Shades of Brown Tile Gradient Nails

Hello Beauties!

I was really excited to try this week’s manicure. If you’ve listened to my style journey, you know that I only wear colors in my color palate: browns, oranges, greens, yellow/gold, etc. I saw this rainbow ombre and thought I could do something with that in my color palate. So here’s what I did:

Base coat – Zoya Anchor
Two coats of China Glaze Knotty
I used four shades of brown to create the tiles: China Glaze Knotty, Kleancolor Chocolate Brown, Orly Glow, and China Glaze Goin My Way?
I took a makeup sponge and painted the tiles on the sponge. I like to use the edge of the sponge so I can use that as a guide when I’m applying the polish. Otherwise, the placement on the nail gets a little all over the place. I also tried to line the center of the tiles with the center of the sponge so I could get the tiles centered on my nails as much as possible.
Once the polish was on the sponge, I dabbed it on each nail. I did about two nails per polish application. And I ended up doing about three coats to get the opacity I wanted.
I followed with a coat of Sally Hansen Triple Strong to reinforce the nails.
I used Seche Vite quick drying top coat as the last step.
Then I cleaned up the edges with acetone and a nail brush.

I like the way this one turned out, and it was pretty easy to do. A couple things I would do differently:

Because my nails are slightly different lengths, the placement on the nail wasn’t uniform. Because I did two nails per polish application, if I were doing it again, I would likely use a different sponge for nails of similar shapes and sizes. For example, I’d use one sponge for the thumb nails, one for the index and middle fingers, and maybe one for the ring and pinky fingers. I ended up having to do my ring fingers over because I’d originally planned to do an accent nail, but didn’t like the way it turned out. When I re-polished the ring fingers, I made my tiles smaller, so that the effect was more dramatic on the nail. If I were doing it again, I’d make sure all of the nails had similar placement.
Three of the polishes I chose were shimmer polishes, and the fourth was a crème. The next time I do this particular design, I’ll use the same type of polish for all four colors. So all crèmes, or all shimmers, etc. I did test the colors first to get a good compliment of browns, but I didn’t notice the difference in quality of the polishes at the time. The difference is probably hardly noticeable, but for me, I like the uniformity of using the same type of polish.

Beyond that, I’m really happy with the choices I made. What do you think? (Look and see if you can include a poll function for others to vote on your work.)