Admittedly, sometimes the inspiration for a design just doesn't come and I just grab for things that are at hand and try different things until something works out. That is definitely what happened with this mani. I had most of the polishes out on my desk already and sort of with a shrug I decided to just play around a bit - and I think it worked out much better than I could have expected when all was said and done. I've been pretty deep in themes recently (as you can probably tell if you've scrolled through my feed) so it was nice to just dip into something fun and graphic and entirely themeless.

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Over the past couple of months, I've started reaching for a pastel in the color family of the neon polishes that I'm going to be using when I'm going to do a smoosh or a gradient, and that's what I did with this mani. I applied one coat of a pale pastel purple to all of my nails as my base and let that dry before applying a latex cuticle barrier to all of my nails as well.

The shades that I went with for this mani are what I'm starting to think of as "nighttime neons" - they're in that cool toned side of the spectrum and walking a line between the intense brightness that we always associate with neons and a more vampy depth. I have a pink, purple, blue and teal all in a very bright, cool tone overall. To get this particular style of blend, I applied lots of small dots of each shade to my stamper head rather than larger dots that give a more smooth marble kind of look. I was also careful not to overblend when I was pouncing the stamper onto my nails because I wanted each color to remain distinct on the nails. 

For the stamping, I wanted to go with something graphic but not sharp, if that makes sense, and I grabbed for the Whats Up Nails B015 Stamping Plate, which is new to my collection after their semi-annual sale. I went with this full cover sort of bubbly looking image using a black stamping polish and I think it does exactly what I wanted it to. Black graphic stamping over this sort of smoosh base really helps everything to pop and I think this image brings that depth and pop in a really good balance.

Once I was happy with my stamping, I cleaned up and my cuticles and then sealed in the stamping with a water based top coat. To finish, I applied a quick dry glossy top coat to all of my nails - in this case a DELICIOUSLY scented one that I got from Polish Pickup - and voila!

I feel like I tend to forget just how cool a neon smoosh can be and then somehow I end up doing one on a bit of a whim and I remember. It's really lucky that I didn't put away the shades I used in my last mani so that I found the inspiration to do this one, because I'm kind of in love with how it turned out!

Thanks for reading!