Ever since I was a teenager in my high school art classes I've been drawn to the pairing of green and purple. I think it's just an elite color combo and there are as many versions of it as there are shades of purple and green and they just so frequently work beautifully together. For today's nail art, I grabbed for a cool toned sort of lavender purple and a beautiful turquoise that's really balanced, I think, between blue and green. Some might argue that this pairing isn't really a purple and green, but I think it fits the criteria - and I also just really, really think these shades work beautifully together. 

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The three gel polishes that I used for this mani are ones I've used together in a couple of other mani's in recent months, but I feel like this is the first time that I've really allowed each color to shine on its own. After applying a peel off base coat, which is a must for me whenever I do gel polish, I went in with my base polishes and I did two coats of each, curing for 60 seconds in my LED lamp between each coat. For my pinkie and thumb, I did the lavender shade. For pointer finger I did the turquoise shade. And for the middle fingers where I was going to do the actual nail art design I did this super pale, cool toned grey shade that makes a fantastic base. 

For the nail art on the middle two nails, I started with the blobs. I love a blobby nail design and I think that the possibilities for what you can actually do with blobs is pretty insane. For this, I decided to keep it pretty simple overall with one large blob of each of my two accent colors on each nail. I also didn't want the two nails to really look the same or even like the opposite of each other, so I kept that in mind when I was placing the blobs and I made sure that they overlapped just slightly.

For the stamping, I wanted to keep it simple and sort of bring in the same movement and flow as the blobs so that the final look ended up being quite cohesive. I chose a single sort of squiggly line as well as a small cluster of blobs to apply to both nails and then I also added different sort of simple swoopy images to each nail to just bring everything together. It's hard to explain the thought process, but I wanted everything to really come together and feel cohesive and that's what really drove how I chose the stamping images.

Once I was happy with my stamping, I went in with a matte gel top coat to take down the shine and bring everything together. After curing that for 60 seconds and removing the tacky layer - voila! 

I'm seriously just having so much fun playing with gel polish right now and I love how this turned out. I think there are really two specific things that draw me to gel nail art. The first is that gel polish stays where you put it, so it's much easier to work with when you're talking about hand painting your designs. The second thing is that if you cure between each element of your design you have more freedom to mess up and start each step over rather than having to start the entire mani over, which I find hugely helpful, especially when I'm playing around and experimenting. 

If you're interested in any of the Born Pretty products I used for this mani, do feel free to use my code TRYSH10 for 10% off your order. I think these gel polishes perform really beautifully and definitely recommend them. 

Also, don't forget to head over to Cosmetic Proof and See The World In PINK for more nail art for this week's #CBBxManiMonday!

Thanks for reading!