Continuing on with an entire week dedicated to cactus themed nails, I kept this one nice and soft and generally pretty simple. This was sort of loosely inspired by this design from Sveta Sanders, though I feel like I made it my own with a different technique and vibe overall. I LOVE that mani though - honestly, who doesn't love pretty much all of her work? ANYWAY. As I said, I wanted to keep this one nice and soft with one of my absolute favorite color pairings - purple and green. 

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Because I wanted to keep this overall look really soft, I went with sort of washed out colours for my smoosh. I knew that I wanted to lean onto cooler tones, so I went with two much cooler toned green shades that feel like they're very much in the same family, just at different depths. Along with those two polishes, I wanted to add the purple, so I went with a really washed out sort of greyish purple that's a little bit darker than a pastel but not quite midtoned. And then, of course, I added a little bit of white for contrast and blending.

I applied one coat of the lighter green shade to all of my nails and let it dry down most of the way before going in with my smoosh and I always make sure to apply a cuticle barrier to help with clean up. When pouncing my smoosh, I'm careful not to overblend so that I get that marbled effect but without it getting muddied.

I only recently picked up Maniology's Greenhouse and it was just the absolute perfect cool toned green for this mani. I chose three different images to build this mani out of and kept the two larger, more intense images on my middle two nails while using a more delicate image for the rest of my nails. I think this really made for a cohesive design even if all of the images have a slightly different weight and vibe.

Once I was happy with my stamping, I sealed it in using a water based top coat and then finished with a matte top coat to take down the shine and sort of ground the look. And voila!

I have to say, I'm really happy with how this mani turned out. I think it would have been really easy and maybe a little bit obvious to go with more yellow toned greens for this look, but I really think these cooler tones have a great vibe for this design. And honestly, I'm kind of obsessed with this stamping polish. Anyway, I'm also really, really loving this stamping plate and I've already used it more this year than I thought I would. Highly recommend.

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