Today's mani was inspired by a Facebook ad. This is not something I ever actually thought that I would say, but it's true. I saw this ad for some clothing site that had these dresses with skull ice cream cones all over it and immediately I knew that I wanted to recreate my own version of the design and I already had just the plate in my collection to do it. I was a little bit worried that it wasn't going to come together the way that I wanted, but I'm actually pretty much madly in love with the results. 

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The pastels definitely came first when I was planning out the color story for this design and everything else sort of followed. I knew that I wanted to have these soft sort of sherbet colors for the cones, so I chose six different pastels from Color Club - a yellow, a creamsicle orange, a warm pink, a cool pink, a purply-blue, and a turqiouse. I knew that I wanted a base that was darker than the pastels but that it couldn't wash out the black outlines, so I went with one of my favorite purple polishes of all time with Color Club's Pucci-licious. 

I started by applying two coats of Pucci-licious to all of my nails and letting those dry down while I worked on my decals. 

Along with my pastel shades, I chose a pale brown shade for the cones and used a combination of dotting tools and nail art brushes to fill in the images. I used six different stampers and did two rounds of filling (I really need to get some more stampers...) to do this entire mani. Once my decals were dry and ready to be transferred, I applied a thin layer of sticky base coat going one nail at a time and let that dry down. Next, I went in with a full cover spotted image to just ad a little bit of texture and visual interest to the background. Finally, I went in with my decals and applied two per nail, starting with the one that would be whole on the nail and then applying the second one so that only part of the image was left on the nail.

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

When I showed this mani to my best friend, she said that she both loved and hated it - the hate because she was super creeped out by the faces in the ice cream. And I sort of have to agree. I love this mani - but man are those faces a bit unsettling!