Colors by Llarowe 'Lotus' & Cirque Colors 'Halcyon' Nail Art

Hello!

No Nail Mail this week but I do have some Nail Art to show you. Lots of pictures ahead as I just couldn't help taking a million photos of this mani! For these I used Colors by Llarowe 'Lotus' and Cirque Colors 'Halcyon'.

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'Lotus' is a gorgeous Orchid pink with gold and pink shimmer from the Colors by Llarowe Summer 2016 collection. The mixture of the pink and gold makes the shimmer lean towards rose gold which I love. This was three easy coats.

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Because of the rose gold leaning shimmer I paired it with Cirque Colors 'Halcyon' from their Holiday 2015 collection as this is my favourite rose gold polish. It's just stunning! This was just two coats on my accent nail.

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I wanted to tie the whole mani together so decided I'd use some nail vinyls for some nail art. I added a coat of HK Girl Top Coat on top of 'Lotus' first so that the nail vinyls didn't rip up the polish underneath during removal. I wanted to accent 'Lotus' with 'Halcyon' so I used some thin straight nail vinyls to create a cross at the bottom of the nail and painted over the bottom and side triangles it created with 'Halcyon'.

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I've always struggled with nail vinyls but previously I hadn't been doing a layer of top coat first. It made SUCH a big difference and I love how these turned out. I also used the latex barrier 'Zap' from Rainbow Connection UK to stop the 'Halcyon' going everywhere when dabbing it over the nail vinyl pattern. I love 'Halcyon' but it's a nightmare for clean up due to the shimmer and silver flakies. (This isn't an issue when removing everything though, just when your cleaning your cuticles etc...). After removing the vinyls (before 'Halcyon' dried) and letting it dry I topped it all off with another layer of HK Girl top coat.

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I really loved these polishes together and this design. I think I'm confident with stamping now so maybe mastering Nail Vinyls will be my next challenge. I brought these nail vinyls a while ago but I think they are the Skinny Straights Vinyls by 'Nail Vinyls' and I believe I purchased them from Picture Polish, they have their own website though.

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What do you think? Are there any nail techniques you're working on at the moment?

Thanks for visiting,

Have a lovely day,

Helen xx