Illamasqua Phallic and Stance Mani Update + Nail Mail

Hi all!

A quick one for today. I was browsing through a few of my fave nail blogs and stumbled upon a few that had tumblr accounts and came across a gradient tutorial by the amazing Nailasaurus. Now I have given gradients a couple of tries before with no success so I grabbed out my nail tips and with the ones I don't use, went to it using her technique, and guess what, it worked!! I think the thing with gradients is that you need to have no fear, the previous times I had been too gentle with it and failed.

Now I was already wearing Illamasqua 'Phallic' and decided rather than take it off I would revamp it by doing the gradient over the top.

More pictures after the jump!



Now I know your meant to put the lightest colour on first, but I thought stuff it and did it in reverse anyway. I grabbed out Illamasqua 'Stance', loaded up my sponge with both 'Phallic' and 'Stance' and went for it. It took 2 spongings to get the soft tipped look I was going for, and it looks so pretty! 1 coat of Seche Vite and I was done.

Yay! I love it! I love how having the blue base it turned 'Stance' into this gorgeous dark purple. It's a very subtle look, but looks great in the sun.

Now for the other exciting news! I love nail mail, its the best. I nabbed all these polishes on eBay from the same seller. I got 2 bottles of Essence 'Blue Addicted' which is a Deborah Lippmann 'Across the Universe' dupe and a bottle of Max Factor 'Fantasy Fire' which is a dupe for the long discontinued and infamous Clarins '230' aka Unicorn Pee. YAY!

I cannot wait to wear these! I might have to choose one to wear next week. I'd put one of them on now but I want to try some nail art for our Friday the 13th this week, so I don't want to waste them. I might test 'Fantasy Fire' over my current mani to see how it looks so I can choose a base colour for it.

What nail mail are you waiting for? Let me know in the comments.