As soon as my May PPU order arrived and I got my hands on Jen & Berries' He Forced Me To Ruin My Dress, which is clearly inspired by Cher's Alaia dress in Clueless, this mani started percolating. I knew that I wanted to pair it with some reverse stamping and I knew exactly what red shade I wanted to pair with it... but I didn't know what I wanted the vibe to be until I was thumbing through stamping plates looking for inspiration and it hit like a truck.

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My friend has been singing the song of Jen & Berries to me for a while, but I hadn't gotten my hands on any of her polishes yet until I saw this one in May's PPU and just... absolutely had to have it. This polish is a white crelly that is absolutely packed with white shimmer, red metallic flakes, a mix of small black and white glitters, and holo microflakes. Seriously, it's packed with beautiful things, but the way it ends up behaving is sort of subtle and I'm obsessed with it. This will definitely not be my last J&B polish. 

For this mani, I applied two coats of He Forced Me To Ruin My Dress to all of my nails and once it was dry I followed with a glitter smoothing top coat to just get a really, really smooth base for my stamping.

The cool thing to me about this stamping image is that it's kind of ambiguous, so it could be a lot of different things or just nothing specific depending on how you use it. For this mani, I decided to go with the latter and just let it be blobby. I really, really wanted to use Bearded Ghoul from Dimension Nails**, which is a seriously stunning and unique polish. I would describe it as a rich, warm red shade packed with a fuscia shimmer as well as a mix of really fine black and red glitters and I think it's that black and red combination that really made this feel like the right pairing. I also decided to go in with a black linear holo to fill in the image, to add some dimension and a slightly different texture. 

When placing the images, I tried to be really thoughtful so that each nail felt different but also cohesive. I transferred the image onto a thin layer of sticky base coat and then used a cuticle tool to trim any excess and clean up my edges. Once I was happy with my stamping, I sealed it in with a water based top coat and then finished with a layer of quick dry glossy top coat and voila!

I have to admit a thing... Everything in this post up to this point was written on Monday before something pretty terrible happened in my life and I don't know how to end it now. I'm posting it because it's here and it was planned and I can... but I don't have any words at the moment other than this...

Life is exhausting and the world is a mess and it can be really easy and sometimes necessary to get lost in just getting through it. But don't forget the brevity of it. Don't forget to love the ones you love outwardly, to their faces, while you have the chance. That's all.

Thanks for reading.