Have I wanted to do today's mani for an obscenely long time? Yes. Have I been holding off and waiting for the perfect deep blue pond-y base polish to get the under the sea look I wanted? Also yes. Did I finally accidentally get the perfect polish for what this looked like in my mind? I sure did! I'm certainly not the first person to use this design in this way, but it's such a fun and easy and playful mani that I would happily do it every summer. I mean... Who doesn't love octopus nails?

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Recently, Polish Pickup did a really limited sale of Mystery Bags for charity and I was lucky enough to get my hands on one, which is how I accidentally ended up with the perfect polish for the mani I wanted to do. Below The Surface from Copacetic Cosmetics is this really beautiful deep blue jelly that gives a really strong pond effect with these beautiful shifty flakes. It's perfect to bring to mind that under the sea sort of vibe, with a sort of mysterious look that's super cool.

For this mani, I ended up doing two coats, which didn't get me to full opacity but instead camouflaged my nail line but left that sort of see through jelly look that I think, in this case, adds to the overall look. 

For my stamping, I 100% wanted to go with this octopus image from the Whats Up Nails B056 Coasting To The Sea Stamping Plate. It's kind of an amazing image because you can create a whole mani using just the one image and have every nail look completely different. I considered going with a copper stamping polish for this design, but ultimately I wanted a cool toned, more high contrast design so I went with a metallic white. For this mani, I wanted to give the look of one octopus sort of filling my middle two nails and then random tentacles coming in from every direction on the other nails. This is actually a pretty easy task, it's really just about removing any excess pick up from your stamper head before you stamp and being mindful about your placement.

Once I was happy with the stamping, I finished with a generous layer of quick dry glossy top coat and voila!

All Products Used

Copacetic Cosmetics - Below The Surface (September 2020 PPU)

Clear Jelly Stamping - 034 Angelic White

Cuticula Limitless Top Coat

Whats Up Nails B056 Coasting To The Sea Stamping Plate

Whats Up Nails Magnified Clear Stamper

Seriously, this is another one of those really great plates from Whats Up Nails - with the frequency that I reach for their plates, I'm sure it's obvious what a big fan I am - and I think this particular image has a ton of versatility with what you can do with it and the ways you can use it. Highly recommend. This is such a simple, easy to recreate mani at the end of the day, but it's so much fun and packs some solid summer punch.

Thanks for reading!