31DC2014 Day 2: Orange Nails

I always love the early days of the 31 Day Nail challenge because the themes are so simple. My favorite kind of nail art is the simple kind; simple but also eye catching. Don't get me wrong, I also love doing really intricate things and think they look amazing, but usually I don't have the patience, let alone the time, to spend hours painting little things on my nails. That being said, a lot of the nail art I do is simple and graphic, because I think that makes just as much of a statement as the really intricate and detailed stuff :).

For day 2 I decided to do a random stripe design using some striping tape that I ordered from Amazon.

Polishes used:
Color Club Cosmic Fate (orange holo)
Essie Tart Deco (coral crème)

I started by cutting four pieces of striping tape for each nail before painting. I always stick any kind of tape I'm using to my phone after I cut them. Don't know why, but it works for me :). I then painted my nails with Cosmic Fate, then waited for it to dry completely. When you're using any kind of tape or decal, you HAVE to wait for your base color to dry completely before you stick them to your nails. If you don't, then when you peel off the tape you'll peel the polish off with it, and that's not what we want to happen! So after I let the polish completely dry, I stuck four pieces of striping tape to each nail in a random pattern. Then I painted over each nail with two coats of Tart Deco. Usually I like to only do one coat of polish after placing the striping tape, but it wasn't quite opaque enough after one coat so I had to do two. In my opinion, the best time to remove the striping tape is immediately after polishing; I find that it gives the sharpest lines that way.

Side note - Cosmic Fate is one of the only polishes I've tried that looks absolutely HORRIBLE on me. I have a pretty neutral leaning but very fair skin tone, so orange polishes tend to look weird on me. The polish itself is amazing though! It's wonderfully opaque in two easy coats and the holo is incredible! Paired with Tart Deco made it look less funny on me than it did on its own, which I'm very happy with :).

Thanks for reading!