Gradient: Color Club "Beyond" and "Eternal Beauty"

Today I said to myself, "Self, I think it's time that you be creative with your nails. You're up early and have done what you can so far, so be fancy." So there I was, sifting, once again, through my heaping pile of nail polish wondering which ones I grab and use. I figured I'd pick a not-blue color since I just had one on and then I saw "Eternal Beauty" from Color Club, which I forgot when I HAD to have the entire Halo Hues set (which I do). So I grabbed that, thought maybe I'd take the blue one too..but I've done that combination before, so let's do a different one. Recently on Instagram I've seen someone do a black and red gradient design so I thought black and purple? Yeah those two definitely go together. So I sifted some more and grabbed "Beyond" which is also part of the Color Club Halo Hues from a couple years ago now (Jeez has it been that long?). And so the process began!

Now this process is an absolute MESS! And I wasn't pleased with myself that I haven't gone online and bought that new latex-y type thang that I've seen some nail people putting on the skin around their nails lately. Now that stuff is something I DEFINITELY need to get ASAP because I feel that it'll allow me to do messy designs and not take forever to clean up. Anyways, after I put my base coat on, I took small pieces of tape and only put them on the bottom of my nail/cuticle figuring that it couldn't be TOO big of a mess on the sides (yeah I was wrong). It becomes a little harder, in my opinion, to use the nail polish bottles when there's tape around all sides of the nail to avoid a messy clean-up.

Before I started I made sure to unscrew each bottle first so that I wasn't trying to do it with semi-stiff fingers due to having tape on them. I use a make-up sponge to actually apply the nail polish to my nail by painting the sponge with the nail polish first in strips and then I dab the sponge on my nail back and forth in a small circle motion so that it covers (mostly) my whole nail. I always go through all my nails first and then go back for a second coat repeating the same thing I did the first round. For this one though I did three coats just to be on the safe side since the purple didn't seem to be going on as thick as the black was.

The aftermath..oh how it was a mess! I had actually waited a little while because I started to clean up because I was actually rambling on to my mom about something that I can't remember. This allowed all the nail polish, on my nails and around them, to dry a bit so I first took a pair of tweezers and tried to peel/pick off as much of the dried on nail polish around my nails off. After that I used my regular angle brush, which is now dead, RIP, and tried to clean up as much as I could of what was left of the non-needed polish. I have found that black nail polish, whether it's this one or any other, is a PAIN to clean off because it seems to just never want to go away. That's my own personal view on it though. Either way, it was all totally worth it because 1. I've been pretty uncreative the last couple of years in terms of my nails, and 2. Do you see how it looks in the sun?