American Apparel Mouse and Water Decals

I love neutrals and I love these nail decals so this mani was a match made for me! Take a look!

I think these colors looked great together! I put a decal on each ring and thumb nail. Click HERE to go to my post explaining the process. For this mani I used 3 coats of American Apparel's Mouse over Orly Bonder and sealed with Out the Door.  The decals were added the next day. 

I did a similar manicure this week (the mani I'm posting now is a few weeks old) and I tried not putting topcoat over the decals.  They remained tacky (the clear borders did at least) and picked up fuzz and dust. So lesson learned: always topcoat the water decals!

OPI Berlin There Done That with Layered Stamping

I decided to spice up a day-old mani with some stamping.  The base of this manicure is two coats of OPI Berlin There Done That, which is a taupey, slightly greyed out creme polish that I absolutely adore. Pardon the tip wear!

This is definitely one of those uh, "looks better from a distance" manicures.  A continual and absolute frustration I've had since I've been polishing is the streakiness of black polishes when doing any sort of nail art. I've waited hours before applying top coat before, I've floated the brush across - but I still get streaks. I usually will just photoshop them out but this was too busy to do that.

I used plates BM206 and BM221 for the stamping designs. I used Wet n Wild Black Creme for the black flowers and L.A. Colors Live for the silver accents. I did do the stamping super quickly because I wasn't planning on wearing it for long. It does look much nicer from a few foot distance, sort of like a tapestry.  The silver stamping was done first, then the black flowers and finally sealed with a coat of OTD.