is nicest?

Thanks for reading :)

Desert Haze

This is my first ever bottle of Elf Nail polish. I use some of their cosmetics and eyeshadow brushes but for some reason their polishes never grabbed my attention. So the last time I placed an order, I thought it was about time to try one. I went for a nude colour as none of the other colours were jumping out at me.

This is 2 coats of Desert Haze, a smokey kind of nude, a little gray, a little taupe?! Dunno!

Elf have said that their new polishes have an improved formula, which they may well do over the old version (which I never tried) but I still had a little trouble with the formula on this one as you can see around the cuticle area. It's a bit of a strange one, it was runny when applying which made me think it would be sheer but it was actually opaque in 2 coats! It only cost £1.50 so I suppose it was quite good for the price.