When I sat down to put together today's mani, I honestly had no idea whether or not it was actually going to work out on my nails the way I imagined it in my head. Ultimately, I would say this design goes pretty firmly against a lot of what I normally do and moves very much in the opposite direction. With that said, though, I do actually really love the way that it turned out in the end. I'm on a bit of a purple tear right now, so when the idea to do a monochromatic nail in a color rather than black and white, purple was the obvious choice. 

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For the base of this design, I decided I wanted to go with a rich royal purple créme shade as my base and then use a special effects topper to bring down that richness just a hair and add some pretty texture. I started by applying two coats of my royal purple shade to all of my nails to get my opaque base. Next, I went in with a topper containing purple and iridescent glitters in a sheer shimmery purple base. I love the combination of these two polishes to create the base for this design and I really think it sings is a really subtle way.

As I said, I went into this knowing that I wanted to do a monochrome design, so I actually chose the stamping imagine after I'd already decided that. I ultimately chose this sort of fantastic peacock feather image from the Pueen Animal Safari 01 Stamping Plate*, which I think works beautifully in this design because it allows just the right amount of that base to peek through while being bold and crisp enough to really show up despite the lack of contrast there. As usual (for me, that is) I alternated the direction of placement of the image across the nails to just break up the design a little bit and add some visual interest.

Once I was happy with my design, I sealed everything in with a nail art top coat and then finished with a generous layer of matte top coat to bring down the shine. And voila!

I really like how this turned out in the end and it has me really inspired to play around with different ways of using monochrome color stories to create different nail art designs. I tend to focus really heavily on contrasting colors and building depth that way, but I think there's something to be said for trying out lower contrast and more basic color stories as well. 

If you're interested in trying out any of the Pueen products featured in this post, they're all available online from Amazon and everyone single one of them would be easily recommended by me.

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