Soft Gradient Lattice

I’m sort of getting this gradient thing down, but I still need to play with it a bit. Last week’s was too bold, this week’s is too subtle. But I’m determined to figure it out!

This week I used two near-sheers from Zoya – “Erika”, a fairly bright pink with gold shimmer finish, and “Miley”, a light lavender cream finish. I know it’s shocking, but I used a whopping 7 ultra thin coats of polish here…because I was experimenting with how the polish colors worked together, and making sure I avoided the “mottled look” from last week. On the up side, it took very little time, since the coats were so thin and dried practically before I had the next hand done.

I started with base coat, then two coats of Miley to get an opaque lavender all over the nail. Then I did three-fourths of the nail in Erika, then half, then one-quarter (to complete the gradient – darker pink with each coat towards the end of the nail). I put a very thin layer of Miley over the whole thing to smooth out the gradient lines, and then decided to do the lattice design over the top with a white nail striper. But with the extreme pastel colors on my nail, the white was too glaring. So I brushed one last thin coat of Erika over the whole thing to tone down the white and give the finished nails a shimmer.

I’m sure you can imagine the difficulty I had photographing this, but you can sort of see how the pink at the tops of the nail fades into lavender at the bottom. The shimmer gives it an optical illusion of sorts too – looking at the nails straight across the top just reveals the pink color, and as the nails are angled, the purple becomes more evident.
I like these quite a bit better, and will continue to experiment with this gradient thing – I think with something glittery next time.