Friday, June 18, 2010

A Celebratory Gold-Tip French!

Not only is the World Cup going on (Hup Holland, Hup!) but today my PI leaves for several weeks in Europe - an entire ocean of peace of mind for me! I wanted to do a mani to celebrate, but nothing too wild. I thought I'd try a French with gold tips!

This look has always appealed to me. I think it is quietly subversive but yet manages to maintain some elegance. Here I used 2 coats of Essie Mademoiselle plus 1 coat of Essie Tennis Corset as my base. The tips are OPI Opening Night Champagne. This was my first time using French guides, and there is definitely a learning curve - I got better with them as I went along. I normally freehand but I didn't want to do that here with a metallic polish, because I wanted my strokes to be vertical and the polish to be thin and even.

Take a look at the results!:


Different angle so you can see how brightly metallic Opening Night Champagne is:


Close-up so you can see the shimmer in Tennis Corset - one of the two polishes I own a back-up of!:


I absolutely adore Opening Night Champagne - I just received it from a lovely lady (you know who you are!) and it is like a mix between yellow gold and rose gold. It applies incredibly smoothly, but is still hyper-shimmery and metallic. I also have OPI I Get a Kick Out of Gold, which is from the same collection and is the same texture but much more yellow gold in colour. I wish I could get my hands on a silver with this texture - does anyone know if one exists? I would love to do a silver version of this!

I'm really loving wearing this mani - it definitely gives off that celebratory vibe I was looking for! I see more gold-tip Frenches in my future - perhaps OPI I Get a Kick Out of Gold tips with Chanel Illusion d'Or base?

What do you think of the metallic-tip French manicure? Do you use guides, tape or freehand for your French manis?

kittytokaren