I have to admit that I have... a very strange relationship with dotticures. For the longest time, I was sort of terrified of them, then I tried one and I loved it, but for some reason I still have an aversion to them that is entirely based on being certain I'm going to mess them up. It's a whole thing in my brain. Anyway, because one of the prompts for the Whats Up Nails March Nail Art Challenge is Dotticure, I had to go ahead and do one and as much as my brain tried to resist, I wrestled it into submission. 

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Ultimately the entire vibe of this mani comes from the base colour, which is another polish that I grabbed from February's Polish Pickup. I've honestly sort of being grabbyhandsing Painted Polish for ages now but it's really expensive to ship to Canada, so I waited until PPU and then was 100% determined to pick this up - and it didn't disappoint. This is Ice Ice Cave-y and it was inspired by the Icelandic Vatnajökull ice caves, which clearly just sings to my Icelandic heritage. It's a white crelly base with turquoise, gold and black holographic and metallic glitters and it is a serious pretty. For this mani, I went with two coats, which gave me the opacity that I was looking for.

I really wanted to just go all in with the base polish - the combination of the speckles in the polish along with the matching shades in the dots just made a lot of sense to me. I went with a really dark blue, a brighter neon blue, a metallic gold, and a crisp white. I used two different dotting tools from my NailStuff.ca Dotting Tools Trio** so that I could have a few different sizes of dots, and tried to create a sort of fade look from the tip moving towards the base of the nail. The thing with a dotticure (and the thing that makes my fear of them so irrational) is that it's really intuitive and hard to mess up - just add dots until you're done.

I let the dots dry down a bit before I sealed them in with a water based top coat and then finished with a quick dry glossy top coat and voila!

I swear, every single time I do a dotticure I'm reminded exactly why there's no reason to be scared of them. Now, granted, I really only ever do this type of dotticure with the random placement and sort of gradient vibe - and I highly recommend trying this style if you're also intimidated by a dotticure - but I think I might just keep the dotting tools out and try a couple more variants on this look soon!

Keep an eye out for more nail art based on the Whats Up Nails March Nail Art Challenge for the rest of the month!

Thanks for reading!