Stone Manicure

Today I'm trying out one of those ideas I've had in my head for a while but never actually got around to doing (until now, of course). When I was a little kid, I loved collecting rocks, and I thought the ones with the little veins running through them were the most beautiful. I tried to represent that look in this week's manicure.  Here goes!

You will need:
- a basecoat
- a base color of your choice (try to avoid neons and extremely dark colors)
- grey/silver/etc. polish
- Chapstick/Vaseline
- sponge
- top coat


Start off with your basecoat - you know the drill!
Next, paint on the color of your choice. Make sure to let it dry COMPLETELY before moving on to the next step.
Am I the only one who loves this color? It's "perfectly" named Perfect Plum. It's a tad darker than it appears in the picture, but it's still a gorgeous color.
I also want to apologize for the food coloring stain on my ring finger. I noticed after I painted my nails, and didn't really want to spend ten minutes scrubbing it out.

Sally Hansen - Perfect Plum

Next, take out the sponge. And yes, you heard me right. Sponge. There are no typos- I don't mean makeup sponge. I mean regular-kitchen-cleaning-sponge. Sponge. If it's really dry, moisten it with water and wring out as much as you can. Some extra water won't hurt, but if it's dripping water it's going to mess up your design.

Before you start this part, rub some chapstick (or Vasaline) around your cuticles. This will make any polish that ventures onto your skin easy to remove. Make sure to clean up any that gets on your actual nails.
Time for the fun part! Get out your grey polish and paint it onto a nail-sized section of the sponge (like in the picture below).

Take the sponge and roll the grey polish lightly onto the nail. What I mean by 'roll' is start at one side of the nail with the sponge and slowly tilt it LIGHTLY until the sponge has touched every part of the nail. Don't move the sponge on your nail, however, or you'll just smudge it. And just to make things clear, I said lightly.
Lightly.
Read the word above ten times before you do anything.
Lightly.
This is critical to getting the design to work out. If you press the sponge too hard, you'll get too much polish on the nail and lose that vein-y look you're going for.

China Glaze - Stone Cold

Taa-daa!
And here's a closeup:

We've had terribly rainy weather these past few days, so I held off as long as I could (there was a POSSIBILITY the rain would stop suddenly and the sun would appear, right?). I needed to get this post up, though, so I'll be adding my pictures of the clean, top-coated (yes, I just made top coat a verb) once this darned cloudy weather goes away.

In the meantime, why don't you head on over to my Facebook page and like it, Twitter to follow, or just follow through GFC here.

Thanks for reading!

- Muffin