Yes to both! Because sometimes between nail art seasons – here the just-passed Valentine’s Day and the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day – you need a bit of a glittery palette cleanser, here Essie’s glittery pink topcoat, A Cut Above, over Glam Polish’s Second Star to the Right, a shimmery blue, and Ladies Choice, a pale aqua blue.
A couple of liquid metal polishes, Sally Hansen’s Color Foils in Leaden Lilac and Purple Alloy, blend together beautifully in this simple gradient that makes excellent use of Essie’s Lux Effects glitter topper in A Cut Above. Eye-searing chromatic effect aside, I think the mix of colours is really quite delicate, and the technique? Always a user-friendly winner in my eyes (gradients are sort of hard to screw up, and if you do, so what? That’s what the glitter is for, to eradicate any nail art sins, with sparkles!)
Ombre shading, day 19’s theme in the Oh Mon Dieu nail art challenge, is often confused with its cousin, gradient shading. And for good reason, as both techniques involve gradually building up a colour (or colours), blending each shade into the next as seamlessly as possible. Both can also be achieved through a wide range of nail art techniques, from sponge painting to brushwork to glitter placement.
Where ombre shading deviates from its sister-technique, though, is in colour palette. Gradient shading can utilize any number of colours, so long as you can find a way to make one blend into the next without creating a giant, muddy mess, whereas ombre shading seeks to take one single colour through the full spectrum, from light to dark and maybe a couple of stops in between. Think that tie dyed linen maxi-dress your weirdo hippie aunt wears that starts off baby blue at the top and then moves through sky blue and cerulean at her waist before finishing off navy blue at her ankles. That’s ombre shading.
While ombre shading is not strictly limited to the gradient technique (a manicure in which you go from, say, eggplant on your thumb to pale lilac on your pinkie would also be considered ombre shading), I find it to be the best technique for blending two tonally similar colours, particularly when they are as close as the two polishes I chose for this manicure, Essence’s rose-hued Time for Romance and Essie’s Lux Effects glitter topper in A Cut Above. Technically speaking, there’s not much to this megawatt mani but for the delicate gradi-ombre colour change, a foregone conclusion when I realized I had a clear glitter topper that matched the shimmer in the base polish very nearly perfectly in both texture and colour – just a tone or two off, which was of course exactly what the challenge theme was asking of me. As always, maximum impact for minimal effort? Sign me up!
You won’t find 50 shades here, just three pretty, pink-and-purple-infused greys that remind me of men’s suiting material.
This was another easy peasy manicure made a little bit special with the addition of Essie’s Lux Effects in A Cut Above, a rosy pink glitter topper that just happens to look fantastic over darker polishes.
Finger Candy 