31DC2017Weekly 3: Bananas For Nail Art!

Hello, and welcome back to yet another week of the 31DC2017Weekly! The prompt for this week is yellow, so I did a fun banana-themed mani with two accent nails:

On my thumb, index and pinky fingers, I’m wearing two coats of OPI Good Grief, topped with Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Top Coat in Pixel Perfect. On the other two fingers, I’m wearing three coats of OPI Funny Bunny, and I reverse-stamped the banana image using Moyra Gastromania plate, Born Pretty black stamping polish and OPI Good Grief. These two fingers were initially meant to be the same, covered all over in the reverse-stamped banana image. However, as I was making the two decals, I totally ruined one (smeared badly with top coat) so I ended up having to ration the one decal between the two nails. Luckily, the Moyra images are huge relative to the current length of my nails, so one decal covered 1¾ nails! In retrospect, I’m glad this is what I ended up with because I like the middle finger the best! I finished off the look on the middle finger with some black rhinestones I received as part of my very first stamping bundle from Amazon.

Wow, I didn’t even notice all those bubbles on my nail until now!

I have mixed feelings about my Born Pretty black stamping polish. While I like having the dark, sharp image that this polish produces, I often find it too stark and it smears terribly with pretty much any top coat I’ve used so far. Here, I had on NYC Grand Central Station, which never smears any of my other stamping polishes.

Also worth mentioning, on all my nails I’m wearing NYC peel-off base coat. I bought this recently because sometimes a girl’s got to wear glitter. I watched this video ranking this base coat pretty low, but it seems to work perfectly fine for me. I cannot comment on drying time because I’ve only ever used PVA glue as an alternative, but wear time is great — today marks Day #4 of this banana mani and I took it off because I wanted to give my nails some oil time. There was no chipping or peeling, no uneven surface like in the video, and not even the typical tip wear my nails are used to (more on that later). Furthermore, it peeled off perfectly in one piece without any cracks on each of my nails (see picture below). However, the one (big) downside is that this did not protect my nails from staining; my pinky is now a sickly shade of yellow, although the others held up fine. I would probably use a regular base coat over this in the future. Since I’m not a swatcher and only do my nails a maximum of twice a week, I’m sticking to this cheaper alternative for those times when I want to wear glitter or preserve my nail art.

Finally, regarding tip wear: I complained in an earlier post that my nails were doing a strange thing whereby there would be some shrinkage/apparent tip wear within hours of applying polish. I have since switched to a more squoval nail shape and have much better luck properly wrapping my tips. There is almost no shrinkage/tip wear anymore.

Phew; that was a more wordy post than I had in mind! As always, please let me know what you think of this look/other thoughts in the comments. If you would like to join in this weekly nail art challenge, post your pictures on your blog or other social media, and tag the picture with the hashtag #31dc2017weekly. Finally, you can check out all my entries for the 31DC2017Weekly under the nail art tab at Nails → Nail Art → 31DC2017, my other nail art adventures at Nails → Nail Art → NOTW, or follow me on Instagram (@altercontroldelight) which I use exclusively for nail art.